Mexico on Main Street

Transnational Film Culture in Los Angeles before World War II

Author: Colin Gunckel
ISBN: 9780813570754

In the early decades of the twentieth-century, Main Street was the heart of Los Angeles’s Mexican immigrant community. It was also the hub for an extensive, largely forgotten film culture that thrived in L.A. during the early days of Hollywood. Drawing from rare archives, including the city’s Spanish-language newspapers, Colin Gunckel vividly demonstrates how this immigrant community pioneered a practice of transnational media convergence, consuming films from Hollywood and Mexico, while also producing fan publications, fiction, criticism, music, and live theatrical events.  Mexico on Main Street locates this film culture at the center of a series of key debates concerning national identity, ethnicity, class, and the role of Mexicans within Hollywood before World War II. As Gunckel shows, the immigrant community’s cultural elite tried to rally the working-class population toward the cause of Mexican nationalism, while Hollywood sought to position them as part of a lucrative tra

Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Publish Date: 2015-04-01

Subjects: Performing Arts / Film & Video / History & Criticism, Social Science / Ethnic Studies / Hispanic American Studies, History / Latin America / Mexico

This book is available in the following Community Centers: Cross-Cultural Center (Location: Latinx/Chicanx American (LCXA))