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Mexican Melodra m a
E le na L ah r-V iva z
Mexican
Melodrama
Film and Nation from the Golden Age to the New Wave
TUCSON
The University of Arizona Press
www.uapress.arizona.edu
© 2016 The Arizona Board of Regents

All rights reserved. Published 2016
Printed in the United States of America

21 20 19 18 17 16 6 5 4 3 2 1
ISBN-13: 978-0-8165-3251-3 (cloth)
Cover designed by Carrie House, HOUSEdesign llc

Cover illustration of vintage girl, DoverPictura Label Art / Alan Weller
Publication of this book is made possible in part by the proceeds of a permanent endowment
created with the assistance of a Challenge Grant from the National Endowment for the
Humanities, a federal agency.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Lahr-Vivaz, Elena, author.
Title: Mexican melodrama : film and nation from the Golden Age to the new wave /
Elena Lahr-Vivaz.
Description: Tucson : The University of Arizona Press, 2016. | Includes bibliographical
references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016004474 | ISBN 9780816532513 (hardcover : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Motion pictures, Mexican—History and criticism. | Motion pictures—
Mexico—History.
Classification: LCC PN1993.5.M6 L34 2016 | DDC 791.430972—dc23 LC record available at
http://lccn.loc.gov/2016004474
This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

To my daughters,
Hannah and Emmy Thompson,
with love and gratitude;
and in memory of my grandmother,
Helen Hughes Lahr
x
Contents
List of Illustrations ix
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction 3
1 Melodrama and Mexico 7

Key Terms 10
Melodrama’s Golden Age (1930–1958) 13
Crisis and Resurgence (1959–1990) 20
The New-Wave Nation (1991–2005) 24
2 Taming Nosotros 33
Enamorada (Woman in Love, Emilio Fernández, 1946) 36
Como agua para chocolate (Like Water for Chocolate, Alfonso Arau, 1992) 43
Entre Pancho Villa y una mujer desnuda (Between Pancho Villa and a
Naked Woman, Sabina Berman and Isabelle Tardán, 1996) 51
3 The Ties That Bind 62

La mujer del puerto (The Woman of the Port, Arcady Boytler, 1933) 64
La tarea prohibida (Forbidden Homework, Jaime Humberto
Hermosillo, 1992) 69
Modelo antiguo (Vintage Model, Raúl Araiza, 1992) 77
Ángel de fuego (Angel of Fire, Dana Rotberg, 1992) 81
viii contents
4 Nosotros No More 87
Nosotros los pobres (We the Poor, Ismael Rodríguez, 1947) 87
Amores perros (Love’s a Bitch, Alejandro González Iñárritu, 2000) 93
El crimen del padre Amaro (The Crime of Father Amaro, Carlos
Carrera, 2002) 100
5 Seeing Stars 108

Cuando los hijos se van (When the Children Leave, Juan Bustillo
Oro, 1941) 110
Japón (Japan, Carlos Reygadas, 2002) 115
Batalla en el cielo (Battle in Heaven, Carlos Reygadas, 2005) 122
6 Re-sounding Melos 137

¡¿Qué te ha dado esa mujer?! (What Has That Woman Given You?!,
Ismael Rodríguez, 1951) 138
Sólo con tu pareja (Love in the Time of Hysteria, Alfonso Cuarón, 1991) 141
Y tu mamá también (And Your Mother Too, Alfonso Cuarón, 2001) 147
Conclusion 162
Notes 167
Works Cited 195
Index 211
Illustrations
Figure 1. A “tamed” Beatriz follows her general during the Mexican

Revolution (Enamorada). 42
Figure 2. Gertrudis runs toward the villista who will carry her away
(Como agua para chocolate). 49
Figure 3. Gina and Ismael watch footage of Pancho Villa (Entre
Pancho Villa y una mujer desnuda). 53
Figure 4. Shots of men are superimposed on a shot of Rosario as
“Vendo placer” (“I Sell Pleasure”) is heard in the back-
ground (La mujer del puerto). 69
Figure 5. María performs her “striptease” to “Qué rico el mambo”
(“Mambo Is Wonderful”; La tarea prohibida). 74
Figure 6. Carmen—played by Golden Age star Silvia Pinal—takes
a last ride in her beloved Cadillac (Modelo antiguo). 79
Figure 7. Don Pilar reacts in fright to what he perceives as the
multiplication of La Paralítica’s eyes (Nosotros los pobres). 97
Figure 8. Octavio waits at the bus station for his sister-in-law
(Amores perros). 100
Figure 9. A wickerwork screen only nominally separates Amelia
and Father Amaro (El crimen del padre Amaro). 105
x illus tr ations
Figure 10. Actress Sara García as the teary-eyed madre mexicana

(Cuando los hijos se van). 112
Figure 11. Ascensión receives a kiss in the unnamed protagonist’s
dream ( Japón). 119
Figure 12. Marcos sits next to Ana in the boutique where she works
(Batalla en el cielo). 129
Figure 13. Pedro and Luis sing “Despierta” (“Awaken”) as a duet
(¡¿Qué te ha dado esa mujer?!). 140
Figure 14. Tomás Tomás, just before he loses his towel and bares
his all (Sólo con tu pareja). 147
Figure 15. Julio and Tenoch meet for the last time (Y tu mamá
también). 158
Acknowledgments
I
wrote this book over a number of years and drafted and discussed its
pages in the libraries, offices, and coffee shops of a number of institutions. At
the University of Pennsylvania, special thanks to Carlos J. Alonso, who read
and offered incisive feedback on drafts too numerous to count, and to Michael
Solomon, who first inspired me to write on Mexican cinema, and whose keen
insights informed the project. Thanks as well to Karen Beckman, Reinaldo
Laddaga, and Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel, all of whom offered invaluable
comments on the project in an early form; and to Kristina Baumli, Rachel Burk,
Tania Gentic, Jaime Hanneken, Meghan McInnis Dominguez, Erica Miller
Yozell, Dierdra Reber, and Eunice Rodríguez-Ferguson, who graciously read
working drafts and made them stronger with their suggestions. At Swarthmore,
gracias to Aurora Camacho de Schmidt, María Luisa Guardiola, and Luciano
Martínez for all their help; at Princeton, thank you to Gabriella Nouzeilles, who
generously agreed to host me during my postdoctoral fellowship. At Rutgers,
gracias and obrigada to my colleagues Jennifer Austin, Jason Cortés, Kimberly
DaCosta-Holton, Jennifer Duprey, and Asela Laguna, as well as departmental
administrator Laura Zuiderveld; I count myself lucky to belong to such a won-
derful department.
Throughout the writing process, Elisabeth Austin and Meredith Broussard
offered consistently on-point suggestions, whether on first drafts or final revi-
sions, and cheered me on when I needed it most. Camille Andrews offered her
xii acknowledgments
editorial expertise and unwavering support. Students in my courses on Mexican

cinema at Penn, Swarthmore, and Rutgers helped me hone my ideas and made
the project come alive through their contributions to our in-class discussions.
Editor Kristen Buckles and the anonymous readers at the University of Arizona
Press made valuable suggestions that helped shape the final project, as did Ben
Railton and the members of the 2015 Northeast Modern Language Association
(NeMLA) Book Award Committee.
I am indebted to the University of Pennsylvania, the Ford Foundation, and
Rutgers University for their generous support of this project. A Benjamin
Franklin Fellowship and a Critical Writing Teaching Fellowship from the Uni-
versity of Pennsylvania afforded me much-needed time to research and write. A
postdoctoral fellowship from the Ford Foundation, along with a research leave
from Rutgers, enabled me to finish the book; a grant from Rutgers’s Center for
Latin American Studies supported its indexing.
Mexican Melodrama received the Honorable Mention for the 2015 NeMLA
Book Award (for unpublished first book manuscripts). Portions of Chap-
ter 6 were published in an earlier form in “Unconsummated Fictions and Virile
Voiceovers: Desire and the Nation in Y tu mamá también,” Revista de Estudios
Hispánicos 40, no. 1 (2006): 79–101. This material is reprinted here with per-
mission of the Revista de Estudios Hispánicos. Portions of the book were also
presented at conferences hosted by the American Comparative Literature
Association, the Ford Foundation, the Latin American Studies Association, the
Modern Language Association, the Northeast Modern Language Association,
and the South Atlantic Modern Language Association; my thanks to my inter-
locutors at these conferences.
Last but by no means least, this book would not exist without the help I
received from my family and friends as I wrote it. My partner Brent listened to
me talk about Mexican melodramas for years and helped me to find the time
to write about them. My in-laws Rick and Judy helped keep our household
functioning smoothly and offered their support in ways too innumerable to
mention. My parents and siblings, Dora, Dwight, Beatriz, Maria, Emilio, Sonia,
and Katerina, supported the project from the start and helped make it possible
in a myriad of ways, as did my cuñados Taz, Karena, and Alec. My Aunt Deidre,
Godmother Betsy, Aunt Dianne, Uncle Phillip, and Aunt Reyna hosted me for
writing retreats and conferences; my friends were always there for me. Thank
you all—I hope that you enjoy reading about Mexican melodramas as much as
I have enjoyed writing about them.
Mexican Melodra m a
Introduction
W
hile the directors of Mexico’s Golden Age film melodramas
once sought to offer spectators a vision of a more perfect nation to
which they might aspire, their recent counterparts characterize the
nation instead as an imagined, imaginary entity composed of fragments of the
past brought into an ever-more international present. As I show, so-called new-
wave Mexican directors of the 1990s and 2000s repeatedly reference Golden
Age melodramas of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s even as they redeploy the tropes
associated with those classic films to critical effect.1 On the whole, Golden Age
directors turned to melodrama to offer spectators a peek at an idealized Mexico
and to spur the formation of a spectatorship of all of “us”—or, in Spanish, all
of nosotros—united through shared tears and laughter. New-wave directors, in
contrast, utilize the melodramatic mode to highlight the limitations rather than
the possibilities of a national nosotros as an imagined, imaginary community
and, as such, signal the need for spectators to assume a critical stance in the face
of the exigencies of the present.2
I first glimpsed this book—although I in no way recognized it as such—on
the small television screen in my Philadelphia apartment on which I watched
Alfonso Cuarón’s Y tu mamá también (And Your Mother Too, 2001) for a graduate
course on Latin American cinema. Why, I wondered as I ejected the DVD,
did this seemingly lighthearted film’s lusty boys just happen to bear the sur-
names Iturbide and Zapata, recalling key figures of national history? And how
4 introduc tion
might the film—frequently compared with the bawdy American Pie (Paul
Weitz 1999)—serve as what Cuarón described in an interview as a “denunci-
ation” (quoted in Basoli 2002, 27)? As I pondered these questions, first in my
final paper for the course and subsequently in the research that led to this book,
I realized that Y tu mamá también was far from the only Mexican film of the
1990s and 2000s to pair melodramatic depictions of transgressive desire with
stock, allegorical images of the nation. The rest, as they say, is history—or, at
least, Mexican Melodrama.
The new-wave films that I analyze in this book date from 1991 to 2005, and,
as such, belong to a specific moment of increasing neoliberalization and glo-
balization. In 1991, negotiations began for the North American Free Trade Act
(NAFTA), or the Tratado de Libre Comercio de América del Norte (TLCAN).
Signed in 1992 and implemented in 1994, the agreement established a trading
bloc between the United States, Mexico, and Canada that brought with it a
shift toward privatization for the nation’s cinema industry. In 2005, YouTube
was launched with the nineteen-second video “Me at the zoo,” and spectator-
ship changed forever. In the intervening years, new-wave directors limned the
nation as no more than a tattered collection of fragments and remains, offering
a melodramatic message that still resonates today.
In the chapters that follow, I pair readings of key Golden Age and new-wave
films to demonstrate how the latter exploit the fragmentation that the former
often seek to cover over through melodramatic excess.3 In chapter 1, I offer a
historical and cultural overview of Golden Age and new-wave cinema to situ-
ate the films discussed in subsequent chapters and examine the key terms that
underlie the book’s analysis: melodrama and Mexico. Here I explain the impor-
tance of Golden Age films in constructing national and continental identities;
discuss the relationship between melodrama, modernity, and Mexico, drawing
on the work of Ana M. López (1991, 1994, 2004), Carlos Monsiváis (1993, 1995,
2008), Ben Singer (2001), Julia Tuñón (1998, 2000, 2010), and Linda Williams
(2001, 2015), among others; and overview the events that led to a generalized loss
of belief in cinema’s ability to conflate self and star, narrative and nation. I also
engage a discussion of Golden Age and new-wave melodramas as allegories.
In chapter 2, I analyze the Revolutionary melodrama Enamorada (Woman
in Love, Emilio Fernández, 1946) in conjunction with Como agua para chocolate
(Like Water for Chocolate, Alfonso Arau, 1992) and Entre Pancho Villa y una mujer
desnuda (Between Pancho Villa and a Naked Woman, Sabina Berman and Isabelle
Tardán, 1996). In Enamorada, Golden Age director Emilio Fernández attempts
introduc tion 5
to construct a coherent identity for a war-torn nation through a tale of Revo-

lutionary desire. Several decades later, directors Alfonso Arau, Sabina Berman,
and Isabelle Tardán turn once more to revolution and desire to allegorize the
nation in, respectively, Como agua para chocolate and Entre Pancho Villa y una
mujer desnuda. In their films from the 1990s, however, these directors demon-
strate the limitations (rather than the possibilities) of Mexico as a construct in
which all spectators might believe.
In chapter 3, I consider the cabaretera melodrama La mujer del puerto (Woman
of the Port, Arcady Boytler, 1933) together with La tarea prohibida (Forbidden
Homework, Jaime Humberto Hermosillo, 1992), Modelo antiguo (Vintage Model,
Raúl Araiza, 1992), and Ángel de fuego (Angel of Fire, Dana Rotberg, 1992).
Golden Age and new-wave directors coincide in portraying the dangers of an
increasingly urbanized society through melodramatic tales of incestuous love.
Boytler, however, offers hope for a more modern nation, while Hermosillo, Ara-
iza, and Rotberg do not. If directors of Golden Age melodramas once sought
to offer spectators what Singer (2001) describes as moral certitude in the face of
social change, the directors considered here point to the need to assume a more
critical stance in the face of the challenges of modernity.
In chapter 4, I read Nosotros los pobres (We the Poor, Ismael Rodríguez, 1947)
alongside Amores perros (Love’s a Bitch, Alejandro González Iñárritu, 2000) and
El crimen del padre Amaro (The Crime of Father Amaro, Carlos Carrera, 2002).
Tracing the path that leads from a Golden Age classic to two of the biggest hits
of new-wave Mexican cinema, I contend that Rodríguez attempts to forge an
empathetically imagined community of all of nosotros, while González Iñárritu
and Carrera pointedly intimate that “we”—nosotros—are no more. As do other
new-wave directors, González Iñárritu and Carrera thus draw on the Golden
Age melodramas that offered a glimpse of (national) unity even as the direc-
tors call attention to the limitations of the relationship between spectators and
screen, audience and nation.
In chapter 5, I consider Cuando los hijos se van (When the Children Leave,
Juan Bustillo Oro, 1941) along with Carlos Reygadas’s Japón (Japan, 2002) and
Batalla en el cielo (Battle in Heaven, 2005), and I suggest that although each
director showcases his stars, Bustillo Oro encourages spectators to identify with
his larger-than-life characters while Reygadas probes the limitations of this
relationship. Featuring nonprofessional actors and their all-too-human bod-
ies, Reygadas disallows facile readings of the screen as a mirror reflecting back
to spectators an idealized image of themselves, even as the repeated images
6 introduc tion
of Mexico in the film force spectators to confront what Michael Billig (1995)
terms the banal nationalism to which they have become accustomed. In this
way, the director calls into question the connaissance central to formulations of
the screen as mirror (and the audience as nation), emphasizing instead the mis-
recognition that necessarily occurs for local and global spectators alike.
In chapter 6, I discuss the melodramatically inclined buddy film ¡¿Qué te ha
dado esa mujer?! (What Has That Woman Given You?!, Ismael Rodríguez, 1951)
in combination with Sólo con tu pareja (Love in the Time of Hysteria, Alfonso
Cuarón, 1991) and Y tu mamá también (And Your Mother Too, Alfonso Cuarón,
2001). Considering the directors’ use of voice and melos (or music), I suggest
in this chapter that Rodríguez employs musical harmony to support the idea
of the star—and the nation he or she allegorically emblematizes—as a uni-
fied entity, while Cuarón utilizes disjunctive melos and disembodied voices to
emphasize instead national dissonance. In Sólo con tu pareja, Cuarón repeatedly
foregrounds readily recognizable icons of Mexican identity only to then employ
the disembodied voice of a mariachi to pierce through spectators’ somnambu-
lism and reveal the Mexico once promoted by Golden Age melodramas as no
more than a dream. Released some ten years later, Y tu mamá también would
appear at first glance to offer a new fable of identity for the fragmented, pas-
tiche nation portrayed in Sólo con tu pareja. The film’s voice-overs, however, call
into question the validity of the fiction the film presents, limiting the discursive
possibilities of its visual content and revealing the limits inherent in any melo-
dramatic allegory of national origins.
Murky and fraught, the films analyzed in this book prove rich in their ambi-
guities. Though it is impossible to encompass the totality of either Golden Age
or new-wave cinema (let alone both) in one book, the paired readings that I offer
here signal how new-wave directors draw from a previous generation to produce
meaning in the present and how they encourage spectators to do the same.
1
Melodrama and Mexico
I
n the 1990s and 2000s, images of Mexico proliferated on movie screens
around the world as films such as Amores perros (Love’s a Bitch, Alejandro
González Iñárritu, 2000) and Y tu mamá también (And Your Mother Too,
Alfonso Cuarón, 2001) proved popular with spectators from New York to
Nueva León. As spectators watched, transfixed, individuals from across Mexico
City crashed together then spiraled apart in the gritty Amores perros, while two
best friends left the metropolis and its dangers behind in search of “heaven
on earth” in the seemingly lighthearted Y tu mamá también. At the same time
that moviegoers flocked to the theater, making Amores perros and Y tu mamá
también box-office hits both in Mexico and abroad, critics swooned that a once
preeminent national cinema had recovered from what was generally considered
to be a long period of decline. New York Times film critic A. O. Scott agreed, yet
suggested that while the films offered U.S. spectators a tantalizing glimpse of
Mexico, they also left much unsaid: “American movie audiences have begun to
discover Mexico [through films such as Amores perros and Y tu mamá también].
. . . To watch them was to be seized by a giddy intuition: this is where mov-
ies are going. But that excitement was also accompanied by a curiosity based
(speaking for myself, at least) on ignorance: movies like this don’t just happen.
Where did they come from?” (Scott 2004). Mexico might of course be discov-
ered in a number of ways, depending on a given spectator’s gender, race, and
nationality, among other characteristics. Similarly, films such as Amores perros
8 Melodr am a and Me xico
and Y tu mamá también are complex and multifaceted and, as such, have numer-
ous influences: they “come from” many different places at once (as Scott indeed
acknowledges). Nonetheless, Scott’s question is at the heart of this chapter, and,
to some degree, of this book, which explores how directors of the 1990s and
2000s draw on the past to construct meaning in the present.
Tracing the ties between Mexican films of the 1990s and 2000s (often
referred to as “new-wave” films) and Golden Age melodramas of the 1930s,
1940s, and 1950s, I seek in Mexican Melodrama to contribute to a greater under-
standing of the rich complexities of multifaceted identities in a diverse, increas-
ingly global world.1 Amores perros’s visual and narrative excess, as well as its focus
on the perils of the modern metropolis, evokes the Golden Age hit Nosotros los
pobres (We the Poor, Ismael Rodríguez, 1947). Y tu mamá también’s coy references
to national history through its protagonists’ surnames remit spectators to the
Golden Age years, in which the nation and its cinema were often seen as synon-
ymous. While the directors of these and other new-wave films I discuss in the
coming chapters reference their midcentury forerunners, however, they employ
the tropes of melodrama that characterized many Golden Age films in order
to denounce the excesses of a nation characterized as a fragmented, fictitious
construct pieced together from remnants of the past. Drawing on the Golden
Age melodramas that offered (even as they often also problematized) a glimpse
of (national) unity, new-wave directors of the 1990s and 2000s therefore proffer
a vision of (allegorical) fragmentation at the same time that they open a space
for critical resistance, encouraging spectators to formulate—and voice—their
own admonitions of the outdated status quo.
Mexico’s Golden Age is generally understood to refer to the period of
increased national film production surrounding World War II—a period that
spanned the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s and that was considered “golden” because of
the perceived prestige of the era’s films and stars as well as the relative critical
and popular success of the films released. While the exact years of the Golden
Age are subject to some dispute, there is widespread agreement that the period’s
cinema proved hugely influential in forging spectators’ ideas about lo mexicano.2
Golden Age films are nuanced and complex and can be read in a myriad of
ways. As historians Gilbert Joseph, Anne Rubenstein, and Eric Zolov (2001a,
9) argue, however, the Golden Age nonetheless functions “as a metonym for
a nostalgically depicted bygone era, a period when lo mexicano still invoked
a series of roughly shared assumptions about cultural belonging and politi-
cal stability under a unifying patriarchy.” 3 With well-regarded directors such
Melodr am a and Me xico 9
as Emilio Fernández, Fernando de Fuentes, Alejandro Galindo, and Alberto

Gout releasing hit after hit, Mexicans (and Latin Americans more generally)
flooded their local cinemas each week for decades to see the latest releases. As
they watched the trials and triumphs of stars including Cantinflas, Sara García,
Pedro Infante, Libertad Lamarque, Jorge Negrete, Silvia Pinal, Ninón Sevilla,
and Tin Tan, among so many others, spectators laughed and cried together,
seeing themselves reflected on the big screen even as they assessed established
ideas regarding national and continental identities.
Mexico’s “new-wave” cinema—also known as nuevo cine mexicano, or “new
Mexican cinema”—emerged in the 1990s and continued into the 2000s, fol-
lowing several decades of what is often considered to be a crisis for the nation’s
cinema.4 Once again, as in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, highly regarded direc-
tors released their films to critical and box-office acclaim, and Mexican actors
became household names nationally, continentally, and internationally. Film-
makers including Alfonso Cuarón, Alejandro González Iñárritu, and Guill-
ermo del Toro—known as the “three amigos”—won prizes and accolades for
their work; actors Diego Luna and Gael García Bernal became poster boys for
Mexican and global cinema alike.5 New-wave directors, moreover, once again
foregrounded lo mexicano in their films in the 1990s and 2000s. Writing on what
he terms “A Mexican Nouvelle Vague” in his article of this name, Jeff Menne
(2007, 71) sums up this tendency as intrinsic to “new-wave” cinema: “A new
wave announces itself, so to speak, when national concerns, in both the cultural
and more properly political sense, become the subject matter by which cineastes
declare their difference from the prevailing cinema of their country, asserting in
the process the new generation’s claim to a share of state power. In this respect,
a new wave may only be intelligible against the backdrop of the nation-state.” 6
As Menne insinuates, new-wave directors foregrounded “national concerns” to
different ends than did their predecessors. Golden Age directors on the whole
sought to craft films that contributed to the formation of the nation as a col-
lective of like-minded, lachrymose spectators, although their films nonetheless
(and in all likelihood unintentionally) reveal fissures in any such construct. Pil-
ing excess on excess, new-wave directors exploited the tensions invariably gen-
erated by melodrama and intimated that spectators must assert a more critical
stance vis-à-vis the screen and the nation.
In each of the chapters that follow, I pair readings of key Golden Age and
new-wave films to suggest how directors of the 1990s and 2000s implicitly ref-
erence their Golden Age predecessors in their use of melodramatic excess and
emotion. Laying the conceptual groundwork for these readings, I present in the
remaining pages of this chapter an overview of the historical and cultural fac-
tors that influence Golden Age and new-wave cinema. To clarify how I use key
terms in my analysis, I also discuss the semantics of the two words that together
title the chapter and, in a somewhat modified form, the book: melodrama
and Mexico.
Key Terms
Tantalizingly murky and intriguingly messy, melodrama and Mexico prove mul-
tifaceted and polyvalent terms resistant to static definitions. In commonplace
language, melodrama might be considered the equivalent of overwrought, highly
charged emotion; in the parlance of film studies, it might be described as a
historically defined genre (Singer 2001) or a mutable mode (Brooks [1976] 1995;
Gledhill 1991; Williams 2001, 2015). In everyday conversation, Mexico might
be considered to be the federal republic located just south of the United States,
with a population of approximately 122 million and a GDP of over 1 trillion
(World Bank, n.d.a); in academic discourse, it might be characterized as an
“imagined community” (Anderson 1983), or, in a slight variant, as an “empathet-
ically imagined community” (Williams 2015), as I further discuss below.7
The Oxford Dictionary succinctly defines melodrama as “a sensational dra-
matic piece with exaggerated characters and exciting events intended to appeal
to the emotions” (“Melodrama,” n.d.) and notes that the term’s origins are to
be found in the “early 19th century: from French mélodrame, from Greek melos
‘music’ + French drame ‘drama.’” In his well-known work The Melodramatic
Imagination, scholar Peter Brooks ([1976] 1995, 11–12) echoes this definition,
suggesting that most individuals are likely to have a general sense of what they
consider to be the common characteristics of the melodrama: “The connota-
tions of the word [melodrama] are probably similar for us all. They include:
the indulgence of strong emotionalism; moral polarization and schematiza-
tion; extreme states of being, situations, actions; overt villainy, persecution of
the good, and final reward of virtue; inflated and extravagant expression; dark
plottings, suspense, breathtaking peripety.”
While Brooks is likely correct in asserting that “we” generally agree on
the broad contours of melodrama, it is worth recalling that melodramas are
famously protean. As film historian and scholar Thomas Elsaesser ([1972] 2002,
Ke y Terms 11
43–44) writes in this regard, “the media and literary forms which have habitu-
ally embodied melodramatic situations have changed considerably in the course
of history and, further, they differ from country to country.” I write of melo-
drama and cinema, while others write of melodrama and stage plays; I find
melodrama in the “buddy film,” while others find it in the telenovela and the
narcocorrido.8 As such, melodrama might be considered a “chameleon” (Wil-
liams 2015; “Melodrama,” n.d.), capable of assuming a variety of guises depend-
ing on the environment in which it is encountered.
Given melodrama’s protean proclivities, when I write of melodrama in this
book, I refer to it principally as a mode, following scholars including Brooks,
Christine Gledhill, and Linda Williams. In so doing, I seek to recognize that
melodrama is seemingly both ubiquitous and ever changing: melodrama as “we”
understand it cannot be limited to one moment in time or place, nor can it be
found in solely one medium (be it cinema, literature, or song). At the same
time, I recognize the value of critics’ recognition of different types, or genres,
of Golden Age melodramas and incorporate these in my analysis. La mujer
del puerto (Woman of the Port, Arcady Boytler, 1933), for instance, is largely con-
sidered a cabaretera melodrama, or a melodrama set in a cabaret, and I refer to
it in this way; Cuando los hijos se van (When the Children Leave, Juan Bustillo
Oro, 1941) is frequently described as a family melodrama, and I reference it
as such.
In writing of melodrama as a mode but referring at times to genre, I fol-
low scholar Julianne Burton-Carvajal (1997, 191), who convincingly describes
melodrama as a “metagenre”: “even when treated as a ‘genre’ in film studies,
melodrama insists on asserting itself as a metagenre, one that subsumes and
hybridizes with other generic categories.” By way of example, Burton-Carvajal
references the list of film genres of the 1930s that scholar Jorge Ayala Blanco
(1993) provides in La aventura del cine mexicano (The Adventure of Mexican Cin-
ema), noting that melodrama spills over into most if not all genres, regardless of
how the critic defines them. On the one hand, she writes, melodrama is largely
excluded, even as it is the proverbial elephant in the room: “Although Ayala
Blanco only uses the term ‘melodrama’ once in this list, very narrowly, all the
genres he names are clearly subject to inclusion under the category of melo-
drama” (Burton-Carvajal 1997, 192). On the other hand, melodrama proliferates:
“Throughout the text, Ayala Blanco ‘coins’ generic and subgeneric terms (e.g.,
comedia melodramática campirana, melodrama del pueblo, melodrama sociofamiliar,
melodrama negro, melodrama blanco, melodrama conjugal, melodrama criminal )
1 2 Melodr am a and Me xico
[melodramatic comedy set in the countryside, melodrama of the pueblo, social/

family melodrama, black melodrama, white melodrama, conjugal melodrama,
criminal melodrama]” (Burton-Carvajal 1997, 192). As Burton-Carvajal’s anal
ysis makes clear, melodrama—whether identified as such or not—moves
betwixt and between genres and subgenres alike.
As is true of melodrama, Mexico, too, can at times prove surprisingly resis-
tant to definition. As I have already suggested, when I write of Mexico in this
book, I write of a nation imagined into existence through tears and laughter,
melodrama and allegory. In construing the nation as both imagined and imag-
inary, I follow a general trend in recent criticism, emblematized in the work
of scholars Benedict Anderson and Linda Williams, each of whom writes
of media’s ability to forge bonds between individuals that will lead them to
self-identify as part of a larger community and, perchance, a nation. For Ander-
son, “imagined communities” begin to form in Latin America in the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries, when newspaper readers start to recognize the self
in the other: “the newspaper reader, observing exact replicas of his own paper
being consumed by his subway, barbershop, or residential neighbours, is con-
tinually reassured that the imagined world is visibly rooted in everyday life. . . .
Fiction seeps quietly and continually into everyday reality, creating that remark-
able confidence of community in anonymity which is the hallmark of modern
nations” (Anderson 1983, 35–36). As per Anderson, if individual A sees individ-
ual B reading the same newspaper, or possibly even the same article contained
therein, A believes that she and B must be fundamentally alike.9 Borrowing
from Anderson, Williams considers melodrama—be it on the page or on the
screen—to seek to contribute to the formation of a larger community: “[The]
sensations [of melodrama] are the means to something more important: the
achievement of a felt good, the merger—perhaps even the compromise—of
morality and feeling into empathetically imagined communities forged in the
pain and suffering of innocent victims, and in the actions of those who seek to
rescue them” (Williams 2001, 21).10 In the case of the Golden Age melodramas
considered here, as in the U.S. melodramas studied by Williams, the “imag-
ined community” of print culture morphs into the “(empathetically) imagined
community” of screen culture in no small part because of the screen’s ability to
encourage spectators’ identification with actors and characters as well as with
the other audience members with whom they have traditionally shared the the-
ater experience.11 Seeking to spark the sentiment that might bring individu-
als together into a larger group, the directors of Golden Age melodramas thus
Melodr am a’ s Golden Age (1930–1958) 13
endeavored to foster the formation of a community united through feeling: a

community that, as I will discuss shortly, exceeded the bounds of the state to
encompass individuals from across Latin America as well as the United States.
In writing of Mexico as an imagined, imaginary entity, I by no means wish
to elide the real-world implications of the nation as a construct; the borders
that delineate the nation, be it physically or metaphorically, have significant
implications for the individuals who live within them and who cross over and
through them to what lies beyond. I write of Mexico as imagined and imagi-
nary, however, in recognition of the diversity of the nation and what Michael
Warner terms its “publics” and “counterpublics.” Necessarily multiple (rather
than singular, as per Anderson), Warner’s publics nevertheless also come into
existence through their engagement with texts: “the notion of a public enables
a reflexivity in the circulation of texts among strangers who become, by virtue
of their reflexively circulating discourse, a social entity” (Warner 2005, 11–12).
Referencing—only to then refute—a static, allegorical rendering of the nation
and its (idealized) subject such as that described in past narratives of identity,
new-wave directors employ melodrama to intimate the existence of a range of
publics and, by extension, the limitations of the nation as the empathetically
imagined community once conjured up in Golden Age melodramas.
Melodrama’s Golden Age (1930–1958)
Considered as “metagenre” or as “mode,” melodramas marked by highly dramatic

plots, larger-than-life characters, and stark appeals to spectators’ emotions pro-
liferated during Mexico’s Golden Age. Indeed, García Riera (1998, 80) estimates
that films of this genre, broadly speaking, approached 40 percent of total Golden
Age production, and Julia Tuñón (2010, 96) notes that they made up fully 72
percent of films produced in 1944 and that, even when their popularity waned
somewhat over the following years, they still made up 62 percent in 1951. On the
whole, Golden Age melodramas—be they melodrama del pueblo, melodrama con-
jugal, or family melodrama—largely adhere to the characteristics, outlined above,
that Brooks associates with the melodramatic mode. In Emilio Fernández’s 1946
Enamorada (Woman in Love), for instance, analyzed in chapter 2, a shrill, upper-
class “shrew” must learn to submit to Revolutionary desire for the greater good.
In Alberto Gout’s 1950 Aventurera (Adventuress), discussed in chapter 3, an inno-
cent young girl endures great agony when others conspire against her, until she is
finally able to achieve some measure of justice at film’s end. And, to offer a final
example, in Ismael Rodríguez’s 1947 Nosotros los pobres (We the Poor), discussed in
chapter 4, a good man suffers at the hands of villains before he is able to clear his
name. In all the aforementioned instances, Golden Age directors indulged spec-
tators’ perceived desire for “strong emotionalism,” “moral polarization and sche-
matization,” “persecution of the good,” and “inflated and extravagant expression”
(Brooks [1976] 1995, 11–12), pitting heroic protagonists against scurrilous villains,
and offering narratives that twist and turn.
Manifesting the characteristics that Brooks associates with the melodra-
matic mode, Golden Age melodramas also display the features that critic Silvia
Oroz associates with Latin American melodramas more specifically. As Oroz
writes in her landmark study, “o melodrama latino-americano cria uma retórica
própria que o diferencia das outras produções melodramáticas. Para isso se
baseia em: 1—Histórias que simbolizam alegorias nacionais. 2—A construção
de uma imagem cinematográfica nacional, que remete a um universo próximo
do espectador. . . . 3—A funcionalidade dramática da música. . . . 4—A utilização
insistente de símbolos como: tempestade (mau pressagio), campos floridos (har-
monia futura)” (the Latin American melodrama creates its own rhetoric that
differs from other melodramatic productions. For this it is based on: 1. Histories
that symbolize national allegories. 2. The construction of a national cinematic
image, which references the nearby universe of the spectator. . . . 3. The dramatic
functionality of music. . . . 4. The insistent utilization of symbols such as storms
[ill omen], countryside with flowers [future harmony]; Oroz 1992, 77–78).12
Pairing melos (or music) with drama, Golden Age directors utilized symbols
with abandon, sought to forge a “national cinematic image,” and offered highly
allegorical renditions of Mexico as a nation.
While I by no means wish to suggest that all “third-world” narratives are
necessarily allegorical in nature, Golden Age directors often did position their
films as allegories as the term is generally understood, offering an “apparent
sense [that] refers to an ‘other’ sense” (“Allegory” 1999). In “Third World Liter-
ature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism,” well-known theorist and critic
Fredric Jameson (1987, 69) sets forth his argument that all “third-world” texts
are of necessity allegorical: “let me now, by way of a sweeping hypothesis, try
to say what all third-world cultural productions seem to have in common and
what distinguishes them radically from analogous cultural forms in the first
world. All third-world texts are necessarily, I want to argue, allegorical, and in a
very specific way: they are to be read as what I will call national allegories, even
when, or perhaps I should say, particularly when their forms develop out of pre-
dominantly western machineries of representation, such as the novel.” Correct
in identifying his postulation as a “sweeping hypothesis,” the argument that
Jameson presents in his essay is simply too broad to be plausible: “third-world”
texts may or may not be allegories, as, indeed, might their “first-world” coun-
terparts. Twinning an “apparent sense” to “an ‘other’ sense” that relates to the
nation, however, Golden Age directors released films manifesting what Darlene
Sadlier, echoing Oroz, describes as a tendency of Latin American melodramas
more generally: “the term melodrama has somewhat broader implications [in
Latin America]. . . . It refers not only to domestic dramas but also to historical
epics in which family life is viewed in relation to larger national issues” (Sadlier
2009, 3). As seen in chapter 4, for example, Golden Age superstar Pedro Infante
is the humble but heroic Pepe el Toro in Nosotros los pobres at the same time that
he serves as a stand-in for all spectators, the nosotros invoked in the film’s title.
With their allegorical renditions of an idealized Mexico, Golden Age melo-
dramas of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s proved immensely popular with a spec-
tatorship made up of individuals who might have wished to escape—albeit
briefly—from the rigors of their everyday lives, perhaps finding temporary
respite from the exigencies of life in the metropolis, the still-lingering effects
of the Mexican Revolution (1910–20), or the stress of war in Europe. In Mex-
ico in particular, cinemas were often constructed to foment escapist fantasies,
encouraging spectators who included newcomers to the city, part of a wave of
migration that shifted population centers from rural to urban areas of the coun-
try, to sink back in their seats—even for a moment—to enjoy the luxurious
surroundings of “salas majestuosas . . . que parecían catedrales laicas, decoradas
de una manera fuera de lo ordinario, con objetos de culturas ajenas o exóticos”
(majestic rooms . . . that looked like secular cathedrals, decorated in an out-of-
the-ordinary manner, with foreign or exotic objects; Tuñón 2010, 97).
While Mexicans certainly crowded their neighborhood theaters, moviegoers
across Latin America, as well as in the United States, also contributed to the
popularity and box-office receipts of Golden Age films. As Rogelio Agrasán-
chez Jr. writes in this regard of Mexican films produced in the 1940s, quoting
a 1943 Cinema Reporter article, “Mexican pictures became so popular in Latin
American countries that they often competed with films made in Hollywood.
Audiences extending from the Caribbean to Argentina applauded [Mexican]
features. . . . When these films were brought to the Spanish-speaking public in
the United States, the reaction was even stronger, as the people ‘love to hear
their own language, observe, criticize and laud their own customs and habits,
and recall their beloved towns and hamlets’” (Agrasánchez 2006, 8). In 1945,
three hundred U.S. theaters screened Mexican films; this number increased
yet further in the ensuing years, reaching its apex in 1951, when 683 venues—
including not only theaters but also “schools, clubs, and churches”—in 443 cities
across the United States screened Mexican movies in a bid to serve the grow-
ing Mexican population, swelled, in part, by the bracero program of the 1940s
(Agrasánchez 2006, 8).
Whether projected in “salas majestuosas” (majestic rooms; Tuñón 2010, 97)
in Mexico or in the more quotidian spaces that frequently served Spanish-
speaking spectators in the United States, the films of the era often featured
“exotic” song-and-dance routines that both interrupted and furthered the plot,
close-up shots of dewy-eyed stars, and elaborately staged sets. Thus, spectators
attending the 1946 premiere of Enamorada would have seen star Maria Félix’s
eyes fill the movie screen, thanks to the director’s use of an extreme close-up;
spectators watching the 1947 Nosotros los pobres would have seen a neighbor-
hood join together in song and dance; and those viewing the 1950 Aventurera
would have seen actress and dancer Ninón Sevilla shimmy her way across the
screen, her elaborate headdress at times adorned with a pineapple, at times with
a ceramic vase.
As critics Monsiváis and Oroz have demonstrated, Golden Age melodramas
such as these offered not only momentary respite to spectators ensconced in
cinematic “cathedrals” (Tuñón 2010, 97) but also lessons—celluloid sermons,
as it were—that taught literate and illiterate spectators alike to navigate the
uneven terrain of the rapidly changing, increasingly modern world around
them. In the years following the Mexican Revolution, cities in Mexico grew as
citizens moved in search of increased opportunity. The percentage of urban res-
idents in Mexico reached 33.5 percent by 1930 and climbed further still in sub-
sequent years (Hamnett 2006, 242). Teaching spectators to confront an increas-
ingly urban landscape populated with unscrupulous individuals who might
plunder their fortunes and leave them adrift if they did not take the necessary
precautions, Golden Age melodramas offered even illiterate cinemagoers access
to important information, and as such “constituiu-se numa forma de educação
audiovisual melhor que os espetáculos populares conhecidos até então” (consti-
tuted a better form of audiovisual education than the popular spectacles known
until then; Oroz 1992, 28). Considered from this vantage point, Nosotros los
pobres demonstrates how to triumph in the face of overwhelming odds, while
Aventurera showcases the victory of good over evil, holding out the hope of a
fairy-tale ending for even the most hapless of victims.
Teaching attentive spectators how to negotiate an increasingly urbanized
society, Golden Age melodramas were projected into spaces that implicitly
encouraged spectators to connect with each other—at times quite literally—as
they learned the lessons of the day. As Monsiváis writes,
En el cine de barrio se adquieren destrezas básicas, que ayudan a orientarse en la

ciudad que se expande: el sentido de intimidad dentro de la multitud y su comple-
mento: el gusto de afiliarse a la alegría comunitaria, de ser y estar con los demás,
indiferenciado y singular. En el periodo 1920–1960 las salas de cine se multiplican
y son el eje de la “identidad del barrio,” mientras cada fin de semana los individuos
y las familias esmeran sus ilusiones, y las parejas afinan ligues o noviazgos en el
trámite casi burocrático de manos que suben, se estacionan, se aceleran, se indig-
nan ante forcejeos inoportunos, se extasían ante rendiciones instantáneas.
(In the neighborhood cinemas one acquires basic skills that help to orient one
in the city that is expanding: the sense of intimacy in the multitude and its com-
plement: the pleasure of joining the community happiness, of being with others,
undifferentiated and singular. During the period 1920–1960 cinemas multiply and
are the center of the “neighborhood identity,” while each weekend individuals
and families polish their illusions, and couples perfect their hookups or engage-
ments with the almost bureaucratic procedure of hands that go up, stop, speed up,
become indignant in the face of inopportune struggles, become ecstatic before
instant renditions.) (Monsiváis 1994, 60)13
At the same time that they burnished their “illusions,” spectators thus learned
from the stars and forged bonds with each other.
While this close tie between spectators and screen would not last through
the end of the twentieth century, during the Golden Age, as Charles Ramírez
Berg (1992a, 5) succinctly states, “National self-image matched cinematic
self-representation: the national audience quite literally ‘bought into’ what the
film industry produced.” A woman interviewed by Mexican anthropologist
Julia Tuñón, for instance, noted that “life was just like those movies”:
The cinema was pure suffering and crying. I look at it now and I say, “Oh, my
God!” How they suffered before! And that was the style everybody followed,
because they copied it from there. The men wanted to be like Pedro Infante,
drunk and fighting, and they copied that. The woman as well—so long-suffering.
I say it because my mother was long-suffering, she never questioned anything,
nothing, nothing. If the man was a wife-beater and authoritarian, well the woman
was self-effacing, because that’s the way Sara García and the others were. It was
the life style. . . . It feels like an exaggeration, but life was just like those movies:
the long-suffering mothers, the fathers in love with and beating their wives, and
the well-behaved daughters. (Quoted in Mraz 2009, 143)
Fostering the formation of an empathetically imagined community for the

nation and the continent, directors of Golden Age melodramas encouraged
spectators to identify not only with their fellow theatergoers, who assumedly
experienced the same emotions that they did, but also with the stars on the
big screen.
The era’s “national audience” (Ramírez Berg 1992a, 5), of course, was also
transnational. Forged in part in Mexico’s neighborhood cinemas, the Golden
Age spectatorship incorporated individuals who hailed from elsewhere as well:
“In the late 1940s, Spanish-speaking populations throughout the Americas
chose high-quality Mexican productions over Hollywood’s. . . . With few excep-
tions, in these markets Mexican films were second behind the United States
in terms of the number of titles released. Mexico exported almost its entire
production to each nation of the Western Hemisphere, sometimes exceeding
40 percent of the films shown in a given country and even surpassing Holly-
wood’s distribution in certain Latin American markets, such as Venezuela. . . .
Mexican films played longer and on more screens than Hollywood fare” (Fein
2005, 139). As such, and somewhat paradoxically, spectators not only in Mex-
ico, but throughout the Spanish-speaking Americas, glimpsed themselves in
Golden Age films,14 leading Ana M. López (1994, 12) to contend that “the Mex-
ican [Golden Age] cinema has been our only version of José Martí’s ‘Nuestra
América.’” 15 With traditional roles reinforced in face of the anxiety of change
spurred by modernization, spectators in a variety of locales were encouraged to
take their cues from the screen as they suffered, fell in love, and behaved as did
the paragons of what they came to consider as their national—and, simultane-
ously, their continental—identity.
To some degree, all cinema simultaneously reflects and influences the milieu
from which it stems.16 In Mexico, however, the government actively encour-
aged this tendency, offering financial and institutional support to the nascent
cinematic industry and the melodramas it often favored. The Mexican Revolu-
tion had ended only a decade or so before the Golden Age began, and the polit-
ical party that would become known as the Partido Revolucionario Institucio-
nal (PRI, or Institutional Revolutionary Party), and that would govern Mexico
for more than 70 years, was faced with the need to consolidate power and forge
a new identity for the nation.17 Recognizing cinema’s potential to influence the
national imaginary, the government invested heavily in the cinematic industry
and, in 1936, mandated that “all movie houses must release one Mexican movie
per month” (Domínguez Ruvalcaba 2007, 77).18
Attempting to impose a unified identity on a populace made up of multi-
ple races, languages, religions, and interests, the strongly nationalistic regime
thereby attempted to forge consensus—and to craft memories of unity past and
present—by employing culture as what Louis Althusser (1994) terms an “ideo-
logical state apparatus”: a means for a hegemonic power to perpetuate itself
without recourse to overt violence. Turning to cinema—and, through cinema,
to melodrama—as one means to shore up an incipient regime through ideology,
the PRI proved remarkably successful in establishing itself as the hegemonic
party in Mexico. With smooth transitions from one president to the next,
Mexico benefited from a long period of peace and political stability following
its Revolution: “it is a measure of the political achievement of the PRI that,
whereas other Latin American countries were racked by violence and brutal
repression, the acute stresses engendered by industrialization in Mexico were
assuaged, where they were not stifled, by the embrace of the corporate state”
(Williamson 2009, 400). From the 1940s to the 1990s, PRI party hegemony
remained largely unchallenged, as PRI candidates won office time and again.
The very melodramas that helped to forge a new identity—and promote
stability—for the war-torn nation through melodrama and allegory, empathy
and emotion, also opened a space for potential criticism, suggesting the evi-
dence of fissures in the national façade that directors of the 1990s and 2000s
would later foreground. For as Susan Dever (2003, 8, 9) argues, melodramas
are able to both “organize and support power” and “contest power imbalances”:
“The genre’s accessibility facilitates the decoding and encoding of its lessons; its
intelligibility invites the deconstruction of its practices.” In her study of Spanish
melodramas, Annabel Martín, like Dever, underscores the need to recognize
melodrama’s subversive potential, which she attributes to the mode’s surfeit
of meaning: “Conceptualmente, el melodrama es por definición excesivo en
sus emociones, propuestas, deseos y frustraciones. Genera un ‘plus’ (226), un
excedente de contenido y de emotividad, donde radica la potencialidad de la

transgresión ideológica del texto” (Conceptually, melodrama is by definition
excessive in its emotions, proposals, desires, and frustrations. It generates a
“plus” ([Sarlo 1985:]226), a surplus of content and emotion, from which stems
the potential of the text’s ideological transgression; Martín 2005, 74, emphasis in
original).19 What Martín (quoting Beatriz Sarlo) terms a “plus” might manifest
itself in the case of Golden Age melodramas in the films’ Byzantine plots; the
songs and dances that are often interspersed in the filmic narrative; and the
close-up shots that are designed to capture a star’s every emotion.
Melodrama’s “excedente de contenido y de emotividad (surplus of content
and emotion; Martín 2005, 74), furthermore, often spills over into a star system
in which the actors’ bodies become a site for polysemic signification, as well as
into an outpouring of emotion that spectators enthusiastically embrace as they
laugh and cry—and, by extension, suffer and learn—together. The “surplus” also
leads to a muddying of the borders of the very nation—Mexico—that Golden
Age directors often sought to portray. In offering spectators across Latin Amer-
ica and the United States a glimpse of “‘Nuestra América’” (López 1994, 12),
Golden Age melodramas exceeded the realm of the national and called into
question its boundaries. Cinemas in Mexico, moreover, were organized socio-
economically during the Golden Age, paradoxically emblematizing the very
societal divisions that directors of melodramas sought to overcome. Ruben-
stein (2001, 217) writes in this regard that “the division of the cinema audi-
ence along class lines had long since been accepted. Different seats within the
movie houses cost different amounts, creating a spatial gulf between poorer and
richer viewers to match the economic gap between them. And the movie houses
themselves each developed a kind of class identity, marked by location but also
by the range of ticket prices, how recently the films shown at each theater had
opened, and other factors.” 20 Concretizing the class divisions that melodramas
both performed and attempted to supersede, the spatial organization of Golden
Age cinemas once more opened a site for potentially subversive readings.
Crisis and Resurgence (1959–1990)
Even during the Golden Age, in which melodramas were widely popular, not
all directors produced (or wished to produce) melodramas. Echoing the criti-
cism that melodramas received from increasingly jaded audiences in the 1960s,
for example, esteemed director Emilio Fernández—known for the films Flor
Silvestre (Wild Flower, 1942), María Candelaria (1944), Enamorada (Woman in
Love, 1946), Río Escondido (Hidden River, 1948), and Salón México (1949), among
others—roundly eschewed the use of the term in relation to his work. In a 1982
interview for Le Journal des Cahiers, Fernández (whose nude form served as the
model for the Oscar statuette [Schou 2012]) bristled in response to French critic
Charles Tesson’s description of his films as “melodramatic”: “For you the lives
of Mexicans are melodramatic; for us they’re a drama. What would you have
me do to have it considered a drama? Shall I cut off my mother’s head? Or my
father’s balls? When you say we make melodramas, you are ridiculing us. When
you say my movies are melodramatic, it’s as if you were saying that they are shit”
(quoted in Mraz 2009, 112–13).21 While Fernández rejected the term melodrama
in his comments, spectators in the 1930s, 1940s, and early 1950s did not appear
to feel the need for sharp distinctions between what Fernández describes as
“drama” and “melodrama,” nor did they clamor for their mothers’ heads (or their
fathers’ balls) to roll.22
As the Golden Age drew to a close in the late 1950s and early 1960s, how-
ever, melodramas increasingly came under attack as popular audiences rejected
what came to be seen as the films’ collusion with power and superficial nar-
ratives (Monsiváis 1993, 140). At the same time that melodramas fell out of
vogue, Mexican cinema experienced what is often described as a crisis: directors
increasingly released serials and sexicomedias, seeking quick profits rather than
the critical and popular acclaim of years past.23 This is not meant to imply that
there were not important films produced during these years. Directors Luis
Alcoriza, Felipe Cazals, Jorge Fons, Jaime Humberto Hermosillo, Paul Leduc,
and Arturo Ripstein, for instance, received acclaim for their work as practi-
tioners of the “nuevo cine mexicano,” or new Mexican cinema.24 Mexican films
released in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, however, did not play to as large an
audience as did Golden Age films, nor did their directors make the same claims
regarding their ability to represent the nation (or the continent).
There are myriad reasons for the decline of the Golden Age and the melo-
dramas that proliferated during the era. For one, the success of Golden Age cin-
ema—and its demise—resulted from a complex, transnational interdependence
between Mexico and its neighbor to the north (Fein 2005, 157).25 During World
War II, the United States supported Mexican film production in the hopes that
it would be able to more effectively communicate its propaganda through Mex-
ican vehicles (Fein 2001, 166). With Hollywood’s attention elsewhere during
the 1940s and Latin American audiences bored by films focused on wartime
efforts, Mexico experienced increases in the quality and quantity of its pro-
ductions and received a greater share of screen time in the United States and
Latin America alike. Between 1931 and 1940, for instance, Mexico released 259
films; between 1941 and 1950, 755 films (Oroz 1992, 102–3, 122).26 Mexico’s cin-
ematic industry, however, did not invest significantly in distribution, thereby
relying (with unfortunate results) on Hollywood to distribute its films. Mexi-
co’s unwillingness to pursue a film policy that directly challenged U.S. interests,
along with a more aggressive policy by the United States in favor of U.S. films,
subsequently contributed to the decline of the Mexican industry (Fein 2005).
Troubling signs were in fact already evident in 1947 when, as Eduardo de la Vega
Alfaro notes, Mexico produced only 57 feature films (in comparison with 71 the
preceding year), due to factors including “the resurgence of Hollywood film
production, which now had as a goal the complete recovery of its Latin Amer-
ican market; . . . the almost immediate withdrawal of the financial and tech-
nological support that producers from the United States had extended to the
Mexican film industry during the war years; and finally, but no less important,
the decline in investment rates, which resulted in less financial investment per
film” (de la Vega Alfaro 2005, 165). With the end of World War II, Hollywood
began to focus once again on the Latin American market, and Mexican produc-
tion fell.
The 1959 Cuban Revolution, and the continental trend toward the more
overtly political New Latin American Cinema, also contributed to the end of
the Golden Age. Mexican films and melodramas were both common on Cuban
screens in the years preceding the Revolution (Chanan 1985, 104). After the
1959 Revolution, however, Cuban filmmakers distanced themselves from melo-
dramas. Considering them ideologically complicit with hegemonic, repressive
regimes, Cuban filmmakers advocated instead for what Julio García Espinosa
famously termed imperfect cinema in his essay of this name: a cinema that estab-
lished itself in contradistinction to Hollywood and that sought to better reflect
lived reality. Summing up the perceived need for an autochthonous cinema able
“to conceive of the spectator as an active being capable of changing his envi-
ronment; to attest to our reality; to achieve cultural independence” (Colina and
Díaz Torres 1978, 46) in an article published in Cine Cubano in 1972, Cuban
critics and directors Enrique Colina and Daniel Díaz Torres wrote that melo-
drama was irrevocably tied to the past: “The popularity of melodrama is not
only the product of deformed cinematographic or literary taste. Its acceptance
is in response to the petty bourgeois values deeply rooted in the people and
systematically publicized by the erosion of an ideological superstructure. Taste
is, finally, the reflection of the assimilation of this superstructure which has edu-
cated man in the ethical principles immanent in the system” (Colina and Díaz
Torres [1972] 1978, 65).27
With 1959 marking the onset of a continental turn to New Latin American
Cinema, the myth of Mexico as a unified society—an empathetically imag-
ined community united in tears and laughter—was irrevocably fractured in 1968
with the massacre of students and civilians in Mexico City’s Tlatelolco Plaza.
The Olympics were to be held in the country that October, and at the beginning
of the year, Mexicans had every expectation of realizing the promised “utopia”
(Volpi 1998, 24) of the world event. Mexico was the first “developing” nation to
host the Olympics, and then-president Gustavo Díaz Ordaz (1964–70) man-
ifested a particular interest in proving that Mexico was both a fully modern
nation and a politically stable refuge from the turmoil of the world at large,
shaken by student protests in France, among other events. When Mexican
students began to demonstrate for political change that summer, Díaz Ordaz
viewed their actions with suspicion. When students, along with others, staged
a mitín in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas at Tlatelolco on October 2, ten days
before the Olympics were to begin, Díaz Ordaz reacted with extreme force.
Under circumstances that have remained unclear, the army began to shoot into
the crowds: while newspapers initially reported between 20 and 28 deaths, it
would appear that at least 325 but perhaps as many as two thousand people
actually died (Poniatowska [1971] 1993, 170; Radio Diaries 2008).
In the 1970s and 1980s, increasing income inequality, economic crises, and
natural disasters further called into question the PRI’s ability to make good on
its promises to all of nosotros. By the end of the 1960s, 40 percent of national
income had become concentrated in the hands of 10 percent of the population,
and “swelling populations [were to be found] in cities disfigured by vast shanty
towns” (Williamson 2009, 403). Exacerbating the difficulties of times already
marked by economic stress and political strain, Mexico’s economy was hit hard
in 1981 when global oil prices dropped. The following year, the nation suffered
through an economic crisis, when the value of the peso fell sharply, from 47
pesos to the U.S. dollar in February to 144 pesos to the U.S. dollar in December
(Hamnett 2006, 267–68). A devastating earthquake then hit Mexico City in
1985; the government’s slow response led to yet more questions about its ability
to respond in times of crisis (Hamnett 2006, 271).
The New-Wave Nation (1991–2005)
With cracks in the national façade ever more prominent, the party that had
financially underwritten much of Golden Age cinema—the PRI—began to
experience heretofore unheard of challenges at the ballot box in the 1990s and
2000s. In 1997, Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas won the mayoral elections in Mex-
ico City as the candidate for the newly founded Partido de la Revolución
Democrática (PRD), or Party of the Democratic Revolution, representing a
serious challenge to PRI hegemony; in 2000, Vicente Fox won the national
elections for president as the candidate for the Partido de la Acción Nacional
(PAN), or National Action Party, marking the first time that a non-PRI candi-
date had won the presidency in over seventy years.
Along with the dramatic shifts in the national political landscape in the
1990s and 2000s, new, increasingly neoliberal governmental policy led to sig-
nificant changes in film production, distribution, and exhibition during these
decades. In the 1970s, the government of President Luis Echevarría Alvarez
(1970–76) actually increased state involvement in all aspects of film production,
distribution, and exhibition in a bid to address the political crisis spurred by
the Tlatelolco massacre as well as the crisis experienced by the nation’s cinema
(Maciel 1999, 200). With President Echevarría’s brother, Rodolfo Echeverría,
at the head of the Banco Cinematográfico, three important production compa-
nies were established by the state: the Corporación Nacional de Cinematografía
(CONACINE), the Corporación Nacional Cinematográfica de Trabajadores
y Estado I (CONACITE I), and the Corporación Nacional Cinematográfica
de Trabajadores y Estado II (CONACITE II; Maciel 1999, 201). In addition,
more resources were made available for film production and promotion as well
as studio renovation, and theaters were encouraged to screen Mexican (rather
than foreign) films (Maciel 1999, 202). As David R. Maciel (1999, 201) states, as
a result of these efforts, “In no other presidential regime did the movie industry
in general and certain filmmakers in particular receive more interest and state
financial support than during the years of [Echevarría’s] regime (1970–1976).”
Government support for national cinema, however, was subsequently curtailed
during the presidencies of José López Portillo (1976–82) and Miguel de la
Madrid (1982–88).28
During the presidency of Carlos Salinas de Gortari (1988–94), many state-
run organizations were shut down or privatized. Azteca Films and CONACINE
the new-wave nation (1991–2005) 25
(responsible, respectively, for U.S. distribution and film production) were

closed; COTSA (or the theater operation company Compañía Operadora
de Teatros) was sold (Maciel 1999, 215). The North American Free Trade Act
(NAFTA), or Tratado de Libre Comercio de América del Norte (TLCAN),
furthermore, had profound implications for the nation’s cinema. Signed in 1992
and implemented in 1994, the accord—which created a nominally more uni-
fied trade bloc between Mexico, the United States, and Canada—marked the
end of long-standing protections for Mexican films. Mexican negotiators did
not advocate for the inclusion of provisions in NAFTA designed to protect
national culture, as did their Canadian counterparts (Hinojosa Córdova 2003,
41–42). Mexican legislators, furthermore, adopted laws that eliminated the pro-
tections long enjoyed by the film industry. “En la fecha de la firma de TLCAN
fueron adaptadas parcialmente otras leyes relativas a los medios audiovisuales,
por ejemplo la Ley de la Industria Cinematográfica, que se originó en 1949 y fue
derogada en función de una nueva ley promulgada el 29 de diciembre de 1992
. . . Esta nueva ley elimina las medidas proteccionistas para la industria cine-
matográfica nacional” (On the date of the signing of NAFTA, other laws were
partially adapted related to audiovisual media, as for example the Law of the
Film Industry, which originated in 1949 and was in effect repealed by a new
law enacted December 29, 1992 . . . This new law eliminated the measures that
protected the national film industry; Hinojosa Córdova 2003, 42). As a result of
these changes, filmmakers increasingly relied on private funds in the 1990s and
2000s, as “a semi-private model . . . gradually but decidedly overtakes Mexican
cinema at all levels: production (thanks to the transition from State sponsor-
ship to mixed public-private and fully private schemes), exhibition (thanks to
the decline of State-owned theaters and the corresponding surge in privately
owned multiplexes, which today account for nearly 90 percent of total screens
in the country), and consumption (from the urban popular sectors who largely
benefited from the pre-1992 model to the middle and upper classes who could
afford to attend the private multiplexes in the wake of price liberalization)”
(Sánchez-Prado 2014, 6). This stands in contradistinction to the Golden Age,
and even to the 1970s, when films were produced, distributed, and screened with
the support of public funds.
In terms of production, a number of private Mexican companies emerged in
the 1990s and 2000s to bankroll films. In her study of the effects of globalization
on Mexican cinema, Lucila Hinojosa Córdova finds that “Ha emergido una
nueva atmósfera financiera para respaldar proyectos privados con inversionistas
mexicanos, quienes consideran atractivo el sector cinematográfico. . . . Una

nueva generación incursiona en la producción fílmica: Altavista, Televisa, Titán,
Argos, Amaranta, Tequila Gang y Anhelo, que junto con el IMCINE se per-
filan como las principales productoras de cine del país” (A new financial atmo-
sphere has emerged to support private projects with Mexican investors, who
consider the film industry to be attractive. . . . A new generation ventures into
film production: Altavista, Televisa, Titán, Argos, Amaranta, Tequila Gang and
Anhelo, which along with IMCINE are profiled as the country’s main film
producers; Hinojosa Córdova 2003, 51). Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Amores
perros and Alfonso Cuarón’s Y tu mamá también, for instance, were funded
privately; Amores perros was produced by Altavista Films, a joint undertaking
between Carlos Slim and the Corporación Interamericana de Entretenimiento
(Malkin 2003) and Zeta Films, a production company established by González
Iñárritu;29 Y tu mamá también was produced by the private production company
Anhelo, founded and funded by Mexican billionaire businessman Jorge Vergara
Madrigal and Cuarón himself (Soutar 2008, 59).30
In terms of distribution, the 1990s and 2000s were marked by privatization
as well, with some production companies also distributing films, as is the case,
for example, of Estudio México Films’s Nuvisión and Televisa Cine’s Video-
visa (Hinojosa Córdova 2003, 51). In the case of Amores perros, for instance, a
Mexican distributor’s investment in the film’s marketing and distribution no
doubt proved key to the film’s success: “NuVision poured over a million dol-
lars into the marketing ($70,000 is typical for a Mexican film) and put it on
220 screens when it opened. As a result, 270,000 Mexican filmgoers went to
see it the opening weekend” (Aldama 2013, 83–84). At the same time, Mexico’s
transnational interdependence with Hollywood continued. El crimen del padre
Amaro, for example, was financed in part by the government-run IMCINE
(Soutar 2008, 110). In this case, however, it was funding from Hollywood that
tipped the balance for distribution: “Columbia Tri-Star’s decision to back and
distribute . . . [the film] was arguably the decisive factor pushing its sales, not its
crushing critique of corruption and criminal behavior in the Catholic Church;
it exhibited at over 360 screens and turned another quick profit of $5.7 million”
(Aldama 2013, 85).
Changes in production and distribution in the 1990s and 2000s were accom-
panied by shifts in spectatorship. In Mexico, the 1992 deregulation of ticket
prices led entrepreneurs to build new cinemas designed to appeal to well-
heeled patrons and to charge higher prices for what they billed as an experience
in luxury. While Golden Age theaters certainly concretized class divisions

(Rubenstein 2001, 217), theaters built in the 1990s and 2000s often eschewed
any possible appeal to nosotros in the interest of establishing their exclusivity.
Consider, for instance, Cinemark’s chain of Cinemex theaters, or the Ramírez
family’s chain of Cinépolis theaters (Aldama 2013, 85):
A sort of “lifestyle cinema,” Cinépolis publishes its own glossy magazine, adver-
tising Armani handbags, Chanel shoes, and “world-class” spas and restaurants.
The chain offers a range of theater experiences: for an extra fifty pesos beyond the
regular hundred-peso ticket, you may enter a variety of different VIP screening
rooms . . . yet another hundred pesos . . . includes entrance to a lounge area called
el lobby, where patrons can spend more money purchasing a comida japonesa, cap-
puccino, dessert, or cocktail, all to be brought to them either in the lounge or
during the film “poco a poco en un mood de confort y tranquilidad” (little by little
in a mood of comfort and tranquility). (Aldama 2013, 85–86)
Cinemas remain important in Mexico, which has “the greatest number of

screens in the continent” (Smith 2003, 390). Cinépolis’s promised experience of
“confort y tranquilidad” (comfort and tranquility; Aldama 2013, 86), however, is
priced out of range for all but upper-class Mexicans: “Considering that around
twenty million Mexicans are forced to live on five pesos a day (about fifty cents),
a night out at the Cinépolis is more than extravagant” (Aldama 2013, 86).
Of course, theaters were no longer the only option for spectators in the 1990s
and 2000s. While films were screened exclusively for a theater-going public
upon their release in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, Golden Age and new-wave
films alike were seen (and circulated) in an unprecedented variety of ways in the
1990s and 2000s. As emblematized in Jaime Humberto Hermosillo’s La tarea
(The Homework, 1991), in the 1990s and 2000s, “we”—nosotros or not—increas-
ingly became “people of the screen,” as Wired magazine’s Kevin Kelly (2008)
argues. DVDs supplanted videos, playing on a plethora of screens; and, for
those with access to the requisite technology, films soon streamed at a viewer’s
convenience on any number of screens as well: desktops, laptops, smart phones,
or flat-screen televisions, to name but a few. As a result of these changes, both
national and nominally “foreign” films became increasingly accessible to a far-
flung, transnational spectatorship.
At the same time that Mexico experienced profound shifts in film produc-
tion, distribution, and exhibition, Mexican filmmakers once again began to
employ the tropes of melodrama to produce critically acclaimed films that were
often quite commercially successful.31 As Gastón Lillo correctly notes, though,
new-wave directors of the 1990s—and, I would add, the 2000s—utilized the
mode to very different ends than did their Golden Age predecessors: “El melo-
drama vive bajo formas distanciadas (aunque no siempre críticas) como la paro-
dia o el pastiche. . . . [El espectador] se desplaza del lugar unívoco que le asigna
el texto melodramático para relacionarse con él de manera distanciada, irónica,
o camp” (The melodrama lives under distant [although not always critical] forms
such as parody or pastiche. . . . [The spectator] is displaced from the univocal
place that he is assigned by the melodramatic text to relate to it in a distant,
ironic, or camp manner; Lillo 1994b, 5).
Exaggerating the already overblown tendencies of Golden Age melodramas
and exploiting their fissures, new-wave directors of the 1990s and 2000s sought
to foreground (rather than hide) the cracks in the national façade. Characteriz-
ing Mexico as an assemblage of past remnants of identity, new-wave directors
of the 1990s and the 2000s limned the nation as a fragmented entity, suggesting
that the screen neither accurately represents nor contributes to the formation of
Mexico as an empathetically imagined community—a nosotros—composed of
all spectators. Drawing on their Golden Age forerunners, new-wave directors
paired melodramatic tales of desire and stock images of the nation, as did many
directors of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. They departed from their World War II–
era predecessors, however, in dashing any hopes of a unified, monolithic Mexico
as a future possibility or an achievable goal. Time and again, the directors ref-
erenced the once potent melodramatic mode that helped to forge the nation.
Yet as they foregrounded the lacunae in the tales told, they curtailed spectators’
ability to fully immerse themselves in the films.
With the nation hovering as a mirage over their allegories of Mexico, new-
wave directors turned to melodrama even as they established their films as
palimpsests, or, to borrow a term from Roberto González Echevarría, as archi-
val texts: in their compilation and display of past myths of identity, the film-
makers offered a “narrative [that] unwinds the history told in the old chron-
icles by showing that history was made up of a series of conventional topics,
whose coherence and authority depend on the codified beliefs of a period whose
ideological structure is no longer current” (González Echevarría 1990, 15). In
contradistinction to the authors of archival texts, however, new-wave directors
did not promote new myths of identity. Rather, they formed part of the recent
trend toward memory work described by Andreas Huyssen, who writes that
recent years have seen a movement away from “present futures” toward “present
pasts,” “a turning toward the past that stands in stark contrast to the privileging
of the future so characteristic of earlier decades of twentieth-century modernity”
(Huyssen 2001, 11).32 Representing a range of approaches to the questions of
nation and identity, new-wave directors converged in pointing to the uncertain,
uneven nature of individual and collective memory, signaling cinema’s inability
to accurately capture a monolithic past—or present—in the name of the future.
Playing to spectators in Mexico and Madrid, Tijuana and Texas, new-wave
directors invoked a time in which spectators were asked to believe that identity
might just be “singular,” and that, as a result, they might one day form a unified
nation. At the same time, these directors of the 1990s and 2000s demonstrated
the need to recognize the differences inherent in a diverse spectatorship made
up of multiple publics, for you and I might not see a film in precisely the same
way, nor, indeed, might we see precisely the same cut. Once again employing
the tropes of melodrama as well as the allegory with which the mode is asso-
ciated in critically and popularly acclaimed films, new-wave directors returned
to the mode once used to forge empathetically imagined communities. They
did so, however, only to demonstrate that the nation is not, in fact, a unified,
coherent entity, but rather that it plays differently nationally, continentally,
and globally. As such, new-wave directors underscored the fragmentation that
theorist Walter Benjamin associates with the allegorical, suggesting that it is
no longer possible to believe that A represents solely B, and that spectators
C, D, and E identify exclusively with star F. Similar to the baroque dramas
known as the Trauerspiel that Benjamin discusses, new-wave directors turned
once and again to the ruin and the fragment: “Allegories are, in the realm of
thoughts, what ruins are in the realm of things. . . . That which lies here in ruins,
the highly significant fragment, the remnant, is, in fact, the finest material in
baroque creation. For it is common practice in the literature of the baroque
to pile up fragments ceaselessly, without any strict idea of a goal, and, in the
unremitting expectation of a miracle, to take the repetition of stereotypes for a
process of intensification” (Benjamin 1998, 177–78). It is worth recalling that all
melodramas suffer to some degree from what Brooks ([1976] 1995, 11) describes
as the mode’s metaphorical pretenses: “If we often come perilously close [ . . . ]
to a feeling that the represented world won’t bear the weight of the signifi-
cances placed on it, this is because the represented world is so often being used
metaphorically, as a sign of something else.” 33 Creaking and groaning from the
“weight of significances” that they are asked to bear, Golden Age melodramas
at times reveal a subversive ability to destabilize the static subjectivity on which

the empathetically imagined community is predicated. Yet while Golden Age
directors hinted at the fissures that necessarily rend the allegorical façade of the
nation, new-wave directors exploited and pried open the cracks left by their
forerunners, encouraging spectators to look and listen more closely. As shown
in chapter 2, for instance, in the Golden Age Enamorada (Woman in Love, 1947),
Emilio Fernández employs romance and revolution to allegorize Mexico as a
nation all spectators might desire, cracks in the façade notwithstanding; in the
new-wave Como agua para chocolate (Like Water for Chocolate, 1992) and Entre
Pancho Villa y una mujer desnuda (Between Pancho Villa and a Naked Woman,
1996), Alfonso Arau and Sabina Berman and Isabelle Tardán, respectively, coin-
cide with their predecessor in offering tales of love set in times of revolution
but highlight rather than conceal the fact that the nation is an inherently frag-
mented, decidedly imaginary entity.
As their films played on any number of screens at local Cineplexes and
international film festivals—and, subsequently, streamed to iPads and lap-
tops—new-wave directors departed from their melodramatic predecessors in
foregrounding the fractures of the nation and suggesting that if Mexico exists
as a unified, coherent entity, it does so only as an imagined, idealized object of
spectators’ desire. Harking back to a time when spectators were encouraged to
believe that they might one day form an empathetically imagined community
of all of nosotros and, by extension, a unified nation, new-wave directors revealed
a nation that evades easy definition and suggested that any glimpse of Mexico
is of necessity partial and incomplete. Taken together, what might be described
as the overstated nature of new-wave films and the images they employ render
them impossible to ignore as what Michael Billig describes as “banal,” quotid-
ian exemplifications of nationalism: “in the established nations, there is a con-
stant ‘flagging,’ or reminding, of nationhood. . . . In so many little ways, the citi-
zenry are daily reminded of their national place in a world of nations. However,
this reminding is so familiar, so continual, that it is not consciously registered
as reminding. The metonymic image of banal nationalism is not a flag which is
being consciously waved with fervent passion; it is the flag hanging unnoticed
on the public building” (Billig 1995, 8). At times literally “flagging” the flag,
new-wave directors “flagged” as well the remnants of Golden Age melodramas
and their more optimistic renderings of the nation: of Mexico.
Drawing on Golden Age melodramas as they performed the nation in their
films, new-wave directors pointed to the fact that Mexico as a coherent national
community is, in the final analysis, a necessarily imaginary entity. For, as histo-
rian Carlos Pabón writes, “La nacionalidad no tiene esencia que nos remita a un
origen ‘verdadero o auténtico.’ Tampoco es algo natural o inevitable. La identi-
dad nacional—como toda identidad, sea ésta sexual, racial, étnica o de clase—es
una construcción cultural, imaginaria. Esta proposición supone un rechazo de
la noción de la(s) identidad(es) como algo fijo e inmutable y a la idea de un
sujeto monolítico y centrado” (Nationality does not have an essence that remits
us to a “true or authentic” origin. Neither is it something natural or inevitable.
National identity—like all identity, be it sexual, racial, ethnic, or class based—is
an imaginary, cultural construction. This proposition supposes the rejection of
the notion of identity/identities as something fixed and unchanging and of the
idea of a monolithic and centered subject; Pabón 2002, 52–53).
In an increasingly international, ever-more interconnected world, Mexico is
even more likely to be understood differently by different spectators. Indeed, if
my Mexico (just outside Philadelphia) is not quite the same as yours (in Paris,
France, or Paris, Arkansas), scholar Juana María Rodríguez notes that neither is
a chilanga’s Mexico the same as a norteño’s:
A Mexican identity as such only makes sense outside a Mexican context. It is

the experience of having to define oneself in opposition to a dominant culture
that forces the creation of an ethnic/national identity that is then readable by the
larger society. “Mexican” is a term that most English speakers understand; Lacan-
don, chilanga, or norteño is not. The myth of harmonious Mexican nationalism
that masks ethnic and social multiplicity and conflict is reconsolidated on the
other side of the border, often as a form of resistance to dominant Anglo-Amer-
ican culture. The constant translation between spaces is never absolute. (Rodrí-
guez 2003, 11)
It is, indeed, perhaps Mexico’s very diversity that led Golden Age filmmakers
to seek to craft a vision of a more inclusive nation and this same diversity that
led new-wave filmmakers to highlight its fragmentation. During its seventy-
year reign, the political party that became known as the PRI turned to cinema
as part of a larger attempt to forge a vision of a unified, mestizo nation following
the Mexican Revolution. The end of the PRI’s tenure in the 1990s and 2000s
brought an increasing awareness of the nation’s diversity: “The opening of the
political playing field coincided with a shift toward multiculturalism and there-
fore a loosening of the decades-long stranglehold that mestizophile ideology
had on Mexican national identity” (Chorba 2007, 11). Populated with a range of
publics and counterpublics, lacandons and chilangas, Mexico’s diversity bubbles
just beneath the surface of the mythical nation of united, like-minded souls
conjured up in Golden Age melodramas: a nation of all of us, all of nosotros. This
same diversity breaks through in new-wave films whose directors dismantle the
myth of Mexico as a community of happy souls who sing and dance their wor-
ries away, insinuating, as I show in the chapters that follow, that we are nosotros
no more, and, indeed, that we never were.
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he could have that. He paid the price out of a well-filled purse.
“I offered to conduct him up to the room, Mr. Carter, but he said it
would not be necessary, because he was familiar with the house, he
having stopped here on various occasions twenty years ago. He left
the room, and that was the last I saw of him until I discovered his
murdered body, when I went up to the attic to call him and opened
the door of the room he occupied.”
“You heard him say he had stopped here on various occasions
twenty years ago?”
“Yes, sir.”
“What is the proprietor’s name?”
“Henry Lancaster.”
“How long has he conducted this place?”
“Ten years.”
“Do you know the name of the man from whom he purchased it?”
“I do not.”
“Has any one been upstairs to the murdered man’s room since you
made the discovery?”
“No one has been near it. Everything is undisturbed. I did not enter.”
“I will speak to the proprietor.”
Carter approached Mr. Lancaster, who was a middle-aged man of
affable manners.
“The bartender informs me that you have conducted this place for
about ten years,” the detective said, as he came up to Mr. Lancaster.
“I have owned it for nearly eleven years,” Mr. Lancaster replied.
“From whom did you purchase it?”
“A man named Peter Wright, who had been the proprietor for nearly
a quarter of a century.”
“Is Mr. Wright alive?”
“He is.”
“Where does he reside?”
“At the Cosmopolitan Hotel, across the street. He is a bachelor, and
entirely alone in the world, all of his relatives having died. He is an
Englishman by birth, and a courtly old gentleman. He has a
moderate income to live on, and he is enjoying himself in his
declining years. All of the merchants of old New York knew him, and
when he conducted the Red Dragon Inn it was famous as a chop
house.
“Mr. Wright’s acquaintance is extensive,” added Lancaster. “If you
see him, he may know something about the murdered man—if the
man spoke the truth when he said that he used to stop here twenty
years ago.
“I shall surely call upon Mr. Wright, and ask him to take a look at the
remains.”
At this moment Carter felt a heavy hand laid upon his shoulder. He
turned around and beheld the captain of the precinct, who had just
arrived.
“I am glad to see you, Mr. Carter,” the officer exclaimed. “You can
help us in this, and as usual I suppose you have gleaned
considerable information?”
“I have found very little,” the detective replied.
“Will you help us?”
“Certainly.”
“My mind is relieved. I hope you’ll take full charge of the case.”
“What about headquarters?”
“I will take care of that. While you have charge, the people at
headquarters will not interfere.”
“Have you sent out an alarm?”
“Yes.”
“Let us go up to the attic room. Request your men to keep every one
downstairs.”
“I will do that.”
The police captain issued his instructions to his men, and then he
and Carter proceeded upstairs to the attic room in which the body of
the victim lay.
The captain stood out in the hall on the threshold, while the detective
entered the room.
Carter stepped up to the side of the bed and scrutinized the face of
the victim closely in silence.
“His throat was cut while he slept,” Nick remarked, looking toward
the captain.
“Do you see any sign of the weapon with which the crime was
committed?” the police official asked.
“Not yet.”
Carter turned around and commenced to inspect the room.
For nearly fifteen minutes he was engaged in the work, without
uttering a word.
The police captain watched him with close attention.
The detective went over the ground with the avidity of a sleuthhound
scenting for a trail.
Every nook and corner of the apartment was inspected, until the
detective stood by the window, the sash of which was raised. He
looked at the sill and then uttered an exclamation.
“What is it?” the police captain asked, entering the room and
stepping up to Carter’s side.
“See,” the detective replied, pointing with his forefinger to stains
upon the window sill and the lower part of the sash. “Here are
imprints of bloody fingers. The murderer, after he committed the
crime, came over to this window and raised the sash. And here are
bloody tracks on the outside. Look; there are imprints of shoes in the
snow across the roof—they lead from here to the edge. The
murderer escaped this way. Wait here.”
“What are you going to do?”
“You’ll see.”
Carter crawled out of the window onto the roof, and followed the
tracks in the snow, until he came to the edge of the roof, where he
halted and looked over.
There, attached to the side of the house, he beheld an iron ladder
leading from the roof down to the yard.
Still he saw nothing of the weapon with which the crime had been
committed.
There was no doubt now in his mind about the assassin having
escaped by the roof. He returned to the room and gave the captain
an accurate but brief account of what he had discovered.
“This leads me to think the murderer possessed some knowledge of
this house,” the police captain remarked, after he had listened to
what the detective had to say.
“Probably,” Carter rejoined, and then for a time he lapsed into deep
thought.
The captain was also silent.
Nick’s eyes wandered around the room and he bit his lips.
Upon his face there was a strained expression.
One could tell that he was following some train of thought.
The pupils of his eyes blazed brilliantly.
Minute after minute passed and still he did not speak.
Patiently his companion waited.
Carter’s eyes rested upon the clothing of the victim, which was lying
on a chair near the bed in a corner of the room.
It was in a confused heap.
The detective stepped forward.
“We have overlooked these!” he exclaimed, pointing to the clothes.
“I was just looking at them,” the police captain remarked. “It seems to
me that they must have been disturbed by the murderer.”
“They were,” Carter rejoined, holding up the dead man’s vest for the
police captain to inspect. “There are bloodstains upon this and the
other garments.”
“Search the pockets.”
For some minutes the detective was engaged in making the search.
When he finished he looked at the captain.
“Nothing,” he said tersely.
“The murderer secured everything,” the police captain rejoined, in a
tone of disappointment, “he has not left a scrap of paper by which
the dead man could be identified.”
“Everything is gone.”
“It is too bad.”
“Yes—but I have made a discovery.”
“What is it?”
“These are prison clothes—they are new.”
“What! Are you sure?”
“I am positive. They were made in Sing Sing Prison.”
“And what is your conclusion?”
“This murdered man was recently released from State’s prison.”
“Perhaps the motive for the crime was revenge.”
“Maybe, and still he may have been murdered because he
possessed information which some one was afraid would be
divulged.”
“That may be it.”
“In one way this discovery is important.”
“And you really think this man was a convict?”
“I do. If he were not a released convict he would not have worn
clothing made expressly for the convicts.”
“He may have purchased them from some one.”
“That is so—but still I think he did not.”
“There is one clew anyway.”
“Yes.”
“Let us go downstairs.”
They left the room.
Carter closed and locked the door.
On the way downstairs the detective inspected the steps, but he
found nothing which would throw any light upon the mystery. There
were no tracks, except those in the snow on the roof. The leading
question in his mind was how the murderer had entered the house.
After he had returned to the barroom he called the bartender aside
and asked:
“Do you remember if any one came in after the old man retired?”
“Yes, I do, now that I come to think of it,” the bartender exclaimed,
with considerable animation. “A tall man entered just as the old man
left the room. He wore a long ulster and a slouch hat.
“This man, sir, stepped up to the bar and called for whisky, which I
served to him. He took a seat at a table near the hall door.
“I was busy supplying the orders to the other customers and I did not
pay any attention to him.
“When I came to close up he was gone.
“When he went out, I do not know; but he may have left while I was
serving drinks at some one of the tables.”
“Would you know the man if you should see him again?” inquired the
detective.
“I cannot tell whether I would or not.”
“Are you able to describe him?”
“I should think he was about forty-five or fifty years old. His face was
covered with a heavy brown beard. His eyes were black, restless
and penetrating. That is all I can remember about him. I didn’t pay
particular attention to him.”
“Who occupied the room next to the one in which the man was
murdered?”
“I did.”
“What time did you retire?”
“It was probably about half past one o’clock. As I was about to enter
my room I noticed that a light was burning in the old man’s room. I
thought at the time that he had not yet retired, but I didn’t hear him
make any noise.”
“You were not awakened during the night?”
“No.”
“Are you a sound sleeper?”
“I am.”
“What time did you get up?”
“About half past eight o’clock.”
Carter went out into the back yard.
There he found footprints in the snow leading from the foot of the
ladder over to a gate in the fence, which opened to an alley running
along between the yards into Hudson Street.
The trail was plain and distinct.
The detective followed it until it ended on Hudson Street.
Then he returned to the yard, where he made a search for the
weapon, thinking the assassin might have thrown it away.
But there was no trace of it to be found.
Carter went back into the barroom.
The coroner had arrived and was preparing to take charge of the
body.
The detective hurried across the street to the Cosmopolitan Hotel
and asked to see Mr. Wright, the former proprietor of the Red
Dragon Inn.
Mr. Wright was a portly old gentleman with a large, florid, jovial face,
and he received the detective instantly. He listened attentively to
what Carter had to say, and he complied with his request to
accompany him over to the inn and view the remains of the victim.
“If that man spoke the truth,” Mr. Wright remarked, as he and the
detective left the hotel, “I may be able to identify the body.”
CHAPTER III.
THE IDENTIFICATION.
Carter conducted Peter Wright upstairs to the attic room in which the
body of the victim lay.
The coroner was making an examination, but he stepped aside, so
as to allow Mr. Wright to see the face of the murdered man.
The former proprietor of the Red Dragon Inn looked at the ghastly
white countenance long and intently.
All of the persons in the room watched him in silence.
Several times the old man shook his head back and forth and his
brow became contracted.
Finally he looked at Carter and shook his head dolefully.
“There is a certain familiar expression about that man’s features,” he
said, in a tone of awe, “but for the life of me I cannot recall who he is.
If he were a patron of the Red Dragon Inn while I was proprietor, he
has changed so that I cannot remember him.”
“I am very sorry that you are not able to identify the body, Mr.
Wright,” the detective said. “Will you kindly accompany me
downstairs. I want to have a private talk with you.”
“Lead on, and I will follow.”
The detective led the way down to the parlor.
As soon as they were inside the room he closed the door. Presently
he and Mr. Wright were ensconced in easy-chairs.
“Permit your memory to wander back ten or twelve years to the time
when you owned this place, and see if you can recall the name of
any one of your patrons who was sent to State’s prison.”
Mr. Wright started.
“By Jove!” he exclaimed.
Carter smiled and his eyes sparkled.
“What startles you?” the detective asked, with an assumed air of
surprise.
“Nothing startles me,” Mr. Wright rejoined.
“Then what is it?”
“That man is Alfred Lawrence—he has changed mightily—it is no
wonder I did not recognize him. But I know him now.”
“Who was Alfred Lawrence?”
“He was one of my old customers. He was sent to Sing Sing for
fifteen years for forgery. Don’t you remember the famous Lawrence
will case?”
“I have a slight recollection of it. The trial took place while I was away
in Europe, and I read very little about it.”
“I will tell you about it.”
“Do so.”
“Alfred Lawrence was a well-to-do produce merchant, who had an
office on West Street and lived on Beach Street.
“His uncle, after whom he was named, was the senior member of the
firm. Old Alfred Lawrence was a bachelor.
“When he died a will was found, and in it he left all his estate to his
nephew.
“Simeon Rich, another nephew, and his sister contested the will.
They claimed that it was a forgery and that Alfred Lawrence had
forged his uncle’s signature.
“The case came up before the surrogate and the fight was a bitter
one on both sides.
“Lawrence’s wife, with whom he had lived unhappily, went before the
referee and swore that she had seen her husband forge the will. Her
testimony was corroborated by Blanchard, the chief witness, who
was Lawrence’s butler.
“It was hinted at, at the time, that Mrs. Lawrence and Simeon Rich
were very intimate.
“The will was broken. Lawrence was arrested, tried, convicted, and
sent to State’s prison.
“Then people forgot all about him.”
“What became of Mrs. Lawrence?” asked Carter.
“She lived for a time in the Beach Street house. A year after her
husband’s conviction the house was closed up and Mrs. Lawrence
and her child disappeared. The house has remained closed ever
since.”
“Then there was a child?”
“Yes—a girl—she was about twelve years old at the time.”
“What became of Simeon Rich?”
“I do not know.”
“How was the estate divided?”
“That I do not remember.”
“Lawrence, you say, was a customer of yours?”
“He was, and he was a mighty fine fellow. I always believed he was
innocent, notwithstanding the fact that all the evidence was strong
against him.”
“And you believe that the murdered man is this same Alfred
Lawrence?”
“I do.”
“Is this all the information you can give me, Mr. Wright?”
“It is.”
“What was the number of the old house on Beach Street in which
Lawrence resided?”
“I don’t remember, but you can find it easily. It is near Varick Street,
and it is the only house on the block that is closed.”
“Ah!”
“Some one is at the door,” said Peter Wright.
Carter arose from his chair and opened the door.
The police captain entered the room, followed by a policeman.
“Mr. Carter,” he said, “here is one of my men, Officer Pat Maguire; he
saw the murdered man last night.”
“Did he?” Carter queried, casting a searching glance at Maguire,
who replied:
“That I did, sir.”
“Sit down and tell me all about it.”
Pat Maguire took a seat.
“This morning,” he said, “I reported at the station house and I heard
about the murder. The instant I heard a description of the man read I
concluded it was the poor, forlorn, down-and-out old chap with whom
I had talked last night while on my beat.
“I came around here, took a look at the body, and I saw that it was
the old man. Then I instantly told the captain about the conversation
I had with him, and he brought me here to see you.”
“Tell me about that conversation, Maguire.”
Policeman Maguire gave Carter a clear account of the conversation
which he had held with the old man and described how he had
acted.
When he concluded, Mr. Wright ejaculated:
“You see, Mr. Carter, that corroborates what I told you. There are no
reasonable doubts now about the man being Alfred Lawrence.”
“Why did he try to enter that house on Beach Street?”
“I cannot tell.”
“There is a deep mystery here,” remarked Carter, “one which I intend
to solve. Gentlemen, I must leave you. Please keep silent about
what you have told me.”
Before any one could utter a word, he had slipped out of the room.
“A strange man,” the police captain remarked, as soon as Carter was
gone. “Why has he left the room without giving any intimation of what
he was going to do?”
The information which had been imparted to Carter by Mr. Wright
and the policeman was important. He was certain now that the
murdered man was the ex-convict, Alfred Lawrence.
It was his intention to probe into that man’s history and learn more of
the details of the will case and the trial.
In doing this, would he be able to discover the motive of the murder?
After leaving the Red Dragon Inn the detective at once—without
waiting to go home—went to a near-by telephone exchange and
called up the keeper of Sing Sing Prison.
From this man he learned that Lawrence had been released early
the day before, that he had been furnished with clothing and a small
sum of money, and that he started for New York.
“What train did he leave on?” Carter asked of the keeper.
“The eleven-ten,” the keeper replied.
“Was he an exemplary prisoner?”
“Yes.”
“Did he have any visitors call on him?”
“None.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
“During his imprisonment, did he receive many letters?”
“None.”
“Did he ever talk to you about himself?”
“No, he was always a taciturn man and he never talked to me or to
others about himself. When he left here yesterday he said that he
intended to be revenged on the persons who had wronged him, for,
he said, he had suffered for a crime of which he was not guilty.”
“Did he mention any names?”
“No.”
“How much money did you give him?”
“Ten dollars.”
From the telephone office the detective went in his automobile to the
old house on Beach Street. He stood on the sidewalk and inspected
it. There was no sign on the house to indicate that the formerly
handsome residence was for rent or for sale. All the windows were
boarded up tight.
A man, who lived next door, noticed Carter, and coming up to his
side, coughed nervously, to attract his attention.
“Are you thinking of buying or renting this place?”
“Is it for sale?” the detective asked, without answering the man’s
question.
“I do not know. I thought from the manner in which you were looking
at it that you thought about renting or buying it. No sign has ever
been up on the house.”
“How long have you lived in this neighborhood?”
“About twenty years.”
“Then you are pretty well acquainted with it?”
“That I am.”
“How long has this house been uninhabited?”
“About ten years, I think.”
“Were you acquainted with the last tenant?”
“I was. Alfred Lawrence and his family lived there. Lawrence was
sent to State’s prison on a charge of forgery. His wife and child
moved away, and from that day to this I never heard what became of
them.”
“Have you ever seen any one visit the house?”
“No one has ever come here.”
“Was the furniture taken away?”
“Yes.”
“Then the house is evidently empty?”
“It is.”
“Were you acquainted with Lawrence enough to know anything
about his affairs?”
“I was not.”
“All I know is what I read in the newspapers at the time.”
“Was he a man of considerable means?”
“I always thought so.”
“Did you know Simeon Rich?”
“No.”
Not being able to secure any further information from the man, the
detective walked away.
Many thoughts crowded his mind and he asked himself innumerable
questions in regard to the case.
The prison keeper had told him over the telephone that Lawrence
had only ten dollars in his possession when he left Sing Sing, and
the bartender at the Red Dragon Inn had informed him that the man
who had been murdered had displayed a large sum of money when
he paid for the night’s lodging.
“From whom had Lawrence received money?” the detective asked
himself as he pondered over this. “He must have got money from
some one.”
That was clear.
But the bartender might have been mistaken.
Nick told Danny to drive to a restaurant, where he procured an
excellent breakfast; then he directed the chauffeur to make a dash
up to the Grand Central Station, where he hoped to find some one
who had seen Lawrence leave the train and had noted the direction
in which he went.
What had Lawrence done from the time he left the depot until Pat
Maguire saw him standing in front of St. John’s Church looking into
the churchyard?
Would the detective be able to follow his footsteps?
Many would have looked upon such a task as Carter had set out to
perform as hopeless.
The railroad detective who was stationed at the depot was unable to
furnish Nick with any information.
Carter made inquiries of the porters and others, but none of them
remembered seeing any man who answered to Lawrence’s
description.
Finally, he left the depot and went outside to the cab stand.
Here he commenced to question the drivers.
At last he found a man who, in reply to his question, said:
“I drove the old chap downtown in my cab.”
“Do you think you would be able to identify him if you should see him
again?” Carter asked.
“I do,” the cabman answered.
“Will you come with me?”
“What for?”
“I want you to take a look at a man and see if he is the same person
whom you drove downtown.”
“I can’t leave my cab.”
“Drive me down to the Cosmopolitan Hotel.”
“I’ll do that.”
Nick sent Danny home, got into the cab, and was driven away.
He had his reasons for not telling the cabman anything about the
case.
Before he questioned him further he wanted to see if the murdered
man was the same person whom the man had had for a fare the
previous day.
The cab stopped in front of the Cosmopolitan Hotel and the detective
alighted. He and the driver crossed the street and entered the Red
Dragon Inn.
To the chamber of death the detective conducted his surprised
companion.
When they entered the room Carter pointed to the corpse and asked:
“Is that the man?”
“Dead!” the cabman ejaculated, as he started back, after having
glanced at the face of the murdered man. “Yes, sir, it is the man, all
right. He has been murdered!”
“Yes.”
“Did you fetch me down here to place me under arrest?”
“No.”
“I know nothing about this.”
“Come with me.”
“I’ll go with you, but I swear——”
“There, there, my man, don’t get excited. You will not be arrested—
rest easy on that score.”
“But——”
“Wait until we get outside, and then I will tell you what I want you to
do.”
They returned to the cab and stood on the sidewalk near it.
Carter was silent for a short time.
Suddenly he looked up into the pale face of the cabman and asked:
“Where did you drive him?”
“You mean——” the man stammered. The question had been asked
so suddenly that he was slightly confused.
“I mean the man whose body lies over there in the Red Dragon Inn.”
“I drove him down to the Manhattan Safe Deposit Company. He got
out of the cab, told me to wait for him, and then he went into the
building, where he remained for nearly half an hour. When he came
out he paid and dismissed me.”
“When he paid you did he display any large amount of money?”
“He had quite a large-sized roll of bills in his hand.”
“Did you drive away immediately after you received the money for
your services?”
“I did.”
“And you did not notice in which direction the old man went?”
“He went back into the building.”
CHAPTER IV.
A PECULIAR INTERVIEW.
Carter lapsed into silence after the cabman had answered his last
question.
It was clear to him now that Lawrence had secured money at the
Manhattan Safe Deposit Company.
Did he get the money out of a box, which he owned, or from some
one connected with the company?
The detective proposed to find out. He happened to be acquainted
with the cashier of the safe deposit company, so he ordered the
cabman to drive him to the gentleman’s house.
Fortunately, Carter found the cashier at home, and he was received
by him in his library.
“Were you acquainted with an Alfred Lawrence?” the detective
inquired of the cashier as soon as he was seated.
The gentleman started in surprise, and asked:
“Why do you ask that question?”
“I want information,” Carter replied, with a smile. He paused for a
moment, and then he continued: “I can see from the manner in which
you started that you knew Alfred Lawrence.”
“Yes, I did know Alfred Lawrence, and I always regarded him as an
honest man. In spite of the fact that he was tried and found guilty of
forgery, I have always believed he was innocent. But why do you
come here asking about Lawrence?”
“Lawrence was murdered at the Red Dragon Inn early this morning.”
“No! It can’t be true!”
The gentleman bounded out of his chair and, standing in the center
of the room, gazed at Carter with an expression of astonishment
upon his face.
“It is true, nevertheless,” the detective replied.
“I saw him yesterday. He had just been released from Sing Sing
Prison.”
“Please be seated and try to be calm. I want you to recall to your
mind all that occurred yesterday between you and Lawrence. It is
important that you should remember everything.”
“I will try and do as you request.”
The gentleman resumed his seat, and for some time he bowed his
head, resting it upon his hand.
The detective remained quiet.
Patiently he waited for the cashier of the safe deposit company to
speak. He desired to let him have plenty of time in which to recall to
his mind all that had happened between him and the murdered man
on the previous day.
Finally the gentleman raised his head and gazed intently into
Carter’s face.
“This is a great shock to me,” he remarked, as he passed his hand
over his forehead. “Lawrence came into my office about two o’clock.
“At first I did not recognize him on account of the great change that
had been wrought in him.
“When I learned who he was I was glad to see him.
“He sat down and told me about his prison experience.
“In years gone by we had been friends.
“When he was tried I did what I could to help him.
“The evidence was too strong against him, and he was convicted.
“When he was sent to prison he left in my care some securities to
dispose of. I sold them and placed the money on deposit with the

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Mexican Melodrama Film and Nation

from the Golden Age to the New Wave

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The New Mexican Cookbook: Authentic and Easy Mexican

© 2016 The Arizona Board of Regents

Printed in the United States of America

ISBN-13: 978-0-8165-3251-3 (cloth)

Cover designed by Carrie House, HOUSEdesign llc

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

1 Melodrama and Mexico 7

3 The Ties That Bind 62

5 Seeing Stars 108

6 Re-sounding Melos 137

Figure 1. A “tamed” Beatriz follows her general during the Mexican

Figure 10. Actress Sara García as the teary-eyed madre mexicana

editorial expertise and unwavering support. Students in my courses on Mexican

to construct a coherent identity for a war-torn nation through a tale of Revo-

as Emilio Fernández, Fernando de Fuentes, Alejandro Galindo, and Alberto

[melodramatic comedy set in the countryside, melodrama of the pueblo, social/

endeavored to foster the formation of a community united through feeling: a

Melodrama’s Golden Age (1930–1958)

Considered as “metagenre” or as “mode,” melodramas marked by highly dramatic

En el cine de barrio se adquieren destrezas básicas, que ayudan a orientarse en la

Fostering the formation of an empathetically imagined community for the

excedente de contenido y de emotividad, donde radica la potencialidad de la

Crisis and Resurgence (1959–1990)

The New-Wave Nation (1991–2005)

(responsible, respectively, for U.S. distribution and film production) were

mexicanos, quienes consideran atractivo el sector cinematográfico. . . . Una

in luxury. While Golden Age theaters certainly concretized class divisions

Cinemas remain important in Mexico, which has “the greatest number of

at times reveal a subversive ability to destabilize the static subjectivity on which

A Mexican identity as such only makes sense outside a Mexican context. It is

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