Racism in American Popular Media: From Aunt Jemima to the Frito Bandito by Brian D. Behnken & Gregory D. Smithers

Author:Brian D. Behnken & Gregory D. Smithers [Behnken, Brian D.]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, azw3
Tags: Minority Studies, Sociology, Social Science, Popular Culture, General, Anthropology, Cultural & Social, Media Studies
ISBN: 9781440829765
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
Published: 2015-03-24T05:30:22.852689+00:00

As with many major motion pictures that used the Southwest and Mexican-origin people as a backdrop, In Old Arizona featured white performers in brownface.

The addition of sound helped to magnify the discriminatory elements in In Old Arizona. Both the Kid and Tonia speak in an overly accented way, using broken English that was meant to demarcate authentic “Mexican-ness” to American audiences. Tonia, in one of her scenes with Dunn, for instance, is being taught to sing the song “The Bowery.” She pronounces it “the browrie,” the “brar-rie,” and “the bar-rie.” Baxter’s Cisco Kid frequently drops his Mexican-like accent but also speaks using broken English. In a scene with Tonia, for instance, he says, “Ah Tonia, bebia … de touch of jur hand is like de touch of an angel.” Along with their speaking style, both Baxter and Burgess are stereotypically dressed and both have their faces slightly darkened to appear more authentically Mexican. Neither, however, actually looks Hispanic—they look like white people pretending to be brown. That doesn’t really matter, though, for at this time and for many years later American audiences found white actors who portrayed ethnic “others” to be more authentic than actors from ethnic communities. Baxter’s performance was evidently so authentic that he won the Academy Award for Best Actor for his portrayal of the Cisco Kid. Baxter reprised his role in several other films, and numerous other Cisco Kid movies were made, almost all starring white actors except for several in the 1930s and 1940s starring Cuban American actor Cesar Romero.42

As Burgess made clear for Tonia, Latinas either were not depicted in major motion pictures or were depicted as highly sexualized objects of male desire, the proverbial Latina lover, or, to borrow a title from numerous films, a “Mexican Spitfire.”43 Take, for instance, the 1940 hit Mexican Spitfire. That film was a sequel to the more innocuously titled The Girl from Mexico (1939). A half dozen other Mexican Spitfire films appeared in the 1940s. These films differed ever so slightly from films featuring the Cisco Kid in that the star character, the Mexican Spitfire, was portrayed by Mexican actress Lupe Velez. Mexican Spitfire dealt with some important themes, including interethnic marriage. In general, the film relied on well-worn clichés about highly sexualized Latinas. The film revolved around the marriage of two performers, Dennis Lindsay (Donald Wood) and Carmelita Lindsay (Velez), he white, she Mexican American. One of the obstacles they must overcome is her seemingly fiery demeanor. More importantly, there is a duplicitous ex-fiancé who seeks nothing more than to break up the marriage. Presented as a comedy, the film falls flat because of its reliance on overly determined racialized caricatures.

Other Latinas found themselves similarly typecast. Alongside the Mexican Spitfire, for example, there existed the “Cuban Fireball.”44 While the Cuban Fireball character was almost always a woman, a male version of this character type could also be viewed, perhaps most famously in the guise of Ricky Ricardo of I Love Lucy (1951, 1953) fame and later Tony Montana in Scarface (1983).

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