Fans still crazy about film’s Sad Girl
The image of Sad Girl has been etched into the minds of a generation.
She’s a young Hispanic woman with her hair teased up into a modest pompadour. A trinity of dots sit just under her left eye, a sign of gang affiliation. And though her lips are glossy from lipstick, her face isn’t glamorous. She’s serious, eyes focused forward with a mix of agitation, frustration and sadness.
It’s all about the eyes, which feel like they could stare through you.
When Angel Aviles talks about Sad Girl she can’t help but feel her eyes build a reservoir of tears. Sad Girl is, after all, the character she played in the 1993 movie “Mi Vida Loca.” The landmark independent film provided a rare view of Chicana gang life and the growing pains inside a section of Los Angeles’ Echo Park during the era of drive-by shootings and khaki uniforms — before gentrification redefined the area.
The tears come not from the passage of time or the gang-inflected realities that faced Sad Girl. They’re pulled from the realization that people still find resonance with the character. That nearly 25 years after Aviles became the face of a small film, she’s still inspiring fan art and tattoos. People still are relating to the Sad
Girl who just wanted to make a better life for her friends and family.
“It’s not a mainstream movie. Getting it made was not easy. It was an art film,” Aviles says. “The fact that people in the culture adopted and love it and consider it part of their history, it’s profound and humbling.”
Given that perspective, she’ll probably shed a few more tears Sunday when she and “Mi Vida Loca” co-star Seidy “Mousie” López come to Houston for a meetup with fans at LifeStylez, on the top floor of the International Flea Market on Greens Road. They’ll sign autographs, take photos and, most likely, hear stories about how much their roles in that film meant to fans.
Margarita Sanchez, who runs Lifestylez, says a lot of people wonder how a style popularized in movies about Los Angeles neighborhoods translates to Houston.
“The culture from L.A. is the same as it is here,” says Sanchez, noting that the more violent tendencies of ’90s Chicano culture were more pronounced in Los Angeles.
Sanchez’s store is a tribute to the Chicano style and experience that extends back to the era of pachucos and zoot suits. Pointed Stacy Adams shoes are lined up on the wall. There are Charlie Brown-style striped polo shirts. Shoppers also will find a selection of movies — but only the culture’s essential films: “Boulevard Nights” (1979), “La Bamba” (1987), “Mi Familia” (1995), “Selena” (1997), “American Me” (1992), “La Mission” (2009) and, of course, “Mi Vida Loca,” which has a special meaning for Sanchez.
“I think it represents a lot of the Hispanic community,” she says. “This movie reminds me of my daughter. She had her best friend since she was in elementary and they grew up together. They fought, they argued, they separated, but now they are so close. That’s sisterhood, nothing beats it.”
As she speaks, a song by the 1960s girls group The Shirelles plays on a speaker inside the store. Like movies, it’s music that cholas and cholos tend to groove to. Oldies — namely 1950s and ’60s doo-wop, rock and pop songs — are the sounds that define the experience, relating to the sounds of the pachucas and preceding generations.
“Mi Vida Loca” also reminds Sanchez of her own youth and her clique of girlfriends. “I dressed like this,” she says, referring to the movie. “Button-up shirt, the ‘Nike Cortez’ — that sort of thing,” she says about her time growing up in North Houston during the mid-1970s.
“Me and my girlfriends we hung around. When one was in trouble, we all were in trouble,” she says. It was a time when, she admits, she wasn’t “on the right side of the tracks.” Sanchez credits a high school teacher with setting her on a different path.
For Sanchez, bringing actors from those special Chicano movies to Houston means a lot. She dedicated her first meetand-greet three years ago to her late friend who had a name to match her dance moves: Crazy Legs.
“They are actors who have not forgotten their community, they have not forgotten their fans and that’s why they’re so loved,” she says.
She can hardly contain herself when she talks about an upcoming event in November with Damian Chapa and San Antonio native Jesse Borrego, stars of 1993’s “Blood In, Blood Out.”This weekend, however, is all about “Mi Vida Loca.”
“It’s a cult classic of sorts for Chicano culture,” says Jovana Lopez, a former assistant to Borrego. “When I was younger, between 11 and 13, I always loved the style of the chola — the way they looked, the way they all ran together. I think it was the first time I witnessed women being their own kind of empowerment.”
An essence of authenticity bolstered the film’s appeal. “Mi Vida Loca” filmmakers hired gang members from L.A.’s Echo Park neighborhood to work with their crew, including the costume department, according to López, the actress who played Mousie.
“When I played Mousie I tried to make sure they got more than just a gang member you saw in the news,” López says. “It was so important to me that you got to see how sweet and young, loving and vulnerable she was.”
And if social media is any gauge, the movie has taken on a life of its own among the younger set, appearing on YouTube and analyzed by websites like BuzzFeed and the hip young Hispanic site Remezcla.
“The other thing about it too, now it represents a culture that wasn’t really appreciated back then,” Jovanna Lopez says.
A snapshot of style long before the Instagram age, “Mi Vida Loca” captures a culture and the inner lives of a group of friends that continues to resonate years later, getting passed on to the next generation of young women and fans of the cholo style.
“I think there are many films that depict life in the hood, but there’s a handful of films that for some reason are adopted into Latin culture,” says Aviles, who created a lifestyle brand called Living Firme that rides the wave of interest in Chicano street culture. “Certain cultural markers land in certain ways . ... you’re meeting people who are pouring their heart out to you. And they’re thanking you for being a part of their life and you didn’t even know up until that moment that you were a part of their life.”
For Sad Girl, the tears may not dry but the special moments continue.