The 1992 film American Me opens with a riot and a rape, and gets darker from there. Directed by and starring Edward James Olmos, the movie tries to present a fictionalized account of the origins of the Mexican Mafia in California—from Los Angeles’s Zoot Suit Riots in 1943 to the city’s gang wars of the 1990s—as a cautionary dirge.
But overwrought acting and directing coupled with corny dialogue (tell any group of Gen X Chicanos to “open your eyes, vato” and expect loud laughs) made the well-meaning American Me a box office disappointment.
Its title is now shorthand among Mexican Americans for ham-fisted moralizing, and the film lives in the shadow of the cinematic 1990s Mexican Mafia origin story, the campy cult classic . But at least Olmos’s magnum opus is remembered. The same can’t be said for the other , a 1948 book about Mexican American youths in L.A. that of the same peculiar name have long sworn is completely unrelated, despite the tome’s opening with—yep—a riot and a threatened rape.
