In the early decades of the twentieth-century, Main Street was the
heart of Los Angeles's Mexican immigrant community. It was also the
hub for an extensive, largely forgotten film culture that thrived
in L.A. during the early days of Hollywood. Drawing from rare
archives, including the city's Spanish-language newspapers, Colin
Gunckel vividly demonstrates how this immigrant community pioneered
a practice of transnational media convergence, consuming films from
Hollywood and Mexico, while also producing fan publications,
fiction, criticism, music, and live theatrical events. Mexico on
Main Street locates this film culture at the center of a series of
key debates concerning national identity, ethnicity, class, and the
role of Mexicans within Hollywood before World War II. As Gunckel
shows, the immigrant community's cultural elite tried to rally the
working-class population toward the cause of Mexican nationalism,
while Hollywood sought to position them as part of a lucrative
transnational Latin American market. Yet ironically, both Hollywood
studios and Mexican American cultural elites used the media to
present negative depictions of working-class Mexicans, portraying
their behaviors as a threat to middle-class respectability. Rather
than simply depicting working-class immigrants as pawns of these
power players, however, Gunckel reveals their active participation
in the era's film culture. Gunckel's innovative approach combines
media studies, urban history, and ethnic studies to reconstruct a
distinctive, richly layered immigrant film culture. Mexico on Main
Street demonstrates how a site-specific study of cultural and
ethnic issues challenges our existing conceptions of U.S. film
history, Mexican cinema, and the history of Los Angeles.
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