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

Preface HowITooCametoLovePedroInfante    Inside el Colón you can watch el mero mero, el merito, nuestro querido, Pedro Infante, the world’s most handsome man love the world’s most beautiful women. . . . He is the man whose child we want to bear. He is the man we wish we could be. Ay, Pedro, most fortunate and unfortunate of men. Dead at age forty. Papi, we miss you still. denise chávez, loving pedro infante I still remember the shock and delight I experienced when I innocently came across a book with the nude photograph of Pedro Infante taking a shower. I was floored! My mind was reeling! I could not believe my eyes! There he was en cueros, the Mexican lover of the century, dubbed by his fans and Mexican media as el ídolo nacional, all soaped up and caught by surprise in a candid private moment, displaying his athletic and muscular body and his family jewels. Seeing Infante nude was like seeing Jesus Christ without a loincloth! It broke Mexican culture’s rigid taboos that strictly limit the visual representation of male nudity. After regaining my composure, all I could think of was, Where could I see more? If before I discovered this image I had resisted Infante’s playfulness and charm, due to how much I linked him with heterosexism and male heterosexual privilege, my interest was now perked. The photo was the initiation to a journey of discovery, a mission to explore the archives of classic Mexican cinema, not only for more special glimpses of Infante, but also for other images of same-sex relations that I was hungry to find. Searching through his extensive filmography I was pleased to find that this photo is not the only example, though certainly the most explicit, of the use of Infante and How I Too Came to Love Pedro Infante ix his body as an object of erotic pleasure; more than a handful of his films depict Infante in queer-friendly contexts. At that moment I realized that Infante’s cultural legacy was ripe for queer appropriation and rereading through a different interpretive lens. To further titillate me, years later, word came to me that Infante’s family jewels were touched up before the photo was first made public. Apparently he was so well endowed that the curators and/or the owner of the copyrights to the photograph felt they needed to tone it down.1 Truth or myth? It didn’t matter: I had been fully won over by this man who seduced spectators throughout the Spanishspeaking Americas. The origin of this book is twofold. First, it can be traced to my desire to see how male homosexuality and homoeroticism are represented in Mexican film and popular culture specifically and in the philosophy of Mexican national identity (mexicanidad, literally “Mexicanness”) more broadly. Second, this project is intimately linked to my desire to feel connected to my inherited national patrimony, specifically as a firstgeneration , working class-born Mexican immigrant in the USA. At the heart of this desire is my obsession with Infante, the most beloved and revered figure of the classic period star system, roughly 1933–1957. This obsession was further driven by the discovery of the Infante nude during one of my research trips to Mexico City while leafing through the exhibition catalogue Asamblea de ciudades: Años 20s/50s, Ciudad de México (1992), celebrating popular culture in Mexico City. This discovery changed how I perceived Infante and how I understood the sexual politics of mexicanidad . Infante had appeared shirtless in many of his more than fifty feature films and in publicity photos. Before the exhibition at the Palacio de Bellas Artes, Mexico City’s most prestigious museum, spectators had not been privy to full frontal (or backside) nudes of the Mexican superstar par excellence (nor, for that matter, was male nudity permitted on screen during his lifetime). The photo rubbed uneasily against my strict Catholic upbringing. The photograph opened up many questions regarding the differences between and within various paradigms of Mexican masculinities , power, national (homo)erotics, the politics of visibility, and pleasure. The photograph opened for me the Pandora’s box of the mythology of Infante and Mexican styles of manliness, adding another layer to his cult following. The controversy that erupted after the nude photograph of Infante was reprinted in Hijo de tigre . . . pintito. Hablemos de sexualidad (Rodríguez and Aguilar Gil 1994), a sex education textbook for grammar school [18...

Share