Celluloid Nationalism and Other Melodramas: From Post-Revolutionary Mexico to fin de siglo Mexamerica

3. Pimps, Prostitutes, and Politicos: Matilde Landeta’s Trotacalles and the Regime of Miguel Alemán

When Luis Spota, aspiring young journalist and pulp fiction novelist, approached filmmaker Matilde Landeta with an idea for a money-maker that would capitalize on the “fallen woman” film that was becoming the rage in Golden Age cinema, he encountered a stalwart woman experienced in reworking male-authored texts. By 1949 the thirty-nine-year-old director had already adapted two of Francisco Rojas González’s national prize-winning novels, changing them considerably.1 Her Lola Casanova (1948) extended the novelist’s vision of the transculturation of indigenous Seri peoples. La Negra Angustias (1949) challenged Rojas González’s idea that a leader of the Revolution would end up trapped as an abused mother living in urban despair instead of leading her nation into the battles of twentieth-century patriotism. Trotacalles (Streetwalker; 1951), the third part of the triptych depicting women’s struggle to forge—and survive in—the new Mexico, subverted Spota’s original designs, based on his lurid Vagabunda (1950), as well as his desires to cash in on his novel as a purely commercial film script (Fig. 3.1). “I told him I’d collaborate on a screenplay and direct the picture only if I could construct my own thesis,” Landeta explains, emphasizing that she “wanted no part in making some story about a good girl who takes herself off to the brothel just so she can support her old dad.”2 Indeed, though she suffered her own hardships as the only professional working woman filmmaker in the 1940s,3 Landeta refused to play the good C H A P T E R T H R E E ��� Pimps, Prostitutes, and Politicos: Matilde Landeta’s Trotacalles and the Regime of Miguel Alemán 95 girl who would prostitute her talents simply to support patriarchal ideologies. Where she saw Mexican cinema—or in the event, novelists—“erecting models of female submissiveness and humility,” she worked to unseat ubiquitous images of “abject mujercitas mexicanas” by producing her own complex characterizations of quotidian female heroism.4 Without sanctifying these protagonists , Landeta managed to laud their successes and comprehend their failures within the context of specific sociopolitical structures. Working at the zenith of discursive patriotism, when national melodramas apotheosized the past and glorified the present, Landeta combined melodrama with social realism to comment lucidly on her nation’s history and her contemporary society. Her project did not pass unremarked. As early as 1944 the popular film magazine México Cinema took her part against a Directors’ Guild that unjustly refused her promotion as assistant director: “Matilde Landeta, one of the most competent workers in the Mexican film industry, was dispossessed of a position as assistant director simply because she is a woman.”5 When she eventually won her stripes, she was praised for her work with the most notable directors of the day, including Fernando de Fuentes, Emilio Fernández, and Julio Bracho. By 1948 the press heralded her success as a full-fledged director. Ban96 CELLULOID NATIONALISM AND OTHER MELODRAMAS FIGURE 3.1. Streetwalking: “A problem that nobody talks about, but all know.” Isabela Corona, Miroslava, Elda Peralta, and Ernesto Alonso. Courtesy Matilde Landeta. ner headlines declared: “Finally She Triumphs!”; “How the Mexican Woman Works”; “A Woman at the Megaphone”; “Adventures of a Woman”; “Matilde Landeta, or, The Triumph of the Mexican Woman in Cinema.”6 As these titles suggest, the reviews articulated great pride in the fact that a woman had finally penetrated the male filmmaking establishment. Yet even beyond recounting stories of her tribulations and triumphs as a woman in men’s society, the press engaged the specific details of her films. Lola Casanova, for instance, was noted for its realism. Thanks to Landeta, the “Indians in Churubusco [Motion Picture Studio]” were real for once, “human Indians . . . with all their virtues and defects intact.”7 While the “Anguish of [Making] La Negra Angustias” was outlined, so too was the nature of its narrative : “Landeta’s depiction of a female revolutionary colonel is faithful to the hidden history of our nation.”8 With the release of Trotacalles even the international press acclaimed the work of one of the “few female directors of our Spanish language films.”9 One of the most descriptive reviews of Trotacalles cited the filmmaker in a bold, five-column headline, “Let’s Not Idealize Public Women,” in approbation of her project “to remove the veil from the clichéd theme of prostitution...