Sissy

Sissy is a day-in-the-life tale set in the (pregentrified) Culver City on the Westside of Los Angeles in July 1979. Sissy confronts and transforms the representation of the Mexican American family and its heterosexist mythologization in Chicano nationalism. The protagonist, Sissy, is a sweet, bratty, clever-tongued Chicano kid raised in a Marxist-Leninist household (like Bracho himself), who is turning twelve years old on this day—the day the Sandinistas successfully overthrew Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza Debayle. While the Sandinista Party takes over in Managua, Sissy leaves his old school birthday party and takes flight to be proto-gay in a quixotic quest across Los Angeles, from his backyard in Culver City to Boys Town in Hollywood. In this coming-of-age picaresque of the post-’68 generation, Sissy encounters a merry band of multilingual misfits and underrepresented characters of impossible to identify genders, races, and sexualities, who lovingly guide him along his way.