To be “at ease” is a white, heterosexual luxury. The steady stream of homophobic and transphobic bills in state and federal legislatures and the arguments before the US Supreme Court threatening to revoke the civil rights of gay and trans people is a constant reminder that, for queer people, especially queer people of color, the future is never certain. The unease and uncertainty of queer existence is mirrored in the ending of Aurora Guerrero's 2012 film Mosquita y Mari (MyM)—a coming-of-age story featuring two Chicanas, very much unlike one another, who explore their mutual queer desire while navigating their families and personal challenges. It is a tender snapshot of queer becomingness that queers storytelling conventions, which has led to critiques such as that of film reviewer Ingrid Holmquist (2012), who asserts that the film “lacked both a hard-hitting plot-line and in-depth character development.” This vagueness and the film's lack of a happy ending are, I would argue, its best features; the vagueness of the ending resists the expected denouement, thereby revealing to the audience their own (queer) desires. And importantly, in the classroom, the lack of resolution creates a space for my students to map their own complexities onto those of the girls, and to leave my class, like the girls, with a better sense of who they are despite the uncertainty they have about the future.MyM has been an ideal film to screen for my students because of three main factors: (1) the racial and gender similarities between my students and the protagonists; (2) the relatively recent boom in queer of color YA literature; and (3) the pedagogical opportunity of the ambiguous ending. I also must add, as a scholar whose entrance into studying Latinx literature was via a teenage interest in the politics of representation in film, I'm also personally committed to giving my students opportunities to see their lives and faces reflected on the historically white dominated Hollywood screen with Latinx creatives at the helm of those productions.As a professor in the Department of Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies at a public university in the California Central Valley, I screen MyM in WGSS 120: “Women of Color in the United States” during our module on queer women of color feminisms. A campus that is 56 percent Latinx as of spring 2022, my university largely reflects the representation of Latinx people in the Central Valley, many of whom work in the agricultural and food production industries and are primarily Spanish-speaking. Students who enroll in WGSS 120 are predominantly women-identified or nonbinary students who are fulfilling the multicultural/international campus requirement, which, until 2022 when the ethnic studies requirement was implemented, was the only requirement focused on diversity and social systems that many of our students were expected to take. Throughout the semester, students are introduced to and grow in their understanding of intersectionality, which they apply to their understanding of the course content on early women of color feminist movements, sexuality, labor politics, reproductive justice, media representations, and anti-Blackness, delving into studies of fatphobia, education, and contemporary activist and solidarity movements.For most students, WGSS 120 is their first class on the study of gender, sexuality, and feminism. As a Chicana professor from an agricultural town much like the ones many of my students come from, I recognize that this similarity has paved a path of connection and fostered a sense of openness to the class content. Sharing my own story—as a young Chicana from a small town who once protested against abortion in front of Planned Parenthood and then became a feminist raising a transgender child—helps students who are experiencing similar tensions see the class as a space for speaking from the complexities of their lives.Importantly, my story serves as a model for how students can trace connections between their own lives and the experiences portrayed on screen. Although MyM doesn't go deeply into cultural ideologies that shape sexuality, students are still able to connect with the experiences of having parents who adhere to traditions of cisheteronormativity, struggling with school, experiencing housing insecurity, or pursuing a forbidden relationship, all narrated from the perspectives of girls who look much like them. Guerrero's film allows me to take advantage of the racial and gender similarities between my students and the protagonists in the film to show students the possibilities for building bridges across our inevitable differences.MyM was released in 2012, on the advent of a boom in queer of color YA literature, particularly novels, memoirs, and poetry written by Latinx authors. While MyM is a film, it's important to consider its release within the context of a broader cultural moment for queer youth of color. Novels featuring queer youth were published earlier, of course, such as Gloria Velasquez's Tommy Stands Alone (1995), Emma Perez's Gulf Dreams (1996), and Carla Trujillo's What Night Brings (2003), to name a few, but it wasn't until the 2010s that such stories were being heavily marketed as YA. As the children's book industry began to reckon with its diversity problem, novels such as Benjamin Alire Sáenz's Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe (2012), Gabby Rivera's Juliet Takes a Breath (2016), and Rigoberto Gonzalez's Mariposa series were subsequently successfully marketed as queer Latinx YA, and over the past ten years queer Latinx authors such as Adam Silvera, Tehlor Kay Mejia, Anna-Marie McLemore, and Aiden Thomas published a number of books with queer Latinx characters with commercial success.When I teach MyM, I ask students to consider the cultural context during which the film was produced and released: could this film have been made in the 1990s? Early 2000s? Would it have had the same effect on viewers? I also ask them to consider the fact that Guerrero financed much of the film through Kickstarter: what does it say about Hollywood's perceptions of Latinx audiences that Latinx people had to finance the film themselves? To what extent did the growing popularity of queer Latinx YA give momentum to the support for the film? While students generally express that they are unfamiliar with much of queer Latinx YA, they learn to think about the role of the arts in shaping our social landscape.So what does MyM look like in my WGSS classroom? In a queer approach to film analysis, I focus much of our class discussion on the end, which is not really the end, at least for the protagonists, though it is not clear if it is a new beginning. But first, as a class we confront the feelings of unease that lend themselves to the tensions within the film and set viewers up to desire a clear and (hopefully) happy ending (see fig. 1). Together, we look closely at the girls navigating their feelings of attraction, Mosquita's friends testing her sexuality, Mari's problems at school and her family's financial struggles, and Mosquita's mother's suspicions; students are then asked to recognize how that unease is experienced as viewers, within their own bodies. Importantly, students are called to theorize from that bodily feeling, and to consider their feelings as reactions to social unease and oppression. They learn to see their bodies as sites of knowledge production. In her description of facultad, Gloria Anzaldúa (2007: 60), one of the two Chicana writers that Guerrero thanks at the end of the film, speaks of these bodily feelings as “an acute awareness mediated by the part of the psyche that does not speak, that communicates in symbols which are the faces of feelings.” She describes facultad as a “proximity sense” generated by those who live in fear, oppressed people, yet it is also “a survival tactic that people, caught between the worlds [nepantleras], unknowingly cultivate” (61). The bodily feelings of facultad, according to Anzaldúa, can appear as a racing pulse, raised arm hair, and sweat on the forehead that “[makes] us acutely anxious to avoid more of it” (61). Privileging marginalized bodies as sites of knowledge production, Anzaldúa queers epistemology.MyM's resistance of a sharp narrative plot enables students to be drawn through their bodies to the characters themselves—to their feelings of attraction, surprise, rejection, and longing made achingly real by Fenessa Pineda's (Mosquita/Yolanda) and Venecia Troncoso's (Mari) raw and beautiful acting. At the same time, some of my students have expressed feeling “uncomfortable” with the age of the girls at the center of this queer love story. We focus on that discomfort to explore social norms and ideologies that have shaped our ideas about love, gender, sexuality, and youth, asking questions such as: Where do we get out messages about love?What does it mean to “deserve” love?Who gets to love?Who gets to have a love story?How do racial and heterosexual privilege inform narratives in film?What is the power of film in the shaping of our collective consciousness, our relationships, our laws?Yet, despite that discomfort, students find themselves longing for a clean ending, a sense of resolution. Will the girls get back together? Will Mari lose her home? Will Mosquita go back to her friends? Will the girls ever embrace their queerness?When, in the last ten minutes of the film, Mari turns her necklace over to her mother, telling her, “Estoy cansada, Ma,” we cannot help but read the gesture as the fatigue of trying to support her family while maintaining her grades and navigating the emotional and social complexities of her queerness. Just minutes later, Mosquita pushes back against her friend and asserts that she doesn't “give a shit.” As viewers, we feel in our bones the weight of Mari's responsibilities and the frustration with Mosquita's friends. These two scenes powerfully set viewers up for what they might expect (perhaps hope to expect) to be an emotion-filled reunion.Instead, in the last scene of the film, the two girls end up on the same block and find themselves walking on separate sidewalks parallel to one another. They silently turn and acknowledge each other with subtle smiles and head nods. The film fades out and viewers are left with a brief replay of Mari writing “MyM” with her finger onto a dusty window. Students struggle with this ending, as the girls are no longer sharing the same path, yet they are not walking in different directions. It is unclear whether the girls have a future with each other or if they will continue onto separate paths.To work through these feelings, I ask: What are the conventions of endings in film?What are the elements of a “good” film?What did you expect to happen at the end?What did you want to happen?What do your answers reveal about your own desire?This last question is where students start to move toward empathy, toward understanding the power of the narrative, and toward understanding love as a human right. Finding out they were rooting for the girls all along, despite their discomfort, enables them to see their desire as something that connects them to others, whether or not their desire for certain genders is shared.What students usually take away from the ending is that the queer relationship between Mosquita and Mari is a shared road of becoming, though they walked that road differently. Students generally agree that despite her parents’ traditional ways, Mosquita was better positioned to pursue her queerness than Mari, whose financial and family circumstances gave her less psychological space to explore her queerness. The uncertainty at the end also speaks to the film's success in representing the heterogeneity of queer becoming. Thus, what Holmquist considers to be failures in plot and character development, I consider to be opportunities for exploring the complexities of queer becoming, for recognizing our own (queer) desires, and for mapping our lives onto the stories of others to move closer to understanding who we are.