Making Cinelandia: American Films and Mexican Film Culture Before the Golden Age by Laura Isabel Serna (review)

Laura Serna has written a groundbreaking study of the impact of US silent film on cinematic culture, in Mexico and among Mexican migrant communities north of the border during the interwar period. A film historian, Serna presents ideas that are both theoretically nuanced and meticulously documented. She gleans dozens of original insights from an astounding array of primary sources in Mexico and the US: newspapers, magazines, distributor records, diplomatic correspondence, minutes of city council meetings, literary texts, unpublished anthropological and economic theses, and, of course, the films themselves.

The book fills an important niche. Previous film historians of this period have focused almost exclusively on Mexican silent films, even though the cultural impact of these homegrown silents was relatively small in comparison to that of US films, which dominated the Mexican market between 1917 and the advent of sound in the late 1920s. Each of the book’s six chapters is expertly argued. Chapter 1 tells the fascinating story of how US film companies gained control of the Mexican cinematic market. Serna sheds light on the inner workings of the United Artists studio in Mexico and the establishment of locally authorized representatives. In chapter 2, Serna argues that cinema during this period was always connected to Mexico’s postrevolutionary obsession with modernity and national pride.

Ironically, the presentation of these imported films provided the means to communicate important messages about Mexico as a modern nation-state. Serna makes it clear that Mexican audiences, while being transformed by these yanqui films in important ways, were also transforming the American films themselves, reconceiving them, presenting them in uniquely Mexican venues, publicizing them in particular ways, framing them within deeply Mexican contexts. In chapter 3, Serna shows how fan magazines, newspapers, and popular magazines reveal Mexican audience’s reception of these US films. The films had a significant impact on Mexicans from many backgrounds, from the literary connoisseurs who wrote film reviews to the illiterate maids who avidly collected photos of Hollywood stars. The highly developed fan culture instructed Mexican moviegoers in the art of writing fan letters, collecting images, and using products and clothing just like the stars’. The fan culture also provided a discursive space for Mexicans to critique the US film culture and to find their own agency and voice.

The second half of the book focuses on crossing borders, those of gender, race, and nation. Serna’s analysis of gender in this context is excellent. Mexican “flappers”—pelonas, or women with bobbed haircuts—made their presence known from Durango to Mexico City. Serna has an extraordinary ability to tell entertaining stories about individuals in ways that reveal larger insights about the period: from the cross-dressing stalker Marina Vega who traveled from Mexico to Hollywood in pursuit of Charlie Chaplin and then came back to Mexico to live as a man, to the ill-fated Honoraria Suárez, a Hollywood contest-winner who failed as a starlet but was remembered in Mexico as a national treasure. Chapter 5 explores the complex impact of racist aspects of US films and how Mexican officials tried to combat such tendencies in the context of modernization and nationalism. The book’s final chapter is especially ambitious, describing reception of these US films by Mexican communities north of the border. Serna convincingly contends that these films actually drew the migrants closer to their counterparts back in Mexico, giving them a deeper sense of mexicanidad.

Serna’s book is an exemplary work of scholarship. It is essential reading for film scholars, historians, or for anyone interested in one of the most powerful influences on Mexican culture on both sides of the border during the 1910s and 1920s: US silent films.