Mexico on Main Street: Transnational Film Culture in Los Angeles Before World War II by Colin Gunckel (review)

Just over a decade ago, Main Street remained part of Los Angeles’ notorious Skid Row, stigmatized as an epicenter that houses one the United States’ largest homeless populations and ostensibly features an abundance of drug activity, violent crime, and all forms of dangerous, illicit behavior. Today, however, tourists walking through Main Street will find themselves overwhelmed by an overflow of traffic, high-rise apartment and business buildings, and seemingly perennial construction sites aimed at redeveloping and modernizing Main Street’s architecture. Of the manifold historical Mexican movie theaters that once pervaded Main Street, only the Regent remains. As Colin Gunckel says of Main Street’s Mexican cinematic past, “its historical significance has been largely forgotten. . . . almost entirely exiled from civic memory” (190). Yet while current revitalization movements have effaced Mexican cinematic heritage from Main Street, Mexico on Main Street endeavors to end its exile.

Mexico on Main Street richly reveals Main Street as a location pervaded by a history of contestations over American and Mexican identity, Americanization, racism, and transnational film culture. Featuring an introduction, five chapters, and a conclusion and covering 1900 to the early 1940s, the book illuminates, specifically in Chapter 1 (which situates itself in the pre-1920s), how stereotypical film representations of Mexicans—as bandidos or “greasers,” for example—assisted in engendering “Main Street” as a Mexican site associated with unkemptness, vice, and crime, which, paradoxically, problematized yet also enabled, aspirations to establish Los Angeles as a white space of progressive American identity and Hollywood film as a decorous industry. Yet, as Mexico on Main Street argues, the Mexican community refused to passively succumb to this cinematic othering. In pursuing this contention, Gunckel grounds his analysis in both Los Angeles and native Mexicans’ participation in film culture to prove that these two populations actively opposed Hollywood’s discriminatory portrayals and, instead, formulated an alternative identity rooted in Mexican nationalism. (Throughout this review, unless I specifically designate subjects as “Los Angeles Mexican” or “native Mexican,” I follow Gunckel’s terminology in which he uses the term, “Mexican,” to refer to both Mexican Americans living in Los Angeles and Mexican citizens as a way of emphasizing the transnational dialog materializing on both sides of the Mexican-U.S. border.)

In studying this filmic counterculture, while also examining the limitations Mexican people faced in producing their own subversive cinema, Mexico on Main Street wisely migrates beyond sole analyses of film narratives to focus on alternate mediums of cultural production, primarily Mexican newspapers, theater, serial novels, and trade journals. Rigorously invested in circumventing geopolitical borders, the book’s commitment to transnationalism leads Gunckel to take as its thematic starting point “transnational Mexicanidad,” which depended on the ability to speak to both an internal and external audience. As the book argues, the movement, externally, sought to contest Mexican stereotypes permeating Hollywood cinema, while, internally, imbuing Los Angeles Mexicans with a sense of native Mexican nationalism aimed at resisting Americanization.

Despite Mexico on Main Street’s venture to recover Main Street’s Mexican film culture, the book notably refuses to romanticize transnational Mexican resistance and identity formations. In probing how Hollywood representations othered the Mexican working class of Main Street to manufacture Los Angeles as an idealized city of white American progressivism, Gunckel also attends to the ways in which Mexican cultural critics and transnational Mexicanidad subscribed to similar othering practices, which attempted to reconfigure unflattering conceptions of Main Street through framing the location as a middle and high class “bastion of respectable Mexican culture and commerce” entirely devoid of the Mexican immigrant working class (36). Ironically, altering Main Street’s affiliations with Mexican working class “poverty, disease, and nonwhiteness” meant that “Mexican journalists and other educated elites in some respects also disavowed the class they ostensibly sought to protect” (36). Chapter 2 further teases out these Mexican class dynamics by analyzing 1920s Mexican theater. According...