The Mulatta on ®lm: From Hollywood to the Mexican Revolution

1 Richard Dyer, White ( London, Routledge , 1997), p. 36.

2 Teresa Zackodnik, `Fixing the color line: the mulatto, southern courts, and racial identity' , American Quarterly (Vol. 53, no. 3, 2001), p. 427 .

3 Winthrop Jordan commented: `After about 1680, taking the colonies as a whole, a new term of self-identi®cation appeared — white.' Jordan, The White Man's Burden ( Oxford, Oxford University Press , 1974), p. 52.

and Nancy Bentley, `White slaves: the mulatto hero in antebellum ®ction', American Literature (Vol. 65, no. 3, September 1993), pp. 501-522.

5 Bentley, op. cit., p. 504.

6 Roach, op. cit., p. 175.

7 Edward Byron Reuter, The Mulatto in the United States ( New York, Negro Universities Press , 1969 (original 1918)), p. 131.

8 See Kevin Brownlow, Behind the Mask of Innocence ( Berkeley, University of California Press , 1990), p. 375.

Describing his research into Hollywood ®lms between 1915 and 1975, Guerrero wrote: `By examining the depiction of slaves and slavery over the continuum of Hollywood's plantation genre, we confront a number of issues about the creation and ideological function of these representations, narratives, and images persistent so long after the abolition of slavery itself and the collapse of the ante-bellum South.' Ibid., p. 10.

10 Gerald R. Butters, Jr, Black Manhood on the Silent Screen ( Lawrence, TX, University Press of Kansas , 2002), pp. 27-28.

11 By the early twentieth century, the Black middle class tended to associate in exclusive clubs and resorts, select schools and churches, cultural and athletic clubs, salons and domestic parlours. See Willard B. Gatewood, Aristocrats of Color ( Bloomington, Indiana University Press , 1990), passim.

12 David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: biography of a race ( New York, Henry Holt & Company , 1993), pp. 217ff.

13 `Wilson behind segregation', The New York Age (19 November 1914), p. 1.

14 Gatewood, op. cit., p. 179.

15 W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction ( New York, S. A. Russell , 1935).

16 Schickel claims the ®lm, originally entitled The Clansman, was retitled in early March after `Grif®th dropped a love scene between Senator Stoneman and his mulatto mistress and a scene in which a black and a white engaged in a ®ght...'. Richard Schickel, D. W. Grif®th: an American life ( New York, Limelight , 1996), p. 282.

17 Hans L. Trefousse, Thaddeus Stevens: nineteenth-century egalitarian ( Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press , 1997), p. 172.

18 Ibid., p. 51.

19 For plot summaries of the `mulatto genre', see Alan Gevinson`s Within Our Gates: ethnicity in American ®lms, 1911—1960 ( Berkeley, University of California Press , 1997), passim.

20 Guerrero, op. cit., p. 19.

21 Donald Bogle, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies & Bucks (New York, Continuum, 2001), pp. 147ff.

Carl J. Mora agrees, see Mora, Mexican Cinema, Reflections of a Society, 1896—1980 ( Berkeley, University of California Press , 1982), pp. 74-75.

See Garcia, `In quest of a national cinema: the silent era', in Joanne Hershfield and David R. Maciel (eds), Mexico's Cinema ( Wilmington, DE, Scholarly Resources , 1999), pp. 5-16.

24 For the early years of the revolution, see Friedrich Katz, The Life and Times of Pancho Villa ( Stanford, CA, Stanford University Press , 1998).

25 Mora, op. cit., p. 20.

26 Ibid., pp. 23ff.

27 Ibid., pp. 23—4. Pancho Villa initially received favourable treatment in Hollywood. In 1914, he contracted with the Mutual Film Company for the latter to ®lm news-reels of his battles with Huerta's troops. Mutual used the newsreels to produce a fictive narrative entitled The Life of General Villa (1914). In 1916, after Villa's raids in New Mexico, his Hollywood image changed dramatically. Eagle Films Manufacturing and Producing Company produced an anti-Villa tract entitled Villa Dead or Alive, and Feinberg Amusement Corporation added its support for the punitive expedition, Following the Flag in Mexico. See Katz, op. cit., pp. 324— 6. William Randolph Hearst, an investor in Latin American mines and a huge landowner in Mexico, was also fairly vexed with the Mexican revolution. Hearst's own studio produced Patria (1915), a fifteen-part serial whose plot `depicted a Japanese-Mexican invasion of the United States and clearly was designed to capitalize on the nervousness many Americans felt over revolution in Mexico, Japanese involvement south of the Rio Grande, and United States-Japanese tensions'. Mora, op cit., p. 24. For Hearst's Mexican holdings, see Katz, op. cit., p. 157.

28 See Mora., op.cit., pp. 40ff. for plot summaries of Redes and Janitzio.

29 Ibid., pp. 41—2.

30 Ibid., p. 47.

31 During the war, Hollywood's collaboration with Mexican filmmakers was managed through the US Office of the Coordinator for Inter-American Affairs(OCIAA) which `undertook the modernization of the Mexican ®lm studios in order to develop a more authentic source of wartime propaganda for Latin American audiences'. Seth Fein, `From collaboration to containment: Hollywood and the international political economy of Mexican cinema after the second world war', in Hershfield and Maciel, op. cit., p. 129. The Mexican point man for Hollywood's penetration of Mexican cinema was Miguel Alemán, Camacho's Interior Secretary and the next president of Mexico (1946—52).

32 Personal email exchange with Luz Maria Cabral, 16 October 2001.

33 Isabel Arrendondo, `Interview with ®lm maker Matilde Landeta', Mexican Studies-Estudios Mexicanos (Vol. 18, Winter 2002), p. 192.

34 Patricia Torres de San Martin maintains that both Landeta and her predecessor, the actress and director Adela Sequeyro, were children of the Mexican upper class. See Torres, `Adela Sequeyro and Matilde Landeta: two pioneer women directors', in Hershfield and Maciel, op. cit., p. 38.

Vincent cites Joel A. Rogers`s biography of Guerrero, `The Negro who freed Mexico', Negro World (4 January 1930) as the inspiration for his article.

and Patricia Seed, To Love, Honor, and Obey in Colonial Mexico: conflicts over marriage choice 1574—1821 ( Stanford, CA, University of Stanford Press , 1988).

37 Vincent, op. cit., p. 260.

38 Ibid., p. 272.

39 Emilio Garcõía Riera and Fernando Macotela, La Guõía del Cine Mexicano de la Pantalla Grande a la Televisioín, 1919—1984 (Mexico, Editorial Patria, 1984), p. 210.

40 Emilio Garcõía Riera, Historia Documental del Cine Mexicano, Vol. IV, 1949—51, 1972, p. 67.

41 Victor Hurtado Oviedo, `Eterna cancionera: TonÄa La Negra esla incesante madre lunar de los boleros', April 1998, http://www.andes.missouri.edu/andes/comentario/vho-lanegra.html.

42 Dani Francisco Tejera, `Rita, una sonrisa centenaria', Cine (Vol. VII, no. 39, September/October, 2000). http://www2.glauco.it/vitral/vitral39/cine.htm.

43 Riera, Historia Documental del Cine Mexicano, Vol. III, 1946—48, 1971, n.a.

44 Maurõício PenÄa, `Un Tipo de Cuidado', SOMOS (January 2001), p. 33.

45 `Three ®lmsfrom Mexico slated here', Los Angeles Times (1 October 1950). The two other ®lmswere Rõío Escondido and El General y la SenÄorita.

46 Ibid.

47 See Arrendondo, op. cit. It is not entirely clear whether Reira and Macotela approved of Landeta's vision since, following a disparaging comment on Angustias' black-face make-up, they concluded: `pero lo que si resulto convincente fue la vehemencia feminista de la directora' (but what is clearly evident was the feminist passion of the director). Riera and Macotela, op. cit., p. 215.

48 Elizabeth Salas, Soldaderas in the Mexican Military ( Austin, University of Texas Press , 1990), p. 87.

49 Joseph Sommers, `Francisco Rojas Gonzaílez: exponente literario del nacionalismo mexicano', Cuadernos de la Facultad de Filosofõía, Letras y Ciencias (Vol. 36, 1966), p. 74.

50 Ibid., pp. 41—2.

51 Riera, Historia Documental... op. cit., p. 67. In her interview, Landeta claimed that Rojas had explained to her that, as an anthropologist, he understood that historically, when women fell in love and married, they left their previous lives to start more selfless lives of obedience to their husbands. Landeta was unconvinced — she recounted that she and her brother had taken their mother's name as a tribute to her caring for them after their father abandoned the family.

52 Landeta not too subtly critiqued Rojas by having the women of Angustias' village harass her, calling her `marimacha' (lesbian) for refusing to accept a loveless marriage. Hersh®eld insists that the taunt is `marimacho' and translates the term as `tomboy' in her essay `Race and ethnicity in the classical cinema', Hersh®eld and Maciel, op. cit., p. 93.

53 Landeta referenced the ®lm to the literacy campaign in the late 1940s. President Alemaín had initiated a national education programme which was dramatised in Rõío Escondido (1947), Mexico's most internationally celebrated ®lm of the period. Fein contrasted Alemaín's politics with Caírdenas's: `If Cardenismo's populist mass-media project sought to mobilize (and incorporate) peasant and worker activism, Alemanismo's aimed to pacify proletarian and agrarian demands while expanding the state's corporatist controls.' Fein, op. cit., p. 126.

For more on this issue see the article cited by Hersh®eld, Alan Knight, `Racism, revolution, and indigenismo: Mexico, 1920—1940', in Richard Graham (ed.), The Idea of Race in Latin America, 1870—1940 ( Austin, University of Texas Press , 1990), pp. 72-73.