White Gypsies: Race and Stardom in Spanish Musicals by Eva Woods Peiró

White Gypsies is an overview of the history of Spanish folkloric musicals in the 20th century, providing a theoretical framework for themes such as race, sexuality, and modernity and its complex dialogue within the musical movie industry of that time. As the author herself acknowledges, her approach “runs counter to most academic, critical, and virtually all mainstream views of the genre” (x), as well as the memories of those who experienced those features as viewers of that time (xi). The book provides a discussion on Spanish understanding of ethnicity and difference based on the historical ostracism imposed on racial minorities—gitanos, mulatos, negros, moros (xi)—in that region. The title of the work is a reference to La Gitana Blanca (1919) as performed by Raquel Meller, which was originally named Los arlequines de seda y oro and renamed for marketing purposes. An understanding of the origin of Spanish musicals reveals the impressions, anxieties, and judgments permeating Spanish society when those filmic productions were done. The author connects the way racial difference is used to the philosophical concerns about race that worried Spanish society, including issues such as the purismo, casticismo, and the discourses that have influenced the creation of that nation-state.

Wood’s research concentrates on the presence of Roma people on the musicals as a minority group that is inside but not completely accepted within that society, basically emphasizing their non-Modern stereotype, making a point of using the term “Gypsy” as to refer to the “Screen Gypsy,” or the representation of the Roma people on the screen. The author analyzes otherness in the filmic discourse from the period ranging from 1920 to 1978. Woods also identifies the romanticism attached to the image of the “Screen Gypsy” as an outsider/insider, and how that image is also used in film as a broadcaster of Spanish modernity through movie stars that represented both backwardness and tradition, creating musicals containing folkloric representations that appeared both familiar and cosmopolitan. The cinematic industry attempted through its movies to represent Spain as closer to Europe in modernity, at the same time that establishing its difference with the other within its own continent, and Africa (31). Film studies allow us to understand anxieties of modernity as projected in early twentieth century film, and in the specific case of Spanish cinema, how it creates its own hybrid version, bringing in the tensions of the españoladas, or the melodramatic romance, and documentary footage that allow for a familiar context of a capitalist, Castilian present. Overall, those racialized visions analyzed by the author disclose how modernity was allowed in different configurations and representations of those cultural groups as partially inside and outside of Spanish society.

As for the organization of the book, chapters 1-3 include the background of the folkloric musical film of the 1920s. The first chapter provides a brief introduction to film theory and cinematic practice, which she contextualizes back to its origins in silent film. Chapter 2, on the trope of orientalized female stars, introduces the discourses of sexuality and their representations in film and the creation of womanhood (the modern Spanish woman), and how racial figures will tension those portrayals. Chapter 3 overviews other themes and construction of race beyond the Gypsy representation, “the most dangerous features of silent film—masculinity, jazz, and blackface—which were later diluted and made more digestible, feminized, and Andalusian” (28), focusing on El negro que tenía el alma blanca (1926). Chapters 4-5 comprise the second part of the Civil War and Francoist years, from 1936-1954, and the folkloric musical films that became popular in that period, including aspects of Otherness through Arab and Gypsy characters. Chapter 6 finalizes with the issue of Queer critique, and how the tradition of the folklórica and cuplé would be recycled by the performers in the period of the transition after 1978, tracing the origin of gender questioning back to the musical and folkloric films of the 1920s to the 1950s, to subsequently...