American Heroines by Kay Bailey Hutchison

Author:Kay Bailey Hutchison
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780061875359
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2009-01-25T05:00:00+00:00

Latina Performers

LATINA PERFORMERS GRAPPLED with obstacles similar to those with which African-American singers and actors contended. In the early years of Hollywood, before the advent of sound and even later, actresses like Dolores Del Rio (1904–83) and Lupe Velez (1908–44) became stars by playing a range of exotic “foreigners” whose mysterious beauty they embodied in film after film. Their characters might be Russian peasants, American Indians, French aristocrats, or even Mexicans or Spaniards. Velez, born in San Luis de Potosi in 1908, appeared in a few Hal Roach comedies before she was twenty, and was not above overplaying her accent for comic effect. “Sometimes I sound just like Donald Duke,” she once quipped. For the most part, however, her role was that of “Latina spitfire.” She actually starred in a popular series of films in the early 1940s with titles like Mexican Spitfire at Sea (1942) and Mexican Spitfire’s Blessed Event (1943). Del Rio, the daughter of a banker and distant cousin of Mexican president Francisco Madero, refused to be typecast as a hot-blooded temptress, but her accent limited her to foreign roles. In 1942, she returned to Mexico and thereafter acted in more Mexican than American productions. María Candelaria, released in Mexico in 1943 (and in the United States as Portrait of Maria), was awarded the Grand Prix at the 1946 Cannes Film Festival, the first year that event was held after it was interrupted by World War II in 1940.

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