AbstractThis essay examines the discourse around Mexican masculinity in the 1920s by looking at the figures of the repatriated migrant and the urban dandy of the period, the fifí. Using evidence from print culture, popular literature, and other sources, it explains how these masculine figures provoked anxieties about sexuality, work, and public space, as well as concerns about how to integrate American mass culture into revolutionary Mexican society. Though many observers saw repatriated migrants and fifís as potentially destructive to Mexico's body politic, others crafted cultural narratives that described how to integrate men's encounters with American culture into modern Mexican masculinity.
This research note introduces material in the Josefa L. Serna Papers held at the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center Library. By examining three objects from the collection, the author suggests that object-centered history can illuminate the interior, that is, the emotional and not just social lives of working class Mexican immigrant subjects.
This short essay sketches the career of Anita Uada Maris Boggs, cofounder of the Bureau of Commercial Education, a charitable organization that from the 1910s through the 1930s circulated a library of sponsored films. I argue that Boggs's absence from film historiography has been doubly determined: first by the relative invisibility of educational film, and second by ideologies of gender that obscured women's work in the film industry, broadly construed, behind that of their male collaborators.
The compilation film La venganza de Pancho Villa (ca. 1930), created by itinerant exhibitor Félix Padilla, combines footage from two national cinematic traditions— those of the United States and Mexico—to construct a biographical film about the regional hero and revolutionary general Francisco "Pancho" Villa. The film's use of found footage offers a retort to American films rife with stereotypical images of Mexican masculinity. However, a close reading of the film in the context of local practices of film distribution and exhibition finds that the film expresses an oppositional consciousness shaped by the structures and ideologies of the dominant film industries it draws from, including a masculinist nationalism that reinscribes racial and gender hierarchies.
Published in cooperation with the William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies, Southern Methodist University. In Land of Necessity, historians and anthropologists unravel the interplay of the national and transnational and of scarcity and abundance in the region split by the 1,969-mile boundary line dividing Mexico and the United States. This richly illustrated volume, with more than 100 images including maps, photographs, and advertisements, explores the convergence of broad demographic, economic, political, cultural, and transnational developments resulting in various forms of consumer culture in the borderlands. Though its importance is uncontestable, the role of necessity in consumer culture has rarely been explored. Indeed, it has been argued that where necessity reigns, consumer culture is anemic. This volume demonstrates otherwise. In doing so, it sheds new light on the history of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, while also opening up similar terrain for scholarly inquiry into consumer culture. The volume opens with two chapters that detail the historical trajectories of consumer culture and the borderlands. In the subsequent chapters, contributors take up subjects including smuggling, tourist districts and resorts, purchasing power, and living standards. Others address home décor, housing, urban development, and commercial real estate, while still others consider the circulation of cinematic images, contraband, used cars, and clothing. Several contributors discuss the movement of people across borders, within cities, and in retail spaces. In the two afterwords, scholars reflect on the U.S.-Mexico borderlands as a particular site of trade in labor, land, leisure, and commodities, while also musing about consumer culture as a place of complex political and economic negotiations. Through its focus on the borderlands, this volume provides valuable insight into the historical and contemporary aspects of the big "isms" shaping modern life: capitalism, nationalism, transnationalism, globalism, and, without a doubt, consumerism. Contributors. Josef Barton, Peter S. Cahn, Howard Campbell, Lawrence Culver, Amy S. Greenberg, Josiah McC. Heyman, Sarah Hill, Alexis McCrossen, Robert Perez, Laura Isabel Serna, Rachel St. John, Mauricio Tenorio-Trillo, Evan R. Ward
