Cinemachismo: Masculinities and Sexuality in Mexican Film

2. Pedro Infante Unveiled: Masculinities in the Mexican “Buddy Movie”

2 PedroInfanteUnveiled Masculinities in the Mexican “Buddy Movie”    When I watch Pedro’s movies I’m watching the lives of my people, past, present, and future, parade in front of me. Pedro Infante could have been my father, he was my father’s age when I was born. He’s the man our men want to be. And he’s the man we imagine ourselves to be if we are men. The man we want our daughters to love. Pedro’s the beautiful part of our dreaming. And his looks still have the power to make my woman’s blood heat up like sizzling manteca on an old but faithful sartén. Just watching him on the screen makes my little sopaipilla start throbbing underneath all the folds and tucks of cloth on the old and creaky theater seat, just give me some honey. denise chávez, loving pedro infante I n Mexican popular culture, the sexual and gender transgressions of the archetypal Mexican macho are a constant source of pleasure, fun, and banter. One need only look to the tradition of the albur to find sayings such as macho probado es macho calado (a real man is he who has been fucked by another man) or the near-universal joke—¿Cuál es la diferencia entre un mexicano homosexual y uno que no lo es? Dos copas. [What is the difference between a Mexican homosexual and one who isn’t? Two drinks.]1 Pedro Infante Unveiled 69 Despite the fact that male homosexuality figures prominently in Mexico’s picaresque tradition, it is no less at odds with the country’s cult of machismo . Given this uneasy and highly charged context, it is fitting to look for variations regarding what it means to be a man in Mexico and how masculinity and sexuality is experienced and expressed. The films of actor-singer Pedro Infante, the most revered performer of the Golden Age period and an object of desire for both women and men during and after his lifetime, provide an intriguing source for such an investigation. By analyzing the representations of the male bonding rituals in four of his most popular films, I wish to tease out the anxieties around the relationship between gender and style, manhood and national identifications, as these are shaped by the intersections of age, class, ethnic, racial, regional, and sexual differences. Decades after his death, Pedro Infante (1917–1957) continues to be a source of national pride and an object of unparalleled adoration.2 Many biographers have dubbed him el máximo ídolo de México [Mexico’s leading idol]. His cult status is reproduced across generations of film and music audiences for whom Infante—affectionately called Pedrito by his fans—continues to be the most revered national icon for Mexicans both inside and outside the geographic boundaries of the nation. April 15, the anniversary of Infante’s untimely death in a piloting accident at age forty, is an unofficial day of commemoration for Mexicans. In the United States, the anniversary of his death is noted in the evening news broadcast by Univisión, the largest Spanish-language television network in the United States, which is partly owned by Televisa, Latin America’s most powerful multimedia conglomerate. Infante embodied the collective hopes and dreams of Mexico’s popular sector during the cultural consolidation of the post-revolutionary nationstate . Today, his popularity seems secured in the greater Mexican transnational collective imaginary. The identification of Mexicans and Chicanas /os with Infante is reinforced through frequent television reruns of his films in Mexico and in the United States and through their circulation on video and DVD and other cultural products such as musical recordings, fan magazines, and literature, as is clearly evident in the epigraph from Denise Chávez’s novel (2001). Infante’s fame is continuously revitalized and reinvented through audiovisual and print media as well as gallery and museum exhibitions.3 He is among the few to be given the special recognition of being called el hijo del pueblo (the people’s son). 70 Cinemachismo Throughout his film career Infante often represented the archetypal, post-revolutionary, not-quite-domesticated, working-class migrant from the provinces.4 He seems forever inscribed as el muchacho alegre (the cheerful young man). He portrayed the Mexican common man who is driven by his passions, be they related to the family in general, mother figures in...