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Patricia Riggen's popular film La misma luna has been praised as a heartwarming film that humanizes undocumented immigrants for American audiences and, for Mexican audiences, deviates from typical immigration narratives by focusing on women and children as immigrants rather than men. Despite this seemingly progressive intentionality, I argue that Riggen's film is exceedingly conservative in its portrayal of mexicanidad as not only inescapably patriarchal, but "naturally" so. Mexico's ruling class has a vested interest in reaffirming mexicanidad as biological, and therefore, politically incontestable. By selling mexicanidad in a transnational context as a racial essence under constant threat by Anglo-American hegemony, hegemonic institutions within Mexico create the illusion of national and ethnic unity, thus erasing any and all internal racism and classism. In La misma luna, the characters' race and gender performances work in tandem to naturalize prescribed notions of national identity and reaffirm the bourgeois and politically-limiting mandate to be a "good" Mexican by being a "good" (wo)man, equating the imperative to remain true to one's nationality to the allegedly unproblematic imperative to remain true to one's biology. Additionally, membership into mexicanidad is reinscribed as contingent upon neoliberal practices of consumerism, up to and including viewing the film itself. (2008) is a widely known and commercially successful film that has made its way into intermediate-level Spanish conversation courses in textbooks such as McVey and Smalley's ¡De película! and Cinema for Spanish Conversation. It has largely gone under the radar of academic criticism, except where it is mentioned as a progressive immigration story in its affirming representation of female immigrants and families. In the film, director Patricia Riggen relies heavily on melodrama to tell the story of a single mother, Rosario, who has left her young son Carlitos with his grandmother in Mexico in order to support him financially from Los Angeles, where she is an undocumented worker. When the grandmother suddenly dies, the boy heads north all by C La misma luna/Under the Same Moon

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Sometimes criticized for the film’s emphasis on delay and ‘dead time’, the present analysis suggests a reading of the seemingly stagnant plot-line of Mariana Rondón’s Pelo malo/Bad Hair (2013) as an effective rhetorical strategy for interpellating viewers into the ‘sideways’ time of queer childhood – a theoretical framework established by Kathryn Bond Stockton – to explore the intersectional processes at work in the subject formation of Junior, the film’s 9-year-old Afro-Venezuelan protagonist. In contrast to most contemporary Latin American films with child protagonists that serve as embodiments of history, Rondón refuses viewers this temporal distance to depict a child undergoing ghostly erasure by the patriarchal mechanisms that dictate the terms of a nation’s history and citizenship.