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

In White Gypsies: Race and Stardom in Spanish Musicals, Eva Woods Peiró examines the intersection of race, modernity, and popular film genres. The book traces the development of what Peiró terms a “racialized vision” of otherness and its most salient manifestation in filmic representations of Gypsies, particularly in the Spanish musicals of the first half of the twentieth century. One of the main goals of the study, as stated by its author, is to “[lay] bare the inscription of race into film,” and thus show that “the story of self and racialized other is a key structural component of Spanish mass entertainment” (xi). Although the unveiling of the ideological underpinnings of mass culture is not novel, Woods Peiró asserts that her “focus on the intersection of race and modernity [in Spanish musical comedies] … runs counter to most academic, critical, and virtually all mainstream views of the genre” (xi). She substantiates this claim by showing, first, that through on-screen and off-screen stardom narratives these films fully participated in the project of Western capitalist modernity. This interpretation diverges from common views of Andalusian musical comedies as reactionary or, at best, nostalgic gestures towards a pre-modern, anti-cosmopolitan Spain. Second, and most importantly, Woods Peiró argues that these films served as vehicles for negotiating the relationship between race and identity, thus allaying anxieties over racial alterity, and projecting and promoting a homogeneous national identity through narratives of assimilation and the portrayal of Gypsies by white actresses.

White Gypsies’s declared focus is the problematic construction of the screen Gypsy as a “whitewashing [of] the historical violence toward Roma in Spain” (x). In the preface, for example, Woods Peiró asserts, “the critical significance” of the film corpus analyzed in the book “lies in the historical terrorization of the Roma” (xi). However, the project is best described as a detailed examination of the role of mass entertainment in shaping Spanish national identity, and the crucial place of race in this construction. From this perspective, the author convincingly shows how film has served as a venue to articulate problematic responses to questions about the place of the racialized other in Spanish society (1).

The introduction, “Modernity, Race, and Visibility,” emphasizes the notions of race and identity that were prevalent in Franco’s Spain. The author argues that the Spanish musical comedies of the 1940’s and 50’s responded to the need to take a stand on internal racial differences as a condition to full participation in Western modernity, understood as collusion with American capitalist imperialism. Correcting the erroneous view of Francoist Spain as “situated in a premodernity” (15), Woods Peiró claims that “Francoism was … a neoimperial phase that drew upon rhetoric from the Crusades and fifteenth-century notions of ethnoreligiosity, while it careened forward with a mix of quasi-Fascist will to power, the Catholic church integration of capitalism, and hispanidad (Spanishness), all of them ultimately amenable to US capitalist imperialism” (13). The remaining chapters, however, do not fully support this focus on Franco’s Spain, since only two of them deal directly with films produced during this period.

Chapter 1, “Time, Racial Otherness, and Digressions in Silent Films of the 1920’s,” examines silent film’s manipulation of time and narrative digressions to convey deep-seated concerns about racial difference and national identity in the 1920’s. Although the chapter itself is filled with digressions and a barrage of varied information, it is nevertheless an informative reading for those interested in Spanish silent films. In chapter 2, “Female Spectacle in the Display Case of the Roaring Twenties,” Woods Peiró looks at the different models of womanhood, shaped by musical theater and cinematic discourse, prevalent in the 1920’s. More relevant to the study’s focus is the discussion on the rise of the folklórica as a well-defined figure where race and consumerism intersected in narratives of stardom and plots of assimilation. These white...