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

2. Las de abajo: Matilde Landeta’s Mexican Revolution

On the threshold of mid-century industrialization, post-revolutionary Mexico produced discursive melodramas in which the characterization of the nation and the enfranchisement of its citizenry were at stake. From political platitudes to cinematic commonplaces Mestizo Mexico reigned supreme. The “civilization” of the Spaniard and the “fortitude” of the Indian would meld to wrench new triumphs from past tragedies, replacing lethargy with industry, overcoming primitivism with progress. Political melodramas staged by mainstream nationalists came to convey the idea that “Indians”—gloriously pure— nevertheless required civilizing, and that women—purely glorious—were the ones most suited to this nation-building task. The recruitment of particularly female “architects . . . of the exaltation of [indigenous] Mexico” is strikingly evident in the shorthand of the country’s dramatic advertising of its literacy crusades (Fig. 2.1). By 1945, for example, readers of Negro y Blanco y Labores, in the midst of articles about glamorous film stars and glamorous home economics for urban ladies and “las que viven en el campo,” were urged to find a “compatriot” and teach her to read and write. Adopting the “mística educativa” of José Vasconcelos to promote literacy and culture, campaign propaganda, christened “Que México Sepa” (Mexico Must Know), featured the image of a young indigenous woman imploringly handing a primer toward an unseen other. Though we might imagine the girl to be offering her services to someone else, the possibility is undermined by the fact of the ad’s placement in a magazine designed for literate women. And given the graphics, Negro y Blanco’s ideal readers could not have failed to notice the C H A P T E R T W O ��� Las de abajo: Matilde Landeta’s Mexican Revolution 71 72 FIGURE 2.1. Learning about “Juárez and Cervantes, Kant and Freud.” Negro y Blanco, October 1945. position of the girl’s book that nearly slides from the advertisement into their hands: the text’s giant alphabet is oriented for the girl’s uncomprehending gaze, not as instruction for another. Readers are clearly meant to interpret her wishes as they are meant to decipher the charged icons and text-laden rest of the ad. Melodramatic clarity facilitates the task. Just beyond the horizon of the girl’s immediate environment, emphatically marked by palm trees and farm equipment, Modern Mexico awaits, sketched promisingly in an urban sky traced by ghostly images of planes, buildings, bridges, and electrical towers . Progress, it would seem, could only be painted by the efforts of a literacy teacher, here rendered in reduced but commanding stature in the lower lefthand corner of the page where the eye falls to read the crusade’s triumphal denouement: “National Campaign against Illiteracy.” Such a civilizing figure is urged to action by the dictates of copy that would have nation-builders employ the power of none other than “Juárez and Cervantes,” joined, but of course, by “Kant and Freud,” in order to realize the future: Mexico must know how to read and write; must find out that the world does not end in broken-down shacks, in miserable cornfields. Mexico must learn of other lands, of other worlds; must learn to read the works of the great writers. Must learn who Juárez and Cervantes were. Kant and Freud. When Mexico learns, the dreams of industrialization, of progress, of a luminous life shall become true. You are the architect in this vast plan of the exaltation of Mexico. Begin teaching a compatriot to read and write. Within this national context and simultaneously critical of its practices, pioneering proto-feminist filmmaker Matilde Landeta directed a trilogy of groundbreaking works that addressed genre, gender, and ethnic politics. Lola Casanova (1948), in particular, illustrates the filmmaker’s representations of women and indigenous peoples who alternately spoke for hegemony ’s “civilizing” projects and who voiced resistance to such totalization. Tracing the “melodramatic imagination” that fuels Landeta’s projects is the task of this chapter. PRELUDE Using the past to make pronouncements about the present, Matilde Landeta’s Lola Casanova invoked the kind of nostalgic ecstasy described by Roger Bartra , where “modern culture creates or invents its own paradise lost.”1 Landeta’s cinematic adaptation of anthropologist Francisco Rojas González’s prized novel was very much a part of a tradition of weighted melodramatic chronicles that, like so many other post-revolutionary works, attempted “to trace the LAS DE ABAJO 73 outline of cohesive nationality...