Making Cinelandia: American Films and Mexican Film Culture before the Golden Age

Laura Isabel Serna

Published by Duke University Press 2014

Making Cinelandia

American Films and Mexican Film Culture before the Golden Age

Laura Isabel Serna

https://doi.org/10.1515/9780822376798

Overview
Contents

About this book

In the 1920s, as American films came to dominate Mexico's cinemas, many of its cultural and political elites feared that this "Yanqui invasion" would turn Mexico into a cultural vassal of the United States. In Making Cinelandia, Laura Isabel Serna contends that Hollywood films were not simply tools of cultural imperialism. Instead, they offered Mexicans on both sides of the border an imaginative and crucial means of participating in global modernity, even as these films and their producers and distributors frequently displayed anti-Mexican bias. Before the Golden Age of Mexican cinema, Mexican audiences used their encounters with American films to construct a national film culture. Drawing on extensive archival research, Serna explores the popular experience of cinemagoing from the perspective of exhibitors, cinema workers, journalists, censors, and fans, showing how Mexican audiences actively engaged with American films to identify more deeply with Mexico.

Author / Editor information

Laura Isabel Serna is Assistant Professor of Critical Studies in the School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California.

Reviews

“Because it deals with Mexican film culture from the teens to the early 1930s, Serna's fine book is a perfect complement to Robert McKee Irwin and Maricruz Castro Ricalde's Global Mexican Cinema, which begins where this study leaves off. The early period was dominated by Hollywood films, representing an exciting, alarming modernity and exhibiting considerable insensitivity toward their neighbors to the south. Yet, as Serna (USC) demonstrates with admirable data and interpretive imagination, cinelandia was welcome to the politicians and capitalists who saw the distribution and exhibition of Hollywood films both as an opportunity and as evidence of post-revolutionary Mexico's movement into the modern age. . . . Recommended. All readers.”

-- W. A. Vincent Choice

"Moving skillfully between Mexico City, El Paso, and Los Angeles, Serna shows how star-struck fans, ordinary filmgoers, and critics of U.S. films generated transnational articulations of Mexican identity."

-- Cara Caddoo American Historical Review

“Making Cinelandia transports its reader to new physical spaces and reveals a material culture perhaps as interesting as the rare or lost films themselves. … At hand is an interesting and well-written text, an effective transnational history suitable for the Latin Americanist or film scholar, the graduate student of either field, and, one hopes, the wider world of film buffs.”

-- Charles V. Heath Hispanic American Historical Review

“Laura Isabel Serna's exhaustively researched and engagingly written Making Cinelandia reconsiders the terms of scholarly debate on Latin American cinema and global film culture more broadly.”

-- Rielle Navitski New Mexico Historical Review

“Laura Serna has written a groundbreaking study of the impact of US silent film on cinematic culture, in Mexico and among Mexican migrant communities north of the border during the interwar period. A film historian, Serna presents ideas that are both theoretically nuanced and meticulously documented. She gleans dozens of original insights from an astounding array of primary sources in Mexico and the US. . . . Serna’s book is an exemplary work of scholarship.”

-- Patrick Duffy The Americas

"Making Cinelandia is a ground breaking cultural history. It is admirable for the attention it pays to the performative, promotional, and cultural practices that were a part of moviegoing and for its extensive archival research across Mexico and the United States. It is original, thoroughly readable and accessible and, most significantly, it changes how we think about Mexican film culture in the twentieth century."

-- Dolores Tierney American Studies

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
CONTENTS Publicly Available Download PDF	ix
A NOTE ON TRANSLATIONS AND FILM TITLES Publicly Available Download PDF	xi
PRÓLOGO (PROLOGUE) Publicly Available Download PDF	xiii
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Publicly Available Download PDF	xv
INTRODUCTION Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
PART I. THE YANQUI INVASION
1. U.S. MOTION PICTURE COMPANIES GO SOUTH OF THE BORDER Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	19
2. AMERICAN MOVIES, MEXICAN MODERNITY The Cinema as a National Space Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	47
3. IN LOLA’S HOUSE Fan Discourse in the Making of Mexican Film Culture Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	85
PART II. BORDER CROSSINGS
4. LA VIRGEN AND L A PELONA Film Culture, Border Crossing, and the Modern Mexican Woman Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	123
5. DENIGRATING PICTURES Censorship and the Politics of U.S. Film in Greater Mexico Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	154
6. AL CINE Mexican Migrants Go to the Movies Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	180
CONCLUSION Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	215
ABBREVIATIONS OF FREQUENTLY CITED SOURCES Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	223
NOTES Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	225
BIBLIOGRAPHY Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	279
FILMOGRAPHY Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	303
INDEX Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	309

Language: English
Publisher: Duke University Press
Audience: Professional and scholarly;
Pages
- Main content: 333
Illustrations
- Other: 46 illustrations, 3 maps

eBook

Published: March 3, 2014
ISBN: 9780822376798