Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem (TOME)
Browse
DOCUMENT
Blizzard 9781438488059.pdf (7.57 MB)
DOCUMENT
Blizzard 9781438488059.epub (8.86 MB)
1/0
2 files

The White Indians of Mexican Cinema: Racial Masquerade throughout the Golden Age

book
posted on 2022-08-01, 18:14 authored by Mónica Blizzard

The White Indians of Mexican Cinema theorizes the development of a unique form of racial masquerade—the representation of Whiteness as Indigeneity—during the Golden Age of Mexican cinema, from the 1930s to the 1950s. Adopting a broad decolonial perspective while remaining grounded in the history of local racial categories, Mónica García Blizzard argues that this trope works to reconcile two divergent discourses about race in postrevolutionary Mexico: the government-sponsored celebration of Indigeneity and mestizaje (or the process of interracial and intercultural mixing), on the one hand, and the idealization of Whiteness, on the other. Close readings of twenty films and primary source material illustrate how Mexican cinema has mediated race, especially in relation to gender, in ways that project national specificity, but also reproduce racist tendencies with respect to beauty, desire, and protagonism that survive to this day. This sweeping survey illuminates how Golden Age films produced diverse, even contradictory messages about the place of Indigeneity in the national culture.

Funding

Emory University as part of the TOME initiative

Andrew W Mellon Foundation

History

Publication date

2022

ISBN (Open Access)

9781438488059

ISBN (Print - Cloth)

9781438488035

ISBN (Print - Paper)

9781438488042

Imprint Name

SUNY series in Latin American Cinema

Publisher Name

SUNY Press