Making Cinelandia

Laura Isabel Serna is Assistant Professor of Critical Studies in the School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California.

“Because it deals with Mexican film culture from the teens to the early 1930s, Serna's fine book is a perfect complement to Robert McKee Irwin and Maricruz Castro Ricalde's Global Mexican Cinema, which begins where this study leaves off.  The early period was dominated by Hollywood films, representing an exciting, alarming modernity and exhibiting considerable insensitivity toward their neighbors to the south. Yet, as Serna (USC) demonstrates with admirable data and interpretive imagination, cinelandia was welcome to the politicians and capitalists who saw the distribution and exhibition of Hollywood films both as an opportunity and as evidence of post-revolutionary Mexico's movement into the modern age. . . . Recommended. All readers.” - W. A. Vincent (Choice) "Moving skillfully between Mexico City, El Paso, and Los Angeles, Serna shows how star-struck fans, ordinary filmgoers, and critics of U.S. films generated transnational articulations of Mexican identity." - Cara Caddoo (American Historical Review) “Making Cinelandia transports its reader to new physical spaces and reveals a material culture perhaps as interesting as the rare or lost films themselves. … At hand is an interesting and well-written text, an effective transnational history suitable for the Latin Americanist or film scholar, the graduate student of either field, and, one hopes, the wider world of film buffs.”  - Charles V. Heath (Hispanic American Historical Review) “Laura Isabel Serna's exhaustively researched and engagingly written Making Cinelandia reconsiders the terms of scholarly debate on Latin American cinema and global film culture more broadly.” - Rielle Navitski (New Mexico Historical 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. . . . Serna’s book is an exemplary work of scholarship.” - Patrick Duffy (The Americas) "Making Cinelandia is a ground breaking cultural history. It is admirable for the attention it pays to the performative, promotional, and cultural practices that were a part of moviegoing and for its extensive archival research across Mexico and the United States. It is original, thoroughly readable and accessible and, most significantly, it changes how we think about Mexican film culture in the twentieth century." - Dolores Tierney (American Studies)

• A Note on Translations and Film Titles xiPrólogo (Prologue) xiiiAcknowledgments xvIntroduction 1Part I. The Yanqui Invasion 171. U.S. Motion Picture Companies Go South of the Border 192. American Movies, Mexican Modernity: The Cinema as a National Space 473. In Lola's House: Fan Discourse in the Making of Mexican Film Culture 85Part II. Border Crossings 1214. La Virgen and La Pelona: Film Culture, Border Crossing, and the Modern Mexican Woman 1235. Denigrating Pictures: Censorship and the Politics of U.S. Film in Greater Mexico 1546. Al Cine: Mexican Migrants Go to the Movies 180Conclusion 215Abbreviations 223Notes 225Bibliography 279Filmography 303Index 309