Women Filmmakers in Mexico: The Country of Which We Dream 9780292798106
Women filmmakers in Mexico were rare until the 1980s and 1990s, when women began to direct feature films in unprecedente...
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Women Filmmakers in Mexico

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Women Filmmakers in Mexico The Country of Which We Dream

Elissa J. Rashkin

u n i v e r s i t y o f t e x a s p r e s s , au s t i n

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Copyright © 2001 by the University of Texas Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America First edition, 2001

Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to Permissions, University of Texas Press, P.O. Box 7819, Austin, TX 78713-7819.

The paper used in this book meets the minimum requirements of ansi /niso

z39.48-1992 (r1997) (Permanence of Paper).

l i b r a ry o f c o n g r e s s c ata l o g i n g - i n - p u b l i c at i o n d ata Rashkin, Elissa. Women ﬁlmmakers in Mexico : the country of which we dream / Elissa J. Rashkin. p.

cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 0-292-77108-8 (alk. paper) — isbn 0-292-77109-6 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Motion pictures—Mexico—History.

2. Women motion picture producers

and directors—Mexico.

pn1993.5.m4 r33 791.430820972 — dc21

I. Title.

2001 00-041772

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To the women “without face or name” whose struggle for justice, democracy, and liberty is the light that illuminates these pages.

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Contents

Acknowledgments

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Introduction: An “Other Cinema” 1 p a r t o n e : Histories 1. Trespassers: Women Directors before 1960 31 2. Student and Feminist Film, 1961–1980 59 p a r t t w o : Revisions 3. Marisa Sistach: The Other Gaze 89 4. Busi Cortés: Telling Romelia’s Secrets 117 5. Guita Schyfter: The Chicken and the Egg 141 6. María Novaro: Exploring the Mythic Nation 167 7. Dana Rotberg: Modernity and Marginality 192 Conclusion: Borders and Boundaries of National Cinema 215 Annotated Filmography Notes 265 Works Cited 273 Index 289

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Acknowledgments

This book exists thanks to the encouragement of many individuals over many years, beginning with professors Ed Norris, Kate Miller, Allston James, Rosalind Petchesky, Louise Spence, Tonglin Lu, and Maria Duarte. Its ﬁrst incarnation as a dissertation at the University of Iowa was partially funded by a Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship from the Center for International and Comparative Studies in 1994, and especially beneﬁted from the guidance of Kathleen Newman and Charles A. Hale, as well as Rick Altman, Joy Hayes, and Corey Creekmur. A version of chapter seven appeared in Spectator’s “Street Smarts” issue, whose editor Karen Voss offered many helpful suggestions. Participants at the Cine-Lit III and Cine-Siglo conferences provided useful feedback on versions of chapter ﬁve and the conclusion. In Mexico City, research was facilitated by Moisés Jiménez at imcine, Celia Barrientos, Salvador Plancarte and Antonia Rojas at the Filmoteca de la unam, Claudia Prado at the Centro de Capacitación Cinematográﬁca, and Leticia Medina at the Cineteca Nacional. In Mexico and the United States, Patricia de la Peña, Patricia Torres San Martín, Joanne Hershﬁeld, Susan Dever, Alejandra Novoa at Telemanita, Karen Ranucci at the Latin American Video Archives, Nancy Deffebach, B. Ruby Rich, and Bob Dickson generously shared information and materials. Others who provided invaluable support include: Stephanie Savage, Diana McKenzie, Heather von Rohr, Randy Russell, Anne Gill, Claire Fox, Sergio de la Mora, Joan Clinefelter, Jim Clinefelter, Ian Phillips, Peggy Zebroski, Pedro González, Mark Farrier, Jena Camp, the members of Chiapas Urgent Call, Juan Mendoza, the Islas Hernández family, Ian Rashkin, Laura Rashkin, Beverly Jarvis, Ed Jarvis, Alan Burns, Hattie Catania, Camille Carter, Peter Rashkin, and José Islas.

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Women Filmmakers in Mexico

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My intention and my defense for making ﬁlms was to make “the other cinema.” To make the other world. Women are half of humanity, but almost everything is explored and explained through men. Women explained through men. At that time I thought that the cinema that I made, and I still think today, that the cinema that I make is from the woman’s point of view. Not that of the romantic and subjugated woman, but on the contrary, of woman as thinker. Matilde Landeta 1

Introduction An “Other Cinema”

When veteran director Matilde Landeta explained her notion of a feminist otro cine or “other cinema” to interviewer Patricia Martínez de Velasco in 1988, only Landeta and a handful of other women in Mexico had directed feature ﬁlms. Moreover, those women’s work, although spanning the nearcentury of the cinema’s existence, had been irregular, fragmentary, and often compromised by external obstacles; many early ﬁlms had been lost due to critical and curatorial neglect, while later directors had seen their work shelved and forgotten. The status of women’s ﬁlmmaking was aptly expressed in the title of Martínez de Velasco’s 1991 book, Directoras de cine: Proyección de un mundo obscuro, as “a dark world.” In the late 1980s and the 1990s, however, this situation dramatically changed. Following two decades of sporadic short ﬁlms, independent and institutional documentaries, and student efforts, women at last began to emerge as professional feature ﬁlm directors. In 1988, two debut features, Busi Cortés’s El secreto de Romelia and Marisa Sistach’s Los pasos de Ana, marked the beginning of what would soon become the widely recognized phenomenon labeled cine de mujer or women’s cinema.2 These were followed by María Novaro’s Lola and Dana Rotberg’s Intimidad in 1989, a second feature from Cortés, Serpientes y escaleras, in 1991, and Guita Schyfter’s Novia que te vea in 1

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1992. Novaro’s second feature, Danzón, went to Cannes in 1991, as did Rotberg’s Angel de fuego in 1992. Marcela Fernández Violante, an active director since the 1960s, began production on Golpe de suerte in 1991, and even Matilde Landeta, by then in her late seventies, returned to directing that year with Nocturno a Rosario. Landeta’s ﬁlms from the 1940s were rediscovered, exhibited, and restored, as were those of Adela Sequeyro from the 1930s; festivals and special programs highlighted these discoveries, linking them to the work of the new generation of women ﬁlmmakers. For the ﬁrst time, the possibility of an otro cine had become an historical reality. The emergence of a “women’s cinema” meant more than the addition of female names to the ﬁlm credits of the era; in fact, it posed a formidable challenge to a long-standing cinematic tradition of female objectiﬁcation, erasure, and displacement. For although the foregrounding of female characters had been a consistent distinguishing feature of the Mexican cinema (from Santa, one of the ﬁrst Mexican sound ﬁlms, in 1931, to Enamorada and María Candelaria in the Golden Age a few years later, to the action-heroine subgenre exempliﬁed by the Lola la trailera series of the 1980s), the industry had always been better at what actress Diana Bracho has called “pimping” (an ironic reference to the abundance of prostitutes on the Mexican screen) than allowing women to tell their own stories (Bracho 413). Feminist theorist Teresa de Lauretis’s well-known distinction between Woman as “the representation of an essence inherent in all women” (Technologies of Gender 9) and women as historical beings was amply supported by the Mexican cinema: its particular formulae, such as the veneration of the suffering mother and the viliﬁcation of the treacherous mala mujer (bad woman), functioned to displace women as historical subjects and replace them with symbolic ﬁgures whose repetitive trajectories were depicted as essential to the reproduction of the social order within the context of a clearly patriarchal nation-state.3 Given the history of women’s erasure from the ﬁeld of representation and their replacement by the iconic, passive image of Woman, the presence of women directors in the 1990s represented a qualitative breakthrough that went well beyond the question of quantitative equity. This breakthrough took place on many levels, both within and outside of the ﬁlm texts themselves, for the work of these directors embodied what ﬁlm scholar Patricia Torres San Martín has described as a “symbiosis” between ﬁlmic creation and social praxis (“La investigación sobre el cine de mujeres en México” 44). Several of the ﬁlmmakers considered themselves feminists, some came from the women’s movement, and all dedicated themselves to telling women’s stories and di2

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rectly or indirectly to revising the image of women on the Mexican screen. Referring to these developments, Torres pointed to “a new female identity” in the cinema, an identity which had been forged by “sujetos activos que han partipado en la sociedad de una manera especíﬁca pese al dominio de ideologías y estructuras patriarcales” [active subjects who have participated in society in a speciﬁc manner in spite of the domination of patriarchal ideologies and structures] (“La investigación” 41– 42). As Torres’s comment suggests, neither the origins nor the political implications of women’s ﬁlmmaking were conﬁned to the cinematic realm. Rather, they took place within and reﬂected the changing cultural geography of Mexico in the 1990s, a complex and highly ambivalent landscape marked by a number of important social, political, economic, and even psychological factors. These included a changing intellectual sector, characterized by the emergence of new media, new forms of participation, and new participants; a deep crisis in the unifying mythos of national identity, resulting in a proliferation of critical analysis and debate and the emergence of new social actors; a ﬁlm industry also deeply in crisis and in need of rejuvenation; increased participation by women in formal education and professional employment, albeit in a social climate of complexity and contradiction; and ﬁnally, a presidential administration acutely sensitive to the ideological functions of culture and willing to lend its support to the production of ﬁlm images in the interests of self-promotion and social control. While not entirely separate from one another or from the broad social and economic changes of the era—namely, the globalization and privatization of production and consumption, cultural and otherwise—it is worth examining each of these areas in detail in order to locate the signiﬁcance of the cine de mujer, not simply as a subgenre of Mexican cinema but as an historical phenomenon. The Shifting Intellectual Sector The emergence of a body of ﬁlms made by women and centered around gender issues and women’s experiences reﬂected a long history of feminist struggle. Women ﬁlmmakers of the 1990s, whether or not they identiﬁed themselves or their work as feminist, were on the front lines of the battle for a form of representation which would take into account the point of view of women, not, as Landeta puts it, romanticized or submissive, but “woman as thinker” (Martínez de Velasco 64). In this sense, they reﬂected a convergence of two subtle but important long-term reconﬁgurations of the traditional inintroduction

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tellectual sector in Mexico: the increased participation of women and the broad shift in that sector away from an exclusive emphasis on literate/print culture and toward an embrace of the audiovisual communications media of the era, changes that are themselves indicative of larger real and potential transformations in historically constituted ﬁelds of power and knowledge. In The Lettered City, a provocative study of literate culture, urbanism, and state power in Latin America, Angel Rama shows how since the colonial era, state power has both depended on and produced groups of literate men (letrados) charged with managing the expanding bureaucracy of the colony (later the nation-state) and with creating ideological visions of its past, present, and future. In Mexico, asserts Rama, the basic arrangement by which a small group of urban elites imposed their ideal maps of nationhood onto an unruly and heterogeneous territory continued almost unabated from viceregal times on, with Independence and Revolution doing little more than shifting players (if that much) and vocabularies. Moreover, in spite of late-nineteenth-century economic modernization and corresponding professional specialization, culture in the limited sense of arts and letters continued to be inseparable from politics (Rama 86 – 87). Written accounts of the Mexican Revolution speak to this phenomenon. In numerous novels and testimonies (notably Mariano Azuela’s 1915 Los de abajo, from which much of Rama’s argument is drawn), the actual ﬁghting is characterized as emerging out of a massive, inchoate sense of rage and injustice on the part of Mexican campesinos, yet this almost primal force is shown to be quickly co-opted by the educated men who would renovate legal systems and write constitutions that paid homage to the desires of the populace while in fact reinstating their own class privileges. Being themselves emissaries from the lettered city, the narrators of these texts can do little but chronicle this cooptation with irony and bitterness. The extent to which power has been linked to the written word in a largely illiterate context can scarcely be overstated. Rama writes that the “exclusive place of writing in Latin American societies made it so revered as to take on an aura of sacredness.” Like the sacred in general, this place was somewhat distinct from the realm of everyday life: “Written documents seemed not to spring from social life but rather to be imposed upon it and to force it into a mold not at all made to measure” (30). While many Mexicans may therefore have a deep and well-founded cynicism toward the lettered city, they have rarely escaped its coercive authority. Rama concludes his book with an allu-

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sion to “two forms of power, that which rests on the sword, and the other, which ﬂows from the pen” (125). With the rise of broadcast media in the twentieth century, however, come important changes. In an essay titled “What’s Left of the Intelligentsia?: The Uncertain Future of the Printed Word,” Jean Franco notes: The new technologies of communication have created a class of technocrats and new audiences for whom print culture has lost its luster and now competes with—and is often superseded by—visual and aural culture. . . . Music and the television image, rather than the printed word, have become the privileged vehicles for the exploration of Latin American identity and the nature of modernity. (17) These shifts are not inevitable results of the technologies themselves but rather resonate with social and political developments both particular to Mexico and consistent with the evolution of capitalism worldwide. The need to incorporate more and more of the populace into the postrevolutionary national project implies the development of media which circumvent requirements of literacy and elite education, for instance, while at the same time the expansion of consumer culture requires the creation of consumers on a massive scale. But in any case, the growing importance of radio, television, ﬁlm, the music industry, and hybrid print-visual media such as comics and fotonovelas has required adaptation on the part of the traditional intellectual sector, whose lettered city has in many ways been engulfed by a multinational, electronic megalopolis. This phenomenon has been chronicled by Néstor García Canclini in his book Culturas híbridas: Estrategias para entrar y salir de la modernidad, in which he outlines the increasing links between traditional elite culture (formerly the province of state patronage) and private enterprise as well as the ways that traditional Latin American intellectuals have adapted to the mass media. Franco, in La cultura moderna en América Latina, similarly describes how writers of the 1960s were forced to confront a growing mass culture whose conservative generic forms—gothic romance, melodrama, detective story—replicated themselves as if impervious to modernist avant-garde challenges.4 Many novels of that period took up mass culture as a theme, often by means of parody (La cultura 324). Moreover, writers like Octavio Paz, Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel García Márquez, and Carlos Fuentes became media icons, their texts and ideas sold through the same marketing channels as the

introduction

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consumer products of industry. García Canclini recounts a meeting between Paz and Borges that could not be ﬁlmed because of the authors’ obligations to rival television stations (García Canclini, Culturas híbridas 101); the humorous anecdote is emblematic of the conﬁguration Franco sums up in her chapter title, “Narrador, autor, superestrella” (Franco, La cultura 311). At the same time, social and political concerns are taken up—if only, more often than not, to be contained and defused—in the texts of mass media, while individuals coming out of pop culture, such as rock stars, actors, and athletes, compete with more traditional ﬁgures as the icons and spokespersons of their epoch. These developments, it should be emphasized, are politically ambiguous, although not neutral; while the mass media in Mexico overwhelmingly reinforce a conservative understanding of the status quo, the challenge to traditional elitism that they symbolize rather than embody may also provide space for the expression of oppositional values. As Franco suggests, that the increasing power of the corporate media in Latin America (and throughout the world) has displaced and engulfed the traditional intellectual sector is not a particularly progressive development (“What’s Left” 20); moreover, hybrid formations that appear “postmodern” may simply be the lettered city’s attempt to map itself onto yet another conﬁguration of political and economic power. Yet if much of what constitutes contemporary culture can be seen as linked to the expansionist project of neoliberal capitalism, new kinds of intellectuals have emerged to respond to and challenge this monopolistic regime of power and knowledge. Such is the case within the ﬁeld with which we are presently concerned, that is, the cinema. Whereas the “classic” cinema in Mexico, as in Hollywood, was characterized by a star system which rendered off-screen production almost invisible, the director as auteur has since come to the fore. Since the 1960s, ﬁlmmakers have sought and won recognition not only as purveyors of entertainment but as artists, cultural workers, and thinkers. As we will see, the ﬁlm industry remains split between a “cinema of quality” that retains much of the elitist aura of the traditional ﬁne arts and a commercial cinema that manufactures generic products as if from an assembly line; yet many ﬁlmmakers elude both of these categories, participating instead in the cross-pollination and hybridization of cultural strains and the blurring of lines among elite, mass, and popular cultural domains that García Canclini described. These individuals are among the best positioned to fulﬁll the role of intellectual in a “postliterate” era, creating images and representations that reﬂect—and shape—the concerns, experiences, values, and beliefs of broad audiences. 6

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Even as the intellectual sector has seen itself transformed by historical shifts in communication and economic structures—what Franco summarizes as “the growing privatization of culture” (“What’s Left” 17)—resulting in increased interface with ﬁlm, television, and other mass media, it has also been affected by the demands of disenfranchised sectors for greater participation in the life of the nation. Roderic Camp’s 1985 study Intellectuals and the State in Twentieth-Century Mexico depicts an intellectual establishment based primarily on old-boy networks formed at exclusive educational institutions and names only one woman (Elena Poniatowska) among its list of recognized ﬁgures; yet an enormous increase in female participation in education has begun to change this scenario. While, for example, women made up 18.5 percent of students enrolled in higher education in 1969, they comprised 30 percent in 1980; in 1994, women made up 44.6 percent of the collegiate population, concentrated in health sciences, education, and humanities. Because overall numbers of students rose dramatically during those twenty-ﬁve years, the gains in women’s education have been far greater than the percentages reﬂect.5 These educated women have gone on to achieve visible (if not proportional) representation in the professions and among the intelligentsia. If we take ﬁlm studies as a case in point, we ﬁnd that while only a handful of women studied ﬁlm when the discipline emerged in the 1960s, their representation in the nation’s ﬁlm schools was equal to that of men by the late 1980s. This had important ramiﬁcations for their subsequent access to what in the case of ﬁlm can be described as the means of production; for while the ﬁlm industry’s professional guilds have long resisted admitting women, the majority of women directors in the 1990s came from the universities rather than working their way through the ranks of the industry. Moreover, immersed in the university milieu, they not only learned the techniques of their trade but also were exposed to and often participated in the debates and struggles of their epoch, as a result becoming outspoken critical thinkers as well as skilled professionals. Social and political activism per se has also brought women to the forefront of intellectual debate, as in the case of Rosario Ibarra de Piedra, the founder of an organization of parents of “disappeared” political victims who became an opposition congresswoman in the 1990s, or that of Debate feminista magazine founder Marta Lamas and others associated with feminist organizing and publishing. In fact, many contemporary ﬁlmmakers ﬁrst approached ﬁlm as a way to communicate feminist and progressive ideas to broad audiences. Their work is thus closely linked to the larger project of creating what Franco introduction

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terms a “feminist public sphere” (Plotting Women: Gender and Representation in Mexico 184). Clearly, few if any of these women have achieved the cultural status and prestige of an Octavio Paz, José Vasconcelos, or Carlos Fuentes (to name three widely recognized ﬁgures cited by Camp), yet the transformation of the intellectual sector that they represent renders the comparison somewhat irrelevant. In fact, in a society characterized by overwhelming cynicism and distrust of the ofﬁcial establishment, it is those voices, both male and female, which seem to speak from outside the lettered city that have begun to gain substantial credibility and appeal. In any case, the partial democratization of the intellectual sphere as well as the increasing power and inﬂuence of the communications media are crucial factors in making ﬁlm a terrain of intellectual activity in which women as well as men have become protagonists. Mexicanidad in Crisis The transformation of the traditional intellectual sector as the result of global pressures and local demands parallels another phenomenon which, although impossible to measure in quantitative terms, was perceptible on almost every level of cultural and social activity toward the end of the twentieth century: the breakdown of nationalist ideologies to a degree that put into question the existence of the nation itself as a meaningful entity. Charles Ramírez Berg analyzes this breakdown in detail in his 1992 book, Cinema of Solitude: A Critical Study of Mexican Film, 1967–1983. Although his study concludes before the period in question here, his observations regarding ﬁlm as a scenario of collective identity formation help us to understand the conditions under which feminism and other oppositional (re)visions were able to ﬂourish in the cinema. For Ramírez Berg as for other observers, the ideology of Mexican cinema hinges on the concept of mexicanidad, or “Mexican-ness.” This elusive notion, he asserts, “has been the key concept in Mexican intellectual, political, and artistic thought for most of this century” (Cinema of Solitude 2); it encompasses identity, culture, national sovereignty, and authenticity and is often set against a perceived encroachment by an alien (European or U.S.) value system and especially the embrace of such a system by a complicit intelligentsia. While mexicanidad is presumed to exist as a complex of recognizable traits, it is in fact always in process. Like all American nationalisms, mexicanidad originated as an anticolonial position, as both a line of defense and a process of collective self-discovery, over time growing in strength as what 8

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Jesús Martín Barbero summarizes as “a popular revolution against creoles, private corporations, and foreign threats” (“Modernity, Nationalism, and Communication in Latin America” 136). Yet in the absence of true national unity—that is, in a large and populous country marked by ethnic, regional, and class divisions, among others—the discourse of mexicanidad seeks to homogenize and ﬁx what in fact is heterogeneous and mobile. It creates strategic points of convergence that are then asserted as cultural essence, particularly within the seamless genealogies of historia patria, the master narrative par excellence. Like the cultural construct of the nation deﬁned by Homi Bhabha as “a form of social and textual afﬁliation,” mexicanidad in fact becomes a kind of metaphor for its own absence—the search itself, rather than an objective entity (Bhabha 140). “The history of Mexican ﬁlm,” Ramírez Berg writes, “might be viewed as a quest for a ﬁlmmaking form, a cinematic aesthetic that would appropriately express the Mexican experience” (Cinema of Solitude 3). The Revolution of 1910 –1920, roughly coinciding as it did with the development of narrative cinema, provided early ﬁlmmakers with subject matter that necessarily had the nation at its core. Carmen Toscano’s 1950 compilation of footage shot by her father, the pioneering ﬁlmmaker and exhibitor Salvador Toscano, and by other documentarians of the period suggests the era’s preoccupations: beginning with images of Porﬁrio Díaz’s lavish celebration of the ﬁrst century of Mexican independence, Toscano and his colleagues went on to chronicle the struggle against the Díaz regime and the subsequent years of conﬂict in which factions and regional armies battled for power in the country. Footage of such signiﬁcant events as the Zapatista army entering Mexico City is breathtaking in its feeling of historical “authenticity”; such images would provide the material for spectacular re-creations in dramatic ﬁlms of subsequent decades. Carmen Toscano’s title for the edited compilation, Memorias de un mexicano, is oddly apt, for the cinema, in its lasting fusion of documentary realism and patriotic melodrama, posed individual history and memory as synonymous with that of that nation. From the mid-1930s to the 1950s, known as the “classical” period or “Golden Age” of Mexican cinema, the Mexicanist aesthetic coalesced around particular genres (the family melodrama, the ranchera musical comedy, the urban cabaretera cycle, and so forth), landscapes (the maguey-dotted expanses captured by the lens of cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa), and thematic ﬁgures or stereotypes (strong, virile, macho men, juxtaposed with women as suffering mothers, virgins, and whores, whose value to the project introduction

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of nation-building was almost always in direct proportion to the depth of their self-sacriﬁce). The product of the Golden Age was “an idealized, romanticized, and imaginary Mexico that illuminated the movie screens of Latin America” (Cinema of Solitude 15) but that could hardly be sustained given the contradictions inherent in the industry itself and the modernizing project to which it belonged. In fact, postrevolutionary novelists and essayists, writing for the lettered elite rather than the mass audience of the cinema, tended to view the national psyche as an ediﬁce of denial constructed on the ruins of Revolutionary idealism, whose blustery nationalism and machismo was no more than a mask hiding failure and solitude.6 The late 1950s and the 1960s were years of turmoil in Mexico. The postwar economic policy of import substitution industrialization, whose statistical appearance of success led to its being labeled “the Mexican miracle,” had not addressed the needs of the country’s rural sector and in fact had brought about an increasingly uneven distribution of national income (Peter H. Smith 324 – 327). On the one hand, an expanding middle class found itself largely estranged from the populist mechanisms of the traditional corporatist state and began to demand greater freedom. At the same time, displaced campesinos ﬁlled the cities, and unemployed and unsatisﬁed workers increasingly took to the streets in protest. Financed by a debt that would soon lay bare its stranglehold over the economy, the “miracle” collapsed and with it the ﬁction of national cultural and political unity whose bankruptcy was deﬁnitively exposed on 2 October 1968 in the massacre of student protesters by the army at the Plaza de las Tres Culturas in the Tlatelolco neighborhood of Mexico City. The formation of an independent and radical ﬁlm sector at this time, inﬂuenced by the theories and practices of New Latin American Cinema, was symptomatic of the need for alternative representations as well as alternative political formations. When events of the 1960s plunged the Mexican state into crisis, “national self-image” and its cinematic analog broke down, initiating what in subsequent decades would become a kind of return of the repressed: the appearance on the screen of the dark side of a nation (that is, a national construct, or in Benedict Anderson’s famous phrase, “imagined community”) founded on patriarchy and masculinist ideology. As Ramírez Berg details, the archetypes and stereotypes of the Golden Age were grotesquely inverted in the ﬁlms of the 1970s. Suffering mothers became vampires; swaggering machos were shown as impotent, alienated prisoners of their own defensive posturing; “fallen women” went from being víctimas del pecado to víctimas del machismo (victims of sin to victims of machismo), with 10

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insanity depicted as the inevitable outcome for women trying to balance the contradictions of patriarchy (Cinema of Solitude 77). In the cinema, as in life, the “taken-for-granted pillars of the old order, patriarchy and machismo, were rocked to their foundations” (4). During the 1970s and 1980s, the cinematic leitmotif that predominated, from the most commercial ﬁlms to the most experimental, was radical alienation; if few ﬁlmmakers went so far as to imagine what a nonpatriarchal society might look like, all seemed to agree on the bankruptcy of past “solutions.” The decline of the old order, to be sure, did not automatically bring about progressive change. As economic crisis led to increasing civil unrest among many sectors of the population, part of the government’s response in the 1970s was to bolster the by-then stagnant ﬁlm industry. As Alberto Ruy Sánchez in Mitología de un cine en crisis and Jaime Tello in “Notas sobre la política del ‘nuevo cine’ mexicano” have convincingly argued, the supposed apertura (opening) of Luis Echeverría’s government (1970 –1976), which permitted the critical images discussed in Cinema of Solitude, served to co-opt dissent and fortify state control while creating an appearance of democracy. From a feminist standpoint, the results were certainly mixed; for example, relaxation of censorship codes during the 1970s meant that the national cinema became not only more “political” but also more blatantly sexist in its depiction of women as sexual objects. Nevertheless, the crisis in the dominant ideology ultimately provided an opening for what Martín Barbero has called the “formation of new subjects— ethnic, regional, religious, sexual, generational” manifesting “new forms of rebellion and resistance” (“Communication from Culture: The Crisis of the National and the Emergence of the Popular” 453). In this sense, the women ﬁlmmakers of the 1990s, confronted with the radical breakdown of old notions of mexicanidad, became part of a societywide movement toward the imagination of alternatives. Mexican Cinema in the 1990s: Rising from the Ruins The most obvious factor inﬂuencing the emergence of women as directors was the ﬁlm industry itself, which at the end of the 1980s was clearly in disarray. In a scathing essay in which he referred to national cinema as a “dead corpse,” Dicine editor Nelson Carro outlined the situation: even though the Mexican cinema had been proclaimed to be in crisis since at least the end of World War II, several factors made the 1980s especially difﬁcult. The worldwide expansion of Hollywood cinema during the second half of the 1970s had introduction

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put domestic ﬁlm producers on the defensive in Mexico as around the world. Mexican ﬁlms all but disappeared from South and Central American screens; meanwhile, the 1982 peso devaluation disproportionately affected ﬁlm producers, whose costs often were accounted in dollars, and the emergence of home video (likewise foreign-dominated) reduced ﬁlm attendance at theaters (Carro, “Cine mexicano de los ochenta: Ante el cadáver de un difunto” 2). Although the number of ﬁlms made suggested a healthy industry, Carro wrote, their quality left much to be desired; the bulk of ﬁlms were either sex comedies or aventuras norteñas, action ﬁlms often based on popular songs and aimed at audiences close to the northern border. The most successful ﬁlms of the decade, El mil usos (1981) and La India María’s Ni de aquí, ni de allá (1987), were distributed by Videocine, whose access to promotional resources was unmatched. And although directors such as Felipe Cazals and Arturo Ripstein continued to produce “quality” ﬁlms at the margins of the industry, their output was negligible compared to that of the likes of formula directors Víctor “El Güero” Castro and Alfredo Crevenna (Carro, “Cine mexicano de los ochenta” 5). In the pages of Dicine, the Colectivo Alejandro Galindo published “El cine mexicano y su crisis,” a three-part critique of Mexican cinema that concluded with a set of recommendations more developed than but ultimately not all that different from the demands that ﬁlm activists had made in the 1960s: infrastructure, promotion, and support for ﬁlm production personnel as workers. Meanwhile, critics like Carro and Rafael Medina de la Serna bemoaned their fate as spectators, with Medina writing in 1988: Ir al cine en México es sin duda la actividad que menos satisfacciones produce a quienes la pratican y por ello cada vez menos personas se toman la molestia de praticarla. Pero si ir al cine en este país es tan poco gratiﬁcante, ser cinéﬁlo es poco menos que una perversión masoquista. [To go to the movies in Mexico is without a doubt the activity that produces the least satisfaction for those who practice it, and for that reason fewer people all the time are bothering to practice it. But if going to the movies in this country is ungratifying, to be a cinephile is little short of a masochistic perversion.] (6)

These texts reﬂect a number of biases, full discussion of which is beyond the scope of this chapter; apart from the obvious elitism, for example, Carro’s dismissal of ﬁlms with a northern focus ignores the concrete historical reasons that the cinema’s attention shifted to the north and that stories of narcotrafﬁc, migration, and border banditry have come to replace those set in the demi12

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monde of Mexico City or on bucolic haciendas. Moreover, these critics’ negative prognoses often verge on becoming self-fulﬁlling prophecies. In contrast, director Busi Cortés has offered strong arguments against the critical establishment’s habitual pessimism, accusing critics of assuming an “intellectual pose” that amounts to a double standard for Mexican ﬁlms (Torralba in El Sol de México). Nevertheless, it is true that during the 1980s, innovative, accomplished ﬁlms like Paul Leduc’s Frida (1984), Cazals’s Los motivos de Luz (1985), and Ripstein’s El imperio de la fortuna (1986), to name three of Dicine’s top ten of the decade, were the exception rather than the rule. Javier González Rubio’s review of Cortés’s El secreto de Romelia in Dicine indicates the general attitude toward national cinema at the end of the decade: Si tomamos en cuenta que en general los distintivos del cine mexicano son: a) guiones incongruentes, b) personajes inverosímiles y estereotipados al máximo, c) diálogos absurdos e increíbles, d) malas actuaciones y e) excusas de algunos directores de por qué la película no salió tan bien, entonces podemos considerar a El secreto de Romelia como una excelente película mexicana. [If we take into account that in general the characteristics of Mexican cinema are: a) incongruent scripts, b) unrealistic and supremely stereotyped characters, c) absurd and unbelievable dialogue, d) bad acting, and e) excuses from some directors for why the ﬁlm came out so poorly, then we can consider El secreto de Romelia to be an excellent Mexican ﬁlm.] (González Rubio 18)

The release of El secreto de Romelia in September 1989, under the auspices of four federal and two regional institutions, in some ways heralded a new era for the cinema. On the one hand, the Salinas administration had adopted a proactive policy toward ﬁlmmaking (and toward other media and cultural sectors) that contributed greatly to the “cinematic renaissance” of the sexenio (six-year presidential term). On the other hand, however, in keeping with the administration’s shift toward neoliberalism, its policy was not so much outright sponsorship as brokering of partnerships between a range of private investors and governmental entities (Pérez Turrent, “Crises and Renovations” 112). While each of the ﬁlms discussed in Chapters 3 through 7 received some funding from the federal government, none was entirely state-supported. The inter-institutional collaboration behind productions like El secreto de Romelia thus met the needs of the ﬁlmmakers (enabling newer directors with less institutional clout to ﬁnd funding from a range of sources) and of the governintroduction

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ment, which sought to minimize its investment while enjoying the cultural cachet associated with a thriving national cinema. Salinas’s National Development Plan for the period 1989 –1994 contained a number of provisions mandating support for the arts, which continued to bear the label “cultural patrimony” (Esteinou Madrid 16n). As in the previous decade, the administration of the government’s relationship to cinema was in the hands of the Instituto Mexicano de Cinematografía (imcine), whose director under Salinas was Ignacio Durán. As David Maciel explains, Durán’s appointment took place at a critical moment in which Salinas’s party, the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (pri), was struggling to maintain its credibility in the face of widespread accusations of fraud and corruption. Durán’s mission was to streamline and decentralize the state cinema apparatus and, in keeping with Salinas’s neoliberal ambitions, to encourage collaboration with the private sector and with foreign coproducers (Maciel 34).7 From its peak of state involvement during the Echeverría administration, the Mexican cinema, like other state enterprises, was increasingly privatized. As a result, foreign involvement increased, and so did the monopolistic practices by which ﬁlm production was absorbed and reduced to a function of vertically and horizontally integrated media corporations. In 1990, for example, the state-owned theater chain cotsa was to be sold; symptomatic of the state of affairs were speculations that its new owner would be either a Japanese company or the powerful media conglomerate Televisa.8 However, the state continued to produce and distribute ﬁlms, mainly through imcine and the Fondo de Fomento a la Calidad Cinematográﬁca (ffcc). During the Salinas sexenio, the state ﬁnanced ﬁfty-seven feature ﬁlms and thirty-one shorts, a marked increase over the low of previous years yet still a small proportion of total national production (“El estado ﬁnanció 57 ﬁlmes en 6 años” in Esto). What emerged as a result was a two-tiered system, dividing the “national” cinema into, on the one hand, a commercial industry infamous for its low-quality genre ﬁlms characterized by sex and violence and, on the other, a state sector devoted to more “serious” subject matter but extremely limited in terms of distribution and exhibition. While state-sponsored ﬁlms were more likely than commercial ﬁlms to go to national and international festivals and to win prizes, most were unlikely to be seen by large numbers of Mexicans. If Alfonso Arau’s 1991 Como agua para chocolate was a stunning exception, the commercial feature Juana la cubana (1994), starring Rosa Gloria Chagoyán and directed by Raúl Fernández Jr., was more representative of the rule: dismissed by critics, it nevertheless remained for weeks in 14

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Mexico City theaters in the fall of 1994, during which time seven of the state’s most promising new features premiered collectively during a single week, one per day at only one theater, in the annual program titled Hoy en el Cine Mexicano. This situation was exacerbated by the general decline of moviegoing as a practice, the closure of hundreds of movie theaters, and the rise of home video. While it is perhaps too unexamined a reaction on the part of ﬁlm scholars to see these developments as inherently negative, the results were concretely detrimental in the Mexican case, due mainly to the fact that the only producer able to respond effectively to the advent of the video age was Televisa, the broadcasting corporation formed in 1972 as a competitor of stateowned television and which quickly surpassed the latter in size and importance. The rise of video allowed the media giant to further consolidate its empire, cheaply producing ﬁlms for video as well as movie-theater distribution and using its privileged access to television to promote its products, which in many cases were themselves little more than promotional vehicles for its musical and television stars. During the 1980s, the government, apparently in an effort to avert ﬁlm piracy, awarded a concession to Televisa to open video rental outlets which would contract with foreign and national producers to distribute their ﬁlms. As Rodrigo Azuela reported in El Universal in October 1994, this caused many existing video rental outlets to close, creating a monopoly which resulted in a lack of choice for viewers as well as a potent threat to traditional exhibitors. In 1992, Televisa’s Videovisión was operating 772 video stores throughout the country, renting and selling almost exclusively U.S.-made products (García Canclini, “¿Habrá cine latinoamericano en el año 2000?: La cultura visual en la época del postnacionalismo” 28). That same year, the state-run cotsa theater chain began a painful process of liquidation that left many union workers unemployed and many theaters sold and converted to other uses; of the 99 Mexico City theaters operated by cotsa in 1990 (more than a third of which had been dedicated to exhibiting Mexican ﬁlms), 33 had been sold by July 1992, as had 164 more throughout the country.9 By 1994, the theaters that remained operational, now in private hands, suffered from notorious mismanagement and neglect. Of the exhibition spaces that remained, the majority were given over to Hollywood blockbusters or to pornography, with only a few devoting screen time to Mexican genre ﬁlms, most often action-adventure or features starring popular musical artists. With the modiﬁcation of the Ley de Cinematografía, introduction

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the requirement that Mexican ﬁlms be given 50 percent of screen time was abolished (although this had in effect already taken place with the liquidation of the cotsa theaters, the sole exhibition outlet for Mexican cinema in the 1980s). Thus, although the Cineteca Nacional and a few small cine-clubes continued to screen new and classic Mexican ﬁlms, and although pirate copies of ﬁlms such as Novaro’s Danzón (1990), Jaime Humberto Hermosillo’s La tarea (1991), and Jorge Fons’s Rojo amanecer (1990) could sometimes be found alongside porno and martial arts videos in street vendors’ stalls, “quality” ﬁlms were almost completely absent from the big and small screens. The most frequent complaint made by Mexican ﬁlmmakers was that their ﬁlms, once completed, never reached national audiences. In short, the conditions under which Cortés, Novaro, Rotberg, and others entered ﬁlm production were fraught with contradiction. Although it would be, in Meaghan Morris’s sardonic phrase, “too paranoid for words” (Morris 38) to suggest a link between the apparently declining fortunes of the ﬁlm medium and its rising accessibility to women (as Morris implies about the emergence of l’écriture féminin in Europe at a point when the status of the writer as intellectual was in decline), it is important to note that while women’s involvement in ﬁlm production quantitatively increased during the Salinas era, the increase took place overwhelmingly within the state sector and not the commercial ﬁlm industry. While stars such as Chagoyán and Gloria Trevi undoubtedly enjoyed a certain level of inﬂuence over the ﬁlms in which they appeared, the only woman to direct more than one commercial ﬁlm (apart from the university-based Fernández Violante) was María Elena Velasco, a comic actress better known as La India María. Velasco’s box-ofﬁce record as a star gave her the power to produce and direct her own ﬁlms, yet unlike the directors in this study, her clout derived from her acting success and not from her ambitions or abilities as a director per se. The majority of women ﬁlmmakers worked with state support, under the rubric of culture rather than commerce. Given its conﬁnement to a semi-marginal sector of ﬁlm production, it is tempting to see the growth of women’s involvement in ﬁlmmaking as a kind of tokenism not unlike that which was apparent in the electoral politics of the era, with the high visibility of a few masking the exclusion of many. Yet while this cynical analysis contains a great deal of truth, it also denies the real gains made by women during the past two decades, not only within the ﬁlm industry but within society as a whole. In fact, somewhere between the idealistic view in which the high number of female directors represents progress and

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equality and the pessimistic view that sees their presence as window dressing covering an essentially unchanged situation lie the complex realities that women in contemporary Mexico face. Representation of and by Women While gender roles in Mexican society were never as static and one-dimensional as outside observers have often believed, by the late 1980s, they were perhaps more complex than ever. As traditional views of women’s roles encountered modern, imported media images, and as uneven economic development meant that barefoot “India Marías” existed side by side with high-heeled businesswomen and bottle-blonde starlets (or at least their photographically reproduced images) on the streets of Latin America’s gigantic metropoli, women’s status became increasingly hard to deﬁne and evaluate. Women now had greater access to education and professional employment than ever before, as the case of the cinema indicates; Martínez de Velasco writes, referring to the fact that the government-run Centro de Capacitación Cinematográﬁca (ccc) admitted more women than men in 1987: [E]sto nos sugiere básicamente dos cosas: que hay un mayor número de mujeres interesadas en participar activamente en la realización cinematográﬁca y que, por otro lado, han desaparecido considerablemente los tabués que la consideraban con una capacidad menor a la del hombre. [This suggests to us basically two things: that there is a greater number of women interested in participating actively in ﬁlm directing, and that, on the other hand, the taboos that considered (women) to be less capable than men have considerably disappeared.] (99)

Yet if the number of women earning professional degrees has risen considerably in recent decades, so has the number of women whose way of life has been dramatically disrupted by national and global economic transformations. Most women who have entered the work force since the 1970s have not done so out of personal ambition but rather out of necessity; for example, with the increasing dependence of the Mexican economy on male migration to the United States, many women have been forced to sustain their families by entering the unstable informal sector or working in low-wage border industries. Thus the notion of women’s increased economic mobility must be taken with

introduction

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caution, understanding that the increased privileges enjoyed by a few women are paralleled by a far more widespread social and economic instability whose effect on the majority of women has been ambivalent at best. Beyond the question of economic opportunity, other issues that touch women’s lives are equally fraught with ambivalence. As the cinema itself demonstrates through its relentless reproduction of stereotypes, dominant ideas about women’s roles and in particular women’s sexuality still are governed by patriarchal ideology; for even if the increased display of women’s bodies and sexual behavior in the media is often interpreted as a challenge to conservative morality, the discursive framing of female sexuality negates any kind of protofeminist agency. To take just one example, Gloria Trevi, an outspoken advocate of single mothers, prostitutes, and independent women, was as well known in the early 1990s for her presidential ambitions as for her singing and her unusual “look” featuring wild hair and ripped stockings. Her refreshing candor earned Trevi the public admiration of Carlos Monsiváis and fem magazine; however, her calendars featuring nude photos were as much a part of her star apparatus as her records, and her politics, framed as an endearing eccentricity, were overshadowed in the fan press by commentary on her physical appearance. Another popular singer-actress, the Spaniard Marta Sánchez, was quoted often in the Mexican press complaining about being treated as a “sex symbol,” yet her success was clearly dependent on this very treatment. Among ordinary women as well as media superstars, sexuality has become, perhaps more than ever, a gray zone that is still dangerous despite its more liberal surface. Whereas young urban women learn via television, movies, and magazines that to be attractive is to be brazenly sexual, actual sexual activity is still condemned, in accordance with a double standard that winks at mujeriegos (promiscuous men) but has no equivalent term for women that is not synonymous with “whore.” Although the November 1994 issue of Nexos featured an article in which middle-class women talked frankly about their sexual experiences, desires, and fantasies (“Tres mujeres conversan” 64 –71), the juxtaposition of their discussion with male writers’ reports on prostitution and pornography (which, among other things, pointed to a disproportionate number of young rural migrants working as prostitutes in urban areas, women whose voices were not included in the magazine’s panorama of viewpoints) suggested that sexual freedom had more to do with class and gender than with any supposed progressiveness of the period.10 Furthermore, Mexican feminists have continued to struggle against the inﬂuence of the Vatican, particularly with respect to abortion; although hun18

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dreds of women die every year from illegal abortions, the practice has not been legalized, and few public ﬁgures have had the courage to advocate reform.11 Traditional conservatism in this area is compounded by the increasing power of the right-wing Partido de Acción Nacional (pan), which has manifested itself in reactionary legislation in many parts of the country, including curfews, laws criminalizing homosexuality, and even a ban on miniskirts for state employees in Guadalajara. Rape, domestic abuse, and sexual harassment also continue to be threats that many women face on a daily basis, threats that are sometimes intertwined with other forms of violence (such as the rape of indigenous women by military personnel in Chiapas as a technique of social control). Lack of health care and other basic services further curtails many women’s freedom, especially in rural areas; and lesbians, in addition to whatever other circumstances they may endure, are almost totally marginalized. Yet even given these deeply rooted social problems, the gains of the past thirty years should not be minimized; they are crucial to the kinds of representations that women have produced in the cinema. Before the advent of feminism, women’s voices were seldom heard outside the boundaries of the domestic sphere, within whose walls as well such everyday oppressions as spousal abuse and rape, unwanted pregnancy, and the stiﬂing of one’s own desires and ambitions were also supposed to be accepted in silence. Poor women bore the crushing burdens of ethnic and economic inequality, while wealthier ones were constrained by models of femininity that required them to be passive objects of desire. As one of Poniatowska’s informants in Massacre in Mexico put it, women’s lives were lived “on the sly” (17), their self-knowledge and expression relegated to the discursive level of secrets and intimacy. Such conﬁnement, of course, was productive—in the Foucauldian sense of producing concrete effects rather than simply repressing other potential outcomes—as well as negative. In Plotting Women, Franco writes that “women have long recognized the imaginary nature of the master narrative. Without the power to change the story or to enter into dialogue, they have resorted to subterfuge, digression, disguise, or deathly interruption.” Franco’s book, the assumptions and methodology of which inform the present project, focuses on situations she describes as “pre-feminist insofar as feminism presupposes that women are already participants in the public sphere of debate” (xxiii). From the mystic nuns of the colonial era to twentieth-century writers and artists confronting dominant ideology in relative isolation, to poor and workingclass women interviewed by academic researchers, she shows how women introduction

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have waged “struggles for interpretive power” in arenas far more conducive to their silence. In her ﬁnal chapter, she notes that with the emergence of feminism in the context of the social upheavals of the 1960s, women do begin to become participants in that public sphere—if not always on equal terms with men, at least in numbers sufﬁcient to exceed and nullify the aberrant categorization historically imposed on women intellectuals. The earliest women ﬁlmmakers, some of whose experiences I discuss in Chapter 1, improvised audacious strategies to fund and produce their work, strategies which succeeded in the short term but which ultimately sustained neither a single individual career nor a substantial female presence in the ﬁlm industry. The ﬁlmmakers of the 1960s and 1970s, allied with feminism and/or with social movements connected to the university and to organized labor, took advantage of technologies that allowed for production outside the ﬁlm industry and created ﬁlm as part of a larger political project—leaving the ﬁlm industry itself both male-dominated and patriarchal in its themes and modes of address (see Chapter 2). It is only during the late 1980s and the 1990s that feminism begins to make a limited but signiﬁcant impact on feature ﬁlm production and corollary institutions such as festivals, awards, and ﬁlm criticism. It is perhaps ironic that this change would occur during a period that already, with only a few years’ hindsight, may be considered one of the most devastating in Mexico’s modern history: the sexenio of Carlos Salinas de Gortari. As will become apparent in later chapters, the Salinas government occupies an ambivalent place in relation to the cinema in question. On the one hand, its policies undoubtedly encouraged and even enabled a surge in production, as I have noted. On the other, its perceived illegitimacy and its dismantling of protectionist economic structures in place since the Revolution (culminating in the signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1993) fostered a culture of opposition, one component of which was feminism and in which, to greater or lesser degrees, the young directors of the period participated. The Salinas Years: Culture of (Il)Legitimacy Historically, twentieth-century Mexican presidents have been hand-picked by their outgoing predecessors (a ritual called the dedazo), ratiﬁed by the party, and voted into ofﬁce with little meaningful opposition. But 1988, the year in which Los pasos de Ana and El secreto de Romelia were ﬁlmed, was different. The presidential election of that year was preceded by the strongest opposi20

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tion movement the country had seen in decades, led by Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, the former pri governor of Michoacan and son of Mexico’s most popular twentieth-century president, Lázaro Cárdenas (1934 –1940). Unlike the trajectory in any previous election, Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas’s dissident campaign picked up such steam that he came to be seen as a serious challenger to Salinas, the hand-picked pri candidate. The election itself was hotly contested, and when the results were announced, many Mexicans believed that Salinas only won through blatant fraud. Although Salinas would soon recover and even achieve astounding popularity on the international political scene, the dubious origins of his presidential authority would not be forgotten in Mexico. Just as the 1970s cultural policies of Luis Echeverría (discussed in Chapter 2) were an obvious attempt to regain the legitimacy among intellectuals and the middle class that the government had forfeited at Tlatelolco, so too did Salinas set out to afﬁrm his own legitimacy and that of his program of neoliberal reform by means of a concerted appeal to and via the cultural sector. I have mentioned the Salinas government’s overhaul of imcine and privatization of many of the state ﬁlm organisms created under Echeverría; examples from other ﬁelds also could be cited, such as the prestigious Mexico: Splendors of Thirty Centuries exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum in New York in 1990 or the U.S.-Mexico Fund for Culture launched in September 1991 as a joint effort of Bancomer, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Fondo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes. Although his strategies were in some ways the opposite of those used in the 1970s, it seems clear that Salinas’s effort to rejuvenate stateowned cultural institutions through partial or total privatization was rooted in a political motivation similar to that which had sparked Echeverría’s interventionist policies. The external debt that had begun to spiral out of control during the Echeverría years remained a determinant factor in economic policy, preventing any real attention to cultural development as a sociopolitical strategy; yet the regime that took power in the 1980s was no less dependent than its predecessors on ideological apparatuses, namely the mass media, to legitimize its reformist policies. As Philip Russell makes clear in Mexico Under Salinas, the key word of the era was “modernization.” The vision offered by Salinas was that of Mexico leaving behind its turbulent past and emerging, modern, capitalist, and democratic, into the First World. This vision, which incorporated the pronasol and procampo social welfare programs as a way of appeasing the large contingent of Mexicans excluded from modernization and alienated by moderintroduction

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nity, was aimed not only at the nation but also at foreign investors, whose capital would be the key to its success. For this reason, although privatization as a strategy may go against the notion of a centralized corporate state, the government had no choice but to invest in its cultural sector, for the image of Mexico in the world community had taken on a determining political importance. Trivial as it may initially seem, the presence of Mexican ﬁlms at international festivals served the interest of the state in an important way. Although superseded more and more by television and video, ﬁlm is still a “modern” medium, and ﬁlm festivals are symbolic “modern” events in which elite art culture openly encounters and celebrates commercial technology. Also, exotic images (namely so-called magical realism) offered help via a standardized medium to smooth over cultural differences, remaking underdevelopment as a salable commodity. Whereas Brazilian Cinema Novo director Glauber Rocha wrote his 1965 manifesto “An Esthetic of Hunger” denouncing a “formal exoticism that vulgarizes social problems” in order to appeal to the European consumer’s “nostalgia for primitivism” (69), Alfonso Arau’s comments to La Opinion in 1993 reﬂected the considerably more conciliatory vision of the 1990s: “El realismo mágico es una visión del mundo que no tiene ninguna otra cultura y que bien puede ser exportada por el cine mexicano hacia otros países” [Magic realism is a vision of the world that no other culture has and can readily be exported by Mexican cinema to other countries] (Rodríguez in La Opinion). Mexico’s ﬁlm exports to the United States and Europe could enhance its First World image while simultaneously capitalizing on its “otherness” and denying its condition of dependence. Thus the fact that the Mexican government funded ﬁlms which were rarely shown in Mexico was not as anomalous as it may seem, despite ﬁlmmakers’ complaints; while the control of information, an obvious priority within the country, was served by the obstacles to distribution and by state-sanctioned media monopolies, the circulation of creative and diverse ﬁlms outside national borders was equally useful to the neoliberal program. The key component of the government struggle for image control was the notion of democracy. Whereas in earlier eras the pri had presided without serious opposition over a kind of populist dictatorship, the emergence of opposition parties and the general rise of dissent dating back to the crisis of 1968 pressured the government to commit itself, at least superﬁcially, to a policy of pluralism and inclusion. Simultaneously, the Mexican government’s desire 22

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for free trade and foreign investment made it the prisoner of the U.S.-deﬁned “New World Order” in which economic concessions were tied to compliance with U.S. standards of human rights, deﬁned almost entirely in terms of multiparty elections. (The human rights standards deﬁned by organizations like Amnesty International that focus on issues such as torture, prison conditions, and censorship have been routinely ignored.) In 1988, the elections that brought Salinas to power were widely denounced as fraudulent, with many voters believing that only a convenient computer failure at the Federal Electoral Institute kept Cárdenas from claiming victory. Yet Salinas’s forceful response, continually attacking Cárdenas as a radical troublemaker whose goal was to destabilize the country, succeeded in defusing the crisis at least temporarily. While the strength of both Cárdenas’s center-left Partido de la Revolución Democrática (prd) and the right-wing pan could be seen as evidence of popular dissatisfaction with the pri regime, the ruling party wisely utilized this growing opposition as proof of its own tolerance and co-opted dissent wherever possible while still maintaining a ﬁrm hold on power. Although such strategies were transparent to Mexican observers, they seemed to accomplish their purpose of satisfying foreign critics, who in 1994 made the national elections into a litmus test of Mexico’s readiness for nafta and entrance into the First World community. Yet the persistence of opposition voices, culminating in the 1 January 1994 uprising in Chiapas, consistently undermined the salinista vision. Because Mexico had not, in fact, resolved its most pressing internal problems, the construction of “democracy,” represented paradoxically as the systemic containment of dissent, was the ruling party’s continuing ideological project. Among the demands that appeared to have inﬂuenced government strategies were those made by women, as members of feminist and popular social movements, for greater political involvement, access to resources, and control over their own lives. By the time of the 1994 elections, it was a well-publicized fact that more than half of the eligible voters were women. The campaigns of all three major presidential candidates addressed women to some degree, with the pri’s main campaign slogan being “bienestar para su familia” (well-being for your family). Moreover, women ran as presidential candidates for the Partido Popular Socialista and the Partido del Trabajo, and for senate and deputy seats in many regions of the country. Yet this emphasis on women’s participation would appear to have been largely cosmetic; not only was female illiteracy among the electorate a probintroduction

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lem noted by foreign and national election observers, but women’s political participation also remained minimal. From 1991 to 1994, for example, only 3 percent of senators and 8 percent of congressional deputies were women (Esperanza Tuñón 52); following the 1994 election, Mexico City assemblywoman Amalia García reported on the television program “60 Minutos” that out of the congressional deputies representing the three major parties, only 12 percent from the prd, 7 percent from the pan, and 5 percent from the pri were women. Moreover, few of the issues usually considered to be of special concern to women, such as abortion, rape, and domestic violence, were addressed in the 1994 campaigns, even by prominent female candidates (as Elvira Hernández Carballido complained in the feminist magazine fem).12 In this context, the sudden visibility of women ﬁlmmakers camouﬂaged women’s persistent exclusion from the political life of the nation as a whole. Was the new Mexican cinema, as its critics suggested, out of touch with national reality? In fact, many ﬁlms of the period demonstrated a cosmopolitan outlook that had few parallels in other arenas of discourse. From Jaime Humberto Hermosillo’s quirky, comic meditations on sexual intimacy in La tarea and other ﬁlms to the post-1960s angst of Gabriel Retes’s El bulto (1991) and Juan Carlos de Llaca’s En el aire (1993), and from the new age mysticism of Nicolás Echeverría’s Cabeza de Vaca (1990) to Guillermo del Toro’s vampire fantasy Cronos (1993), the content of many critically acclaimed ﬁlms of the 1990s seemed to move away from the quest for mexicanidad, replacing cultural speciﬁcity with a certain generational universality. Yet cinema’s continued direct and indirect dependence on the state was sharply revealed at the end of 1994, when the collapse of the peso brought the ﬁlm “renaissance” to a grinding halt and, in doing so, exposed the actual fragility of the situation. The virtual cessation of state-supported ﬁlm production in 1995 laid bare what should have been clear all along: that the “new Mexican cinema,” with its cadre of women directors at the forefront, was intimately linked to and dependent on the neoliberal economic project instigated by the government of Miguel de la Madrid (1980 –1988) and accelerated under that of Salinas. Although Salinas’s support for the ﬁlm sector was not the only factor enabling women’s emergence as directors, the end of his sexenio and the economic crisis that followed effectively put an end to this optimistic period, plunging the cinema—along with the rest of the country—into a state of uncertainty that at the time of writing shows no signs of coming to an end. In Bienvenido/ Welcome (1994), veteran actor/director Gabriel Retes paro-

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dies the situation facing ﬁlmmakers in the 1990s. His movie depicts a group of Mexican ﬁlmmakers working on an independent feature about AIDS—made entirely in English for the export market. With its nonexistent budget and relentless bad luck, however, the ﬁlm-within-the-ﬁlm is hardly competitive, its good intentions derailed by its quixotic post-nafta ambitions. While the new Mexican cinema—much like the new Mexican democracy—undeniably introduced themes and topics formerly excluded from the national screen, it was a long way from being what commentators such as García Canclini called for: a cultural catalyst capable of meeting the challenge of economic and cultural transnationalization (“¿Habrá cine latinoamericano?” 28). Toward an Otro Cine/Otro Mundo In his 1993 essay “¿Habrá cine latinoamericano?” 13 García Canclini pointed out that if national identity had always been a construct, its foundation in material reality had become much more precarious in the 1990s, un tiempo de globalización e interculturalidad, de coproduciones multinacionales y Cadenas de las Américas, de acuerdos de libre comercio e integraciones regionales, donde los mensajes, los artistas y los capitales atravesan constantemente las fronteras. [a time of globalization and interculturalism, of multinational coproductions and Cadenas de las Américas (a satellite television network), of free trade agreements and regional integrations, where messages, artists, and capital constantly cross borders.] (28)

For women, who had long been marginalized from constructs of national identity and the institutions in which they were concretized, these developments may have been even more ambivalent, bringing new dilemmas but also hopeful apertures. As I have sought to indicate in these introductory pages, the present text is not intended as a celebration of national or women’s cinema; rather, it seeks to address the contributions that women have made through the cinema to projects and processes of cultural reconversion and democratization in a complex historical moment. Such contributions, I will argue, have been made from an explicitly gendered perspective; however, rather than try to isolate the nebulous and endlessly debatable traces of women’s “difference,” I have followed de Lauretis’s suggestion to feminist theorists that “the emphasis must be shifted . . . toward

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the wider public sphere of cinema as a social technology: we must develop our understanding of cinema’s implication in other modes of cultural representation and its possibilities of both production and counterproduction of social vision” (Technologies of Gender 134). What I hope to demonstrate are the ways in which women ﬁlmmakers have attempted to “construct other objects and subjects of vision, and to formulate the conditions of representability of another social subject” (135). It should be noted that the ﬁlms analyzed in this book are only a few of the ﬁlms made by women during the late 1980s and the 1990s. In order to encompass multiple areas of investigation, such as production history, content, and reception, as comprehensively as possible, I have limited my analyses to a small number of feature ﬁlms which received relatively wide attention due to their presence in competitions and festivals, in most cases generating broad coverage in both the mainstream and the specialized press. The choice to focus exclusively on narrative feature ﬁlms meant that many relevant and interesting texts, such as the experimental video work of Ximena Cuevas and the documentary production of Maricarmen de Lara, Gloria Ribé, and Alejandra Islas, among others, had to be excluded. Yet I believe that the examples chosen not only show the range of women’s production (across genres, formal approaches, and points of view) but also successfully address the issue of gendered national and/or “postnational” identity. As Franco might argue, they represent “diverse conﬁgurations of the struggle for interpretive power” in contemporary Mexico—a nation wrestling with the contradictions of a postnational or transnational age (Plotting Women xii). Their ﬁlms illuminate forgotten or obscure aspects of Mexican history, analyze the crises of their times with humor and insight, and begin to postulate and explore new and liberating identities— even as they confront the limits and contradictions of their particular mode of production. At a time when the culture industry was rapidly expanding and the images and sounds of ﬁlm and television began to surpass the printed word in impact and inﬂuence, the work of these ﬁlmmakers raised serious and provocative questions about gender, commercial and popular culture, collective identity, and particularly the role of the woman artist in a time of globalization and national transformation. By transforming the central myths and narratives of national cinema, they attacked the patriarchal and exclusionary ideologies which that cinema once upheld. Their visible interventions in public discourse began to provide Mexico with a critical vision of its present and with what García Canclini described as necessary for its future: “una iconología 26

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electrónica que corresponda a la redeﬁnición actual de la identidad” [an electronic iconology that would correspond to the current redeﬁnition of identity] (“¿Habrá cine latinoamericano?” 33). The ﬁlms they produced were not answers or manifestos but perhaps guideposts, pointing audiences toward what Matilde Landeta called not only an “other cinema,” but an “other world.”

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How did they succeed in introducing their contraband through such jealously guarded borders? But above all, what was it that impelled them so irresistibly to risk being smugglers? Because what is certain is that the majority of women are quite tranquil in their houses and in their limits without organizing gangs to mock the law. They accept the law, observe it, respect it. They consider it adequate. Rosario Castellanos 1

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Trespassers Women Directors before 1960

In spite of a sustained surge of interest during the past twenty years, the presence of women in the Mexican cinema before the 1960s is a phenomenon still somewhat shrouded in mystery. Thanks to the work of numerous ﬁlm scholars, we now have a litany of names: Mimi Derba, Adriana and Dolores Ehlers, Candida Beltrán, La Duquesa Olga, Alice Rahon, Adela Sequeyro, and ﬁnally, Matilde Landeta, who unlike her predecessors reemerges to become the mentor and grande dame of an entirely new generation of women directors. But in spite of the growing body of research, these names remain little more than ephemeral sparks in an otherwise unrelenting darkness. For these ﬁlmmakers’ work, like so much of early Mexican cinema, is mostly lost; the silent period in particular scarcely exists outside of memory and extratextual documentation, excavation of which has only just begun. Moreover, what we know of these women’s lives does not help us to formulate a unitary notion of “women’s cinema.” Their works are separated in time and disparate in content and approach. Unlike the feminist collectives and student “generations” who would follow, they seem to have worked in isolation from other women, although they often participated in the vanguard political and/or artistic movements of their times. Existing testimony indicates that their desires to make ﬁlms were overwhelmingly personal struggles, not 31

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intentional feminist acts. And even though they nearly always worked within supportive artistic communities, their cinematic efforts were rarely sustained. Candida Beltrán, for instance, made only one ﬁlm, El secreto de la abuela (1928), based on her own experiences as an orphan and advocating responsible paternity; the Chilean-born Eva Limiñana, also known as La Duquesa Olga, collaborated on many ﬁlms with her husband José Bohr but retired from cinema after a ﬁlm she codirected, Mi lupe y mi caballo (1942), was suspended in mid-production for lack of resources, then completed but shelved. French expatriate Alice Rahon’s experimental ﬁlm The Magician (c.1947), made in collaboration with her husband Edward FitzGerald, a set designer for Buñuel, was similarly derailed by funding problems and never exhibited.2 Given this lack of continuity, it would be far too simplistic to group disparate ﬁlms together by virtue of the directors’ sex and proclaim them “women’s cinema.” Yet simply to append them to the larger chronology of Mexican ﬁlm history would be to ignore the very real battles women fought to be able to make ﬁlms within a male-dominated industry as well as the markedly idiosyncratic sensibilities that surviving ﬁlm texts reveal, sensibilities quite distinct from the prevailing cinematic models of their respective eras. Their struggles and innovations paved the way for the entrance of women into Mexican cinema many years later—although the relation should not be seen as a teleological progression. My intention in this chapter is not to create a false lineage or to pay homage to the achievements of a few exceptional women. Rather, understanding the ways in which ﬁlmmaking has been conditioned by social, national, and industrial formations and the ways in which these have been affected by changing constructs of gender in different eras will help put into clearer historical perspective the gains, losses, struggles, and achievements of the 1990s. To this end, I have taken as a point of departure the question posed by Rosario Castellanos in “Sobre cultura femenina,” her master’s thesis in philosophy written at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (unam) in 1950: Given the overwhelming odds against them, how and why did women choose to trespass on the domain of male-dominated culture and to become producers themselves of women-centered cultural “contraband”? Although Castellanos did not speciﬁcally address the role of women in her country’s then-ﬂourishing industrial cinema, her thesis and subsequent writing posed a formidable challenge to dominant views regarding women’s creative agency. For example, in his inﬂuential essay collection The Labyrinth of Solitude, also published in 1950, Octavio Paz characterized women’s role in culture as essen32

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tially passive; descendants of La Malinche, whose participation as the translator and mistress of the conquistador Hernán Cortés was instrumental in effecting and consolidating Spanish rule in Mesoamerica, Mexican women were transmitters of values in which they themselves did not necessarily believe (Paz 35). Their role in perpetuating constructs of national identity was crucial, yet they themselves were excluded from that identity. Although for Paz this exclusion had its origins in the Conquest, he implicitly attributed it as well to the female condition or “taint” that “resides in her sex” (85). Castellanos, in what would prove to be a prescient counterpoint to Paz’s stiﬂing analysis, agreed that women were for the most part complicit in maintaining a patriarchal regime. What bothered her, however, was that if the law of women’s exclusion was total, how was it that some women eluded its mechanisms of control? That is, if culture was “una especie de enfermedad que, como la hemoﬁlia, las mujeres no padecen pero transmiten” [a type of illness that, like hemophilia, women do not suffer from, but transmit] (“Sobre cultura femenina” 19), how had women like Sappho, Virginia Woolf, and Gabriela Mistral engaged in literary or cultural activity at all? How and, most importantly, why had they dared to become contrabandistas, trespassers in a realm deﬁned and governed by men? While Castellanos focused on literary production, the same question can be put to the cinema. To date, much writing about women in Mexican ﬁlm has dwelt on their systematic exclusion; feminist scholars have pointed out that through a Manichean system in which women have been represented only as whores or as mothers, the complex experiences of Mexican women have been reduced to iconic, impossible models of Womanhood that uphold national and patriarchal ideologies at the expense of female agency and autonomy. The small number of women ﬁlmmakers—Marcela Fernández Violante, writing in 1987, could name only nine in sixty years, although subsequent research has recovered several more—is deplored and the recent augmentation of this ﬁgure seen as welcome and overdue. But the implications of their inﬁltration, their smuggling and border crossing, have yet to be explored in detail. While we are surely no longer satisﬁed with the biological determinist hypothesis Castellanos offered in “Sobre cultura femenina” (which she herself would revise substantially in her later work), an investigation of the circumstances surrounding their often short-lived and conﬂict-ridden careers can help us to address her provocative question and thus to begin to develop an historical understanding of the sources of and the limitations on women’s creative agency in Mexican cinema. t r e s pa s s e r s

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In the pages that follow, I brieﬂy examine three cases of ﬁlm production by women during the ﬁrst half of the century: the Ehlers sisters in the 1910s and 1920s, Adela Sequeyro in the 1930s, and Matilde Landeta in the late 1940s. Differing from one another in important ways, these cases are especially instructive because of the unique conﬁgurations each inhabited with respect to the ﬁlm industry and to the ideology of the nation-state. While the ﬁlms of Dolores and Adriana Ehlers are lost to us, their multifaceted careers and especially their relationship to the government of Venustiano Carranza provide a fascinating example of the possibilities and the constraints that existed in cinema’s entrepreneurial period. In the ﬁlms of Adela “Perlita” Sequeyro, on the other hand, the nation-state is a structuring absence; her ﬁlms instead reﬂect a fascination with the European cinema and with modes of storytelling reminiscent of the silent screen, infused with an explicitly feminine sensibility. Finally, Matilde Landeta’s work is directly and centrally about the construct of national identity and about women’s contradictory place— or at least, the place of certain exceptional women—within that construct. The very speciﬁcity and singularity of these cases, as opposed to an ideal or archetypal notion of women’s cinema, is what makes them useful for the present study; for it is not their particular textual strategies or modes of production but rather their constant engagement with constructs of gender, nation, and identity that would be inherited by the women ﬁlmmakers of the 1990s. Despite their differences, each of these ﬁlmmakers can be seen as a trespasser in a labyrinth not of her own making, battling the unique professional solitude faced by women whose insistence on creative expression ﬂies in the face of entire systems of gender and power, systems which seek to exclude women from the public sphere and count on their passivity and complicity. The Ehlers Sisters: Entrepreneurship and State Patronage The cinema in Mexico was born at the turn of the century during the period of dictatorship and development known as the Porﬁriato: a symbol of modernity and progress, much like the railroads that had begun to connect disparate regions into an almost cohesive nation-state. More uniquely, the medium grew to maturity during the Revolution of 1910 –1920, whose events it would document and whose epic themes it would obsessively revisit up to the present day. As in the rest of the world, ﬁlmmaking at its inception was an essentially artisanal enterprise; as John King points out, Pathé did not build studios

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in Mexico as it did elsewhere, leaving the ﬁeld open for Mexicans whose passions and/or entrepreneurial impulses were roused by the magical-seeming French technology (King, Magical Reels 15). Among those who answered the call was Salvador Toscano, whose footage of the Revolution would be compiled in 1950 into a full-length documentary, Memorias de un mexicano, by his daughter, Carmen Toscano. In the early 1900s, Toscano’s movie house, featuring Lumière equipment and ﬁlms, and Enrique Rosas’s Pathé-equipped salon competed for audiences in Mexico City; both men also made ﬁlms, which they exhibited alongside the European imports (Mora, Mexican Cinema 7– 8). In the wake of their success, many other small-scale ﬁlm producers emerged; among them were the sisters Adriana and Dolores Ehlers, who not only were among the ﬁrst women ﬁlmmakers in Mexico but also were key in implementing the system of state patronage of cinema that is still in place today. Historical data on the Ehlers sisters is scant, although Patricia Martínez’s research on Dolores in the mid-1980s, included in Directoras de cine, adds a more detailed perspective to the account given by Gabriel Ramírez in his 1989 Crónica del cine mudo mexicano. Ramírez based his account on several revealing newspaper articles, the same sources subsequently utilized by Patricia Torres in her 1995 conference paper “Las primeras realizadoras en México” and in other articles. Martínez’s account is more anecdotal, due to the fact that she had access to Dolores Ehlers’s memoirs, which, at the time of writing, remain unpublished. A brief unsigned article published in Cuadernos de la Cineteca Nacional, attributed by Torres to Eugenia Meyer, includes the Ehlerses’ ﬁlmography. The following section is based on these accounts. As related by these historians, the very biographies of the Ehlers sisters exceed the boundaries of conventional representations of women’s roles in the Revolution, for far from being women in service to men in service to a cause, they appear to have participated in political activity on their own account. As Martínez explains, they grew up in Veracruz in the house of their widowed mother and a godmother that before the fall of Porﬁrio Díaz was the site of clandestine meetings aimed at freeing political prisoners. Along with politics, Adriana and Dolores appear to have been introduced early on to the cinema and screened movies in their home for neighborhood children. Both sisters worked outside the home to aid their mother; Adriana got a job in a photo studio, where she began to learn what would become her lifelong trade. Later, the sisters opened a studio in their home.

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As enterprising young photographers, the sisters attended an ofﬁcial ceremony in 1915 at which they photographed Venustiano Carranza. Ramírez speculates about this encounter: En un ámbito esencialmente masculino, tuvo que causar una enorme impresión la audacia de esas jóvenes lidiando con sus incómodas vestimentas y su insistencia en plantar esos pesados cajones ante el presidente para fotograﬁarlo. [In an essentially masculine context, the audacity of those young women battling with their uncomfortable outﬁts and their insistence in planting those heavy boxes in front of the president to photograph him must have made an enormous impression.] (110)

Whatever the public’s reaction to the Ehlerses’ “trespassing” might have been, Carranza was apparently impressed and awarded them a grant to study in the United States. In Boston, Washington D.C., and New York, the sisters studied photography and cinematography. During World War I, they worked for the U.S. government ﬁlming subjects related to soldiers’ health. The ﬂuidity of the boundaries between production and exhibition, between ﬁlm itself as a product and the technology required to proﬁt from it, and the openness of the ﬁeld as a nascent industry all apparently worked in their favor; not only could they cross borders of gender and geography that would be much more rigid only a few years later, but they also could successfully combine their technical training with business acumen and political connections. In 1919, they returned to Mexico as the exclusive representatives of the Nicholas Power Company, a projector manufacturer, and were entrusted with government money for purchase of equipment for Mexican ﬁlm labs. Shortly thereafter, Adriana was named head of the federal Film Censorship Department and Dolores head of the Film Department, major positions in what was to become the labyrinthine bureaucracy of the government ﬁlm sector. The Ehlerses’ tenure coincided with the heyday of the U.S. ﬁlm industry’s “greaser” ﬁlms, whose racist content had been given political overtones during the Revolution in accordance with U.S. foreign policy and with an ongoing debate regarding the wisdom or folly of U.S. intervention in Mexico (Orellana 4 – 6). As Carranza’s centralized government coalesced out of the decade’s fragmentation and chaos, it determined to improve Mexico’s cinematic image at home and abroad. In July 1919, Adriana Ehlers announced the production of a series of ﬁlms that would show the “best and most interesting” aspects of the country, in contrast to the work of producers who, in her 36

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view, had more often elected to show the most extreme examples of poverty and misery (Ramírez 111). The web of governmental regulation and censorship grew; exhibitors were now required to pay fees and solicit ofﬁcial approval of material shown, while producers had to obtain authorization before ﬁlming in the capital. The brunt of reaction fell on the Ehlerses, who were accused of exercising arbitrary judgment and of lacking artistic training and sensitivity (111). Besides working with the Carranza regime as bureaucrats, the Ehlerses were part of the group which founded the ﬁrst ﬁlm industry union, the Unión de Empleados Confederados del Cinematógrafo, afﬁliated with the Confederación Revolucionaria Obrera Mexicana (crom); they also produced ﬁlms for the union. Although the extent of their involvement with the union remains to be investigated, the afﬁliation of cinema workers with crom has important implications not only for our understanding of the Ehlers sisters but also for the development of the ﬁlm industry as a whole. As urban historian Diane E. Davis relates, the Carranza years were difﬁcult and crucial ones for the Mexican labor movement. Workers in Mexico City had originally organized under the umbrella of the Casa del Obrero Mundial, which became increasingly divided between a conservative-moderate sector, generally corresponding to the artisanal or white-collar occupations, and a more radical wing generally associated with industrial workers. Whereas the latter group tended to focus on workplace issues, favor radical tactics such as strikes, and be internationalist and often Communist in ideology, the former was strongly connected to Mexico City, organized around urban services such as transport and housing, sided with Carranza against Zapata and Villa, and was disposed to negotiation and compromise. As these divisions widened, the Casa split into two new organizations: the moderate wing became the crom in 1918 and, due to its collaboration with the government, quickly rose to power. In 1921, the leftist wing founded the Confederación General de Trabajadores (cgt), an openly Communist organization that, unlike the crom, suffered severe repression throughout the period (Davis 45 –59). The ﬁlm industry’s afﬁliation with the crom is hardly surprising, for the industry of the 1910s shared many of the characteristics that Davis describes as common among crom-afﬁliated professions. As the industry was still largely artisanal and entrepreneurial, ﬁlmmakers such as the Ehlerses were independent businesspeople for whom proletariat struggles were remote. Socially and economically they were mainly members of the urban petit-bourgeoisie with little relation to or sympathy for the campesino movements in the countryside, t r e s pa s s e r s

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which (in contrast) many radical urban workers supported. Finally, their ability and willingness to work with the government propelled them into positions of power within the federal bureaucracy such that they played a small yet signiﬁcant role in determining the direction of the postrevolutionary nation, through media regulation, censorship, and production of propaganda. The strong relationship between the government and the industry, particularly its unions, which would later come to be seen as obstacles to rather than promoters of creativity and innovation in the cinema, almost certainly has its roots in this period. The Ehlerses were key ﬁgures in the foundation of the modern state-cinema ediﬁce. But with the consolidation of government control (however incomplete it probably was in practice) over the cinema, the tradition began by which the ofﬁces overseeing ﬁlm production, distribution, and exhibition, like all governmental bodies, were linked to the administration of a particular president. Although full-blown presidencialismo had not yet developed in the still-fragile postrevolutionary environment, a political conﬂict between the Ehlerses and Alvaro Obregón (rooted in their friendship with an Obregón rival) cost them their jobs when the latter took power in 1920. Undaunted, they opened their own lab with their mother as partner, founded a production company, Revistas Ehlers, which produced and sold newsreel footage between 1922 and 1929, and established a shop that repaired and sold projectors which went on to last ﬁfty years. The nature of the Ehlerses’ ﬁlm output can be ascertained from their titles: ﬁlms such as La industria del petróleo, Las aguas potables de la ciudad de México, and Real España vs. Real Madrid were clearly ﬁlms made under contract rather than products of personal inspiration. Having lost Carranza’s ﬁnancial backing upon his death, they almost went bankrupt but were able to recuperate their losses by contracting with the Modelo brewery to ﬁlm a major soccer match at which, according to Dolores, their presence on the ﬁeld attracted more attention than the game itself (Martínez de Velasco 37). Although Dolores eventually quit working due to illness, Adriana stayed involved in ﬁlm until her death in 1972. To what extent did being women affect the Ehlerses’ careers? One can really only speculate, for apart from anecdotes such as that about the soccer game culled by Martínez from Dolores’s unpublished memoirs, gender is not a theme overtly addressed in existing documentation of their lives. Growing up in a female-headed household, within which they were given economic responsibility and exposure to political activism at an early age, may well have 38

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fostered the independent spirit that enabled them to study and work abroad, run businesses, and move about in tense wartime situations and in high political circles. The history of their family’s opposition to the Díaz regime, coupled with the fact that their biggest opportunity had been given to them by Carranza, helps account for their concern for the nation and its image in national and foreign cinema. But nothing in their biographies fully explains the anomaly of their acceptance and even prominence in a ﬁeld that would soon be all but closed to women. In January 1920, a government ofﬁcial interviewed in the newspaper El Universal inadvertently revealed the kind of biases the Ehlers sisters must have routinely encountered. Defending a censorship body called the Consejo de Censura, the ofﬁcial, Aguirre Berlanga, pointed out that no está integrado por señoritas, sino por respetables caballeros de ilustración bastante para que puedan juzgar en materia artística y moral. Uno de ellos es ingeniero de bien probada cultura; otro profesor de larga experiencia; el tercero es persona respetable. Todos tienen más de treinta años y son padres de familia. [it is not made up of señoritas, but rather of respectable gentlemen enlightened enough to be able to pass judgment on artistic and moral matters. One of them is an engineer of proven culture; another a professor of considerable experience; the third is a respectable person. All of them are over thirty years old and are heads of families.] (quoted in Ramírez 112)

The fact that none of the committee members apparently had links to the cinema did not matter: what counted for this ofﬁcial was their respectability, their class status, and above all, their gender. Yet it is difﬁcult to understand why a government unwilling to trust “señoritas” with making judgments about ﬁlm content would have placed the departments of ﬁlm and of censorship in female hands—and why an employee of one of those departments was seemingly unaware of or unwilling to mention this fact. Aguirre Berlanga was not the last to overlook the Ehlerses’ contribution. On the basis of published testimony, it appears that they were not even known until recently; for instance, neither Marcela Fernández Violante, in her 1987 essay “Las directoras de la industria cinematográﬁca nacional,” nor Landeta, in a 1980 interview in which she cited as predecessors Alice Guy, Germaine Dulac, Dorothy Arzner, and Ida Lupino, appeared to have been aware of their existence.3 As Torres comments, “Un caso por demás lamentable sería el de éstas hermanas, perdidas en la burocracia gubermental y desaparecidas del ámt r e s pa s s e r s

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bito cinematográﬁco repentinamente” [A too-regrettable case is that of these sisters, lost in governmental bureaucracy and disappeared abruptly from the cinema ﬁeld] (“Las primeras realizadoras” 6). Better known than the Ehlerses is Mimi Derba, the stage actress who cofounded Azteca Films with Enrique Rosas and who was involved in the production of ﬁve features during 1