Opening the Cabaret America Allegory: Hemispheric Politics, Performance, and Utopia in Flying Down to Rio

This essay examines the Carioca song-and-dance scene that lies at the narrative center of the 1933 film Flying Down to Rio in light of current theories of identity performance and performativity. Produced by RKO at a time when the studio became the meeting point of U.S. political and industrial interests, Flying represents a seminal moment in the cinematic representation of intercultural relations in the Americas. Its use of music and dance to articulate an inter-American utopia based on spectacle and entertainment ushered in the depiction of Latin American identity as an always evolving performance. Flying established a template for the representation of hemispheric relations that has been followed by numerous films produced not only in Hollywood but also in Latin America. From its position at the onset of the Good Neighbor policy, the scene becomes a historic record of the pivotal role that the construction of Latino and Latin American identities occupies in the articulation of racialist discourses in the United States.