A lot of us also grew up perplexed by Caucasian mother-daughter relationships both in real life and on TV. I remember I was completely shocked when an acquaintance of mine said that her mother was her best friend. I could not relate to the Gilmore Girls whatsoever. Ana says that her “Anglo friends either treat their mothers as best buddies or don’t talk to them at all” and that the media rarely ever shows a realistic Latina mother-daughter dynamic. The only time I even remotely related to a mother-daughter relationship was when I watched the movie Real Women Have Curves. Adriana, 32, says that she has only related to the relationships in The Joy Luck Club. Ana feels that nothing “has come close to reflecting an accurate relationship between an immigrant Latina mom and American-born Latina daughter.” The movie Spanglish showed the tension between an immigrant mother and a young daughter, but not how the relationship may have evolved as the daughter got older.
