Dance and the Hollywood Latina: Race, Sex, and Stardom

Notes

145 chapter 1 — mobilizing the latina myth 1. As I later explain, the distinction “Spanish” is wholly entangled in the myth of the Hollywood Latina, despite key distinctions between Spain–Spanish and Latin America or the United States–Latina. 2. In 2005, the U.S. Postal Service unveiled its Hispanic heritage commemorative stamp series titled “Let’s Dance/Bailemos!” All four featured illustrations of dancing couples, with the dancing Latina prominently featured in three of the four designs. 3. Like the white/black racial binary, representations of gender (and heterosexuality ) work according to dominant power structures by supporting and reifying one another. 4. Judith Ortiz Cofer (2007) briefly began to explore this myth in her short, personal essay “The Myth of the Latin Woman.” The article was originally published in 1992. 5. Cinema studies’ emphasis on representation has enabled me to rethink identity politics and the term “Latina,” an identification I use to unify the women and goals of this project. 6. While Rick Altman provides this coupling dynamic to better frame the musical, Adrienne McLean develops this point by highlighting how musicals have largely been validated through male-centered analyses around authorship—either in terms of the performer (Astaire, Kelly, etc.) or auteur (Minnelli, Freed Unit, etc.) (Altman 1987; McLean 2004). 7. This hierarchization functions like the colonial model of race and gender, as outlined by Maria Lugones (2007). 8. These claims of in-betweenness and racial mobility are not meant to prioritize one racial representation or identity over another. Rather, I aim to nuance the representational hierarchy that continues to favor poles rather than spectra in a continued hegemonic effort to recenter whiteness. I use these terms to further theorize the phenomenon through which black is read differently from brown, brown differently from white, and everything else—yellow, red, interracial—is diffuse or further marginalized beyond an “American” or Hollywood body. My goal is to further this discussion of look and performance across various racialized and sexualized representations on screen. 9. Duna was chosen to test whether dark hair and an “olive complexion” would photograph “attractively” in Technicolor (Berry 2000; Higgins 2000, 361). 10. Although Lucy and Ricky Ricardo (Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz) are seemingly the exception that proves the rule, Arnaz’s Cuban identity is often affiliated with Caucasianness (Sandoval-Sánchez 1999, 55). Notes 11. As Frances Negrón-Muntaner notes, “The interracial exchange [of West Side Story] becomes a safe spectacle for white audiences. . . . The fact that the two principal ‘Puerto Rican’ characters are ‘white’ actors makes West Side Story a drag ball of sorts, where white (male) America can inhabit the dark and dangerous skins of Puerto Ricans and desire Natalie Wood safely (protected by her whiteness) while indulging in Rita Moreno from Bernardo’s masquerade [as a “Euro-American” or Greek actor playing Puerto Rican]” (Negrón-Muntaner 2000, 92). Examples like these reinforce Judith Butler’s assertion that bodies that matter are discursively constructed and reified by hierarchies of race and gender (Butler 1993, 10). 12. On-screen depictions of interracial romance have been a component of Hollywood since the silent era, but it was expected that the coupling would not suggest procreation (Courtney 2005; Hershfield 1998). 13. While James Mandrell’s use of the phrase “between and betwixt” and Alicia Arrizón’s work on Latina performance have greatly contributed to my understanding of in-betweenness, I have found the work of Asian American scholars like Gary J. Okihiro and Celine Parreñas Shimizu to be particularly insightful on the racial ambiguity of bodies that are not quite white, not quite black, in terms of social and racial/identity formation as well as performance (Arrizón 1999; Gúzman and Valdivia 2004; Mandrell 2001; Okihiro 1994; Shimizu 2007). 14. I thank Sangita Gopal for her insight on this point. I am also indebted to scholars such as Melissa Blanco Borelli and Cindy García, whose work at the intersection of Latina representation and dance studies illustrates the complexity and intimacy of the brown female body’s dance mobility, racialized identity, and agency (Blanco Borelli 2008; García 2008). 15. Pioneer Pictures was cofounded by a Technicolor stockholder, millionaire John Hay (Jack) Whitney; La Cucaracha was its first live action film, a test of the production process as a “prototype” Technicolor film (Higgins 2000, 360–361). 16. The actual airdates for “Mural” are unknown, but the commercial was available on the Jell-O Channel Web page...