In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • La India María: Mexploitation and the Films of María Elena Velasco by Seraina Rohrer
  • Nilo Couret
Rohrer, Seraina. La India María: Mexploitation and the Films of María Elena Velasco. U of Texas P, 2017. 232 pp.

Seraina Rohrer's La India María: Mexploitation and the Films of María Elena Velasco is the first English-language monograph on one of the most beloved comedians of Mexico. Velasco's India María character starred in sixteen films, as well as numerous TV shows and theater sketches, mostly between the late 1960s and the late 1980s. Rohrer charts the rise of Velasco from vaudeville performer to comedic icon, a career trajectory that found Velasco exercising increasing control over her persona, founding a production company with her children, and later directing five of her own films. Velasco was a triple threat—star, producer, and director—and Rohrer makes a case for Velasco as a neglected woman pioneer in Mexican film history. In addition, Rohrer argues against film histories that characterize this period as "la crisis," instead situating Velasco's filmography in the context of a resourceful Mexploitation film industry that produced a thousand films for both domestic and foreign audiences. Rohrer polemicizes the marginalization of these films: "film critics viewed these mass-market films as devoid of artistic value, judged them to be [End Page 312] merely commercial, and accused them of recycling stories that had proven to be successful at the box office" (4). The film historical interventions of the project are the book's strength, but Rohrer's project of recovery also discusses the narratives of Velasco's films in relation to Mexploitation tropes and genres in order to identify the different symbolic functions of her India María character.

After her synoptic chapter on Velasco's career, Rohrer provides an accessible and comprehensive survey of recent scholarship on Mexploitation, a recently-coined term for popular cinema primarily produced during the 1970s and 1980s. In this way, La India María is heavily indebted to the pioneering anthologies on Latspoitation by Dolores Tierney and Victoria Ruétalo and Latin American horror film by Rosana Díaz-Zambrana and Patricia Tomé, as well as case studies by Andrew Syder, Hugo Benavides, Misha MacLaird, and Norma Iglesias. Her engagement with Mexploitation highlights the book's strengths and weaknesses: the book shines as cultural history when reconstructing production and exhibition practices but struggles as cultural criticism when discussing narrative, representation, and the politics of exploitation cinemas. Most film histories depict the postwar period as a fallow period between the Golden Age and the late 1980s. Rohrer counters by tracing the changes to the studio system after the Golden Age in parallel with the different presidential regimes in the postwar period in order to demonstrate how certain policies and regulations shaped the production and distribution of Mexploitation.

Rohrer's discussion of Mexploitation film narratives begins with a descriptive categorization based on semantic elements: wrestling films, sexy films, border films, and comedies with a hero at the margins of society (32). The India María films belong to the last category as family-friendly comedies or comedias blancas that rely on cultural stereotypes and the clash of the rural and the urban (16). Rohrer catalogs the main themes in Velasco's films: "(1) an adventurous migration; (2) religion; and (3) society's power structures" (17). Her analysis raises concerns when she describes the narrative structure with reference to Joseph Campbell and his universal pattern of the hero's journey, failing to note, for instance, the ways the country-to-city trajectory was a historically specific trope (Raymond Williams) or was used as a way of training spectatorship (Miriam Hansen). Similarly, Rohrer draws on Tom Gunning's cinema of attractions to argue, "India María films do not conform to a classical style but diverge from it toward Gunning's cinema of attractions" (16). Although Gunning's concept has much explanatory power, it cannot help but be read as dated and ill-suited when applied to the India María films. Comedy always presented a challenge to the opposition between spectacle and narrative in Gunning's framework, an issue Gunning...

pdf

Share