“You Are a Cortez!”: Robert Rodriguez’s Tejano Sensibility and Restorative Kinship in the Spy Kids Series

ABSTRACT:Robert Rodriguez is an iconic Latino filmmaker who presents captivating Latinx characters and storyworlds in genres dominated by whiteness. His Tejano upbringing and sensibility also play an important role in shaping his films. Bringing Tejano history and culture as well as biographical and critical commentary from Rodriguez to bear on the Spy Kids series, I suggest the storyworld is informed by a Tejano sense of place/belonging and identity that delights in independence and ingenuity while upsetting conservative Tejano ideals through representations of nontraditional family and gender hierarchies. In Spy Kids, viewers apprehend less about the dominant US nation-state—often understood as the oppositional motivation of Latinx film—and more about the restorative power of imaginative Latinx kinships.