La India María
Title | La India María PDF eBook |
Author | Seraina Rohrer |
Publisher | University of Texas Press |
Pages | 233 |
Release | 2017-12-20 |
Genre | Performing Arts |
ISBN | 1477313451 |
La India María—a humble and stubborn indigenous Mexican woman—is one of the most popular characters of the Mexican stage, television, and film. Created and portrayed by María Elena Velasco, La India María has delighted audiences since the late 1960s with slapstick humor that slyly critiques discrimination and the powerful. At the same time, however, many critics have derided the iconic figure as a racist depiction of a negative stereotype and dismissed the India María films as exploitation cinema unworthy of serious attention. By contrast, La India María builds a convincing case for María Elena Velasco as an artist whose work as a director and producer—rare for women in Mexican cinema—has been widely and unjustly overlooked. Drawing on extensive interviews with Velasco, her family, and film industry professionals, as well as on archival research, Seraina Rohrer offers the first full account of Velasco's life; her portrayal of La India María in vaudeville, television, and sixteen feature film comedies, including Ni de aquí, ni de allá [Neither here, nor there]; and her controversial reception in Mexico and the United States. Rohrer traces the films' financing, production, and distribution, as well as censorship practices of the period, and compares them to other Mexploitation films produced at the same time. Adding a new chapter to the history of a much-understudied period of Mexican cinema commonly referred to as "la crisis," this pioneering research enriches our appreciation of Mexploitation films.
Mexican Cinema
Title | Mexican Cinema PDF eBook |
Author | Carl J. Mora |
Publisher | Univ of California Press |
Pages | 284 |
Release | 1989 |
Genre | Performing Arts |
ISBN | 9780520043046 |
The author's main reason for writing this book, however, is simply to provide an introduction to the Mexican commercial cinema for American and other English-speaking readers. Although the United States has been, and continues to be, a major foreign market for Mexican movies, the overwhelming majority of Americans are unaware of them. Mexican films are restricted to the Hispanic theater circuits and shown without English subtitles; therefore anyone wishing to see a Mexican movie would have to be fairly fluent in Spanish. Such a requisite effectively eliminates almost the entire general audience in the United States from exposure to Mexican cinema.
Information Services on Latin America
Title | Information Services on Latin America PDF eBook |
Author | |
Publisher | |
Pages | 1006 |
Release | 1988-10 |
Genre | |
ISBN |
Clippings of Latin American political, social and economic news from various English language newspapers.
Latin American Research Review
Title | Latin American Research Review PDF eBook |
Author | |
Publisher | |
Pages | 884 |
Release | 1990 |
Genre | Electronic journals |
ISBN |
An interdisciplinary journal that publishes original research and surveys of current research on Latin America and the Caribbean.
Cantinflas and the Chaos of Mexican Modernity
Title | Cantinflas and the Chaos of Mexican Modernity PDF eBook |
Author | Jeffrey M. Pilcher |
Publisher | Scholarly Resources, Incorporated |
Pages | 292 |
Release | 2001 |
Genre | Biography & Autobiography |
ISBN |
Why was Cantinflas, actor Mario Moreno's film persona, the most popular movie star in Mexican history? Was it because virtually every Mexican--rich or poor, Creole or Indian, man or woman, young or old--could identify with him? A fast-talking, nonsensical character, Cantinflas helped Mexicans embrace their rich mestizo identity and cope with the difficulties of modernization. For thirty years he served as a "weapon of the weak, " satirizing corrupt officials and pompous elites who victimized Mexico's urban poor. Cantinflas and the Chaos of Mexican Modernity is a revealing probe into the life and times of Mario Moreno. Latin America's most famous film star from the 1940s to the 1970s.
Women Filmmakers in Mexico
Title | Women Filmmakers in Mexico PDF eBook |
Author | Elissa Rashkin |
Publisher | University of Texas Press |
Pages | 311 |
Release | 2001-04-15 |
Genre | Performing Arts |
ISBN | 0292771096 |
Women filmmakers in Mexico were rare until the 1980s and 1990s, when women began to direct feature films in unprecedented numbers. Their films have won acclaim at home and abroad, and the filmmakers have become key figures in contemporary Mexican cinema. In this book, Elissa Rashkin documents how and why women filmmakers have achieved these successes, as she explores how the women's movement, film studies programs, governmental film policy, and the transformation of the intellectual sector since the 1960s have all affected women's filmmaking in Mexico. After a historical overview of Mexican women's filmmaking from the 1930s onward, Rashkin focuses on the work of five contemporary directors—Marisa Sistach, Busi Cortés, Guita Schyfter, María Novaro, and Dana Rotberg. Portraying the filmmakers as intellectuals participating in the public life of the nation, Rashkin examines how these directors have addressed questions of national identity through their films, replacing the patriarchal images and stereotypes of the classic Mexican cinema with feminist visions of a democratic and tolerant society.
Why Civil Resistance Works
Title | Why Civil Resistance Works PDF eBook |
Author | Erica Chenoweth |
Publisher | Columbia University Press |
Pages | 451 |
Release | 2011-08-09 |
Genre | Political Science |
ISBN | 0231527489 |
For more than a century, from 1900 to 2006, campaigns of nonviolent resistance were more than twice as effective as their violent counterparts in achieving their stated goals. By attracting impressive support from citizens, whose activism takes the form of protests, boycotts, civil disobedience, and other forms of nonviolent noncooperation, these efforts help separate regimes from their main sources of power and produce remarkable results, even in Iran, Burma, the Philippines, and the Palestinian Territories. Combining statistical analysis with case studies of specific countries and territories, Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan detail the factors enabling such campaigns to succeed and, sometimes, causing them to fail. They find that nonviolent resistance presents fewer obstacles to moral and physical involvement and commitment, and that higher levels of participation contribute to enhanced resilience, greater opportunities for tactical innovation and civic disruption (and therefore less incentive for a regime to maintain its status quo), and shifts in loyalty among opponents' erstwhile supporters, including members of the military establishment. Chenoweth and Stephan conclude that successful nonviolent resistance ushers in more durable and internally peaceful democracies, which are less likely to regress into civil war. Presenting a rich, evidentiary argument, they originally and systematically compare violent and nonviolent outcomes in different historical periods and geographical contexts, debunking the myth that violence occurs because of structural and environmental factors and that it is necessary to achieve certain political goals. Instead, the authors discover, violent insurgency is rarely justifiable on strategic grounds.