The White Indians of Mexican Cinema: Racial Masquerade throughout the Golden Age

Mónica García Blizzard is Assistant Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese.

The White Indians of Mexican Cinema theorizes the development of a unique form of racial masquerade—the representation of Whiteness as Indigeneity—during the Golden Age of Mexican cinema, from the 1930s to the 1950s. Adopting a broad decolonial perspective while remaining grounded in the history of local racial categories, Mónica García Blizzard argues that this trope works to reconcile two divergent discourses about race in postrevolutionary Mexico: the government-sponsored celebration of Indigeneity and mestizaje (or the process of interracial and intercultural mixing), on the one hand, and the idealization of Whiteness, on the other. Close readings of twenty films and primary source material illustrate how Mexican cinema has mediated race, especially in relation to gender, in ways that project national specificity, but also reproduce racist tendencies with respect to beauty, desire, and protagonism that survive to this day. This sweeping survey illuminates how Golden Age films produced diverse, even contradictory messages about the place of Indigeneity in the national culture.

“Mónica García Blizzard's first book is a rich and revelatory project … This text is useful for Latin American and Anglophone scholars who work at the intersection of race, ethnicity, gender, and film studies, as the book offers a significant sociohistorical contextualization of the racialized and gendered patterns of colonial power in Mexican cinema.” Film Quarterly

“Well written, tightly argued, and thoroughly researched, The White Indians of Mexican Cinema promises to make a lively and important contribution to studies of Indigenous representation in Mexican cinema.” Dolores Tierney, author of New Transnationalisms in Contemporary Latin American Cinemas