Fashioning Spanish Cinema by Jorge Pérez

Author:Jorge Pérez
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Costume design – Spain, Motion pictures – Spain – History, Fashion design – Spain
Publisher: University of Toronto Press

Chapter Four

Dressing the Immigrant Other

Clothes and fashion have always played an important role in the politics of difference. As Tim Edwards reminds us, these entail those “which effect, reinforce or even invent difference within groups and societies whether according to class, age, gender, race, sexual orientation or, more simply, the politics of bodily regulation” (Fashion in Focus 104). With this in mind, I turn my attention to how Spanish immigration films place a heavy weight on costume as an important signifier in producing racialized images of migrants, who are visualized in opposition to the exaggeratedly dissimilar clothing choices of native Spaniards. I concentrate on three specific migrant groups (sub-Saharan men, Caribbean women, and Central and Eastern Europeans), because their cinematic portrayals make these racialized patterns even more perceptible. In these films, costume becomes a mechanism of representation that fabricates what Stuart Hall calls “a form of racialized knowledge of the Other” (260), one profoundly associated with operations of power such as the attempt to condense, homogenize, naturalize, and resolve cultural differences. This visual discourse reduces the racial other to a few essentials through stereotypes and creates a hierarchy among migrant subjects according to ethnic origin, with white European migrants being the demographic least racially marked by sartorial codes.

Costume patterns in immigration films illustrate the blending of immigration and race in the Spanish popular imagination. As Steve Garber notes, this is a widespread phenomenon across the European Union, making “the conditions of entry and settlement more difficult for those people not racialized as ‘white’” (62). Anyone of a non-white racial background is immediately supposed to be an (illegal) immigrant subject, regardless of national origin or how long he or she may have been in the country. The analysis of this immigration-racializing process entails tackling those discursive mechanisms that use racial phenotypes – biological markers – not only to classify human difference, but also to do so with tangible ideological effects, given that race is “a set of socially constructed boundaries, practices, and commonly held meanings mapped onto a population whose members themselves represent wide physical and social diversity” (Craig 9). Moreover, as a signifier of alterity, racialized costume patterns express how Spaniards perceive and construct themselves and their own identity as much as that of the newcomers. It is well known that, starting in the late stages of Francoism, Spain’s European aspirations centred on a foundational utopia as a means of boarding the train to modernity – inextricably associated with Europe – and of shedding the perceived backwardness posed by its historical connections with Africa (Delgado 211). In this process of reinventing its identity, the “whitening” and therefore constructed homogenization of the national complexion went hand in hand with the disavowal and racialized othering of any non-white European heritage. Ironically enough, as Rosalía Cornejo Parriego notes (18), this symbolic whitening coincided with the actual darkening of the European population, as well as with the escalating presence of non-white postcolonial subjects that effectively challenged the viability of that foundational utopia.

“Spanish immigration films”

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