Mexico lindo y querido
porque no quiero olvidar me voy me voy
(the trumpet cries)
a Los Angeles porque no quiero olvidar
me voy a Los Angeles me voy
(the accordion moans)
a Los Angeles porque no quiero olvidar
mi México
(the trumpet wails)
This theme is named after a song “México lindo y querido” (Beautiful and Beloved Mexico), with a well known version coming from Mexican singer Jorge Negrete. The lyrics describe a deep sentiment of loyalty and love for the homeland of Mexico: “My beautiful and beloved Mexico/ should I die far from you/ let them say I'm asleep/ and bring me back to you.”These lyrics were prophetic as Jorge Negrete died in Los Angeles in 1953. Negrete’s travel to the city had been arranged by Frank Fouce, a movie theater impresario and owner who ran a major entertainment organization that catered to Mexican audiences in the city at the height of the Spanish-language cinema renaissance in Downtown Los Angeles.
For immigrant (primarily Mexican and Mexican American) film audiences that frequented South Broadway, well into the 1970s and early 80s, the movie theaters in Downtown Los Angeles provided an opportunity to be symbolically transported to “Mexico lindo y querido.” Gracefully demonstrating this diasporic sentiment in the epigraph above, poet Eduardo Corral mixes languages – Spanish, English, musical – on the space of the page to evoke a nostalgia and sense of transnational belonging particular to Los Angeles’ place in the diasporic cultural imaginary.
In interpreting these varying modes of nostalgia and sentimentality, it is useful to consider how transnational scenes of belonging are shaped by the processes of forming cultural and ethnic(-racialized) identities. These processes are relational, involving situated definitions of identity as they are formed in a specific city, as George Sánchez examines in Becoming Mexican American, focusing on Los Angeles in the first half of the 20th century, or between different generations, periods of migration, and shifting notions of citizenship as David Gutiérrez outlines in Walls and Mirrors. Identities are also shaped through and within media representations: for example, between film cultures, understandings of modernity, and media industries, as Laura Isabel Serna explains in Making Cinelandia, a work that complicates dominant understandings of how American films functioned in Mexican film culture on both sides of the border in the 1920s. The mediated formation is Chicano identity is addressed in Rosa Linda Fregoso’s landmark studies, The Bronze Screen and meXicana Encounters, which illustrate how canonical Chicano films center masculinity, heterosexuality and investment in the Chicano familia to build their cultural nationalist project.
The annotations listed here explore how themes of cultural citizenship, national belonging, and ethnic identity emerge in scenes from filmes that conjure nostalgia, feature return journeys, situate Broadway as a significant node for the production, circulation and exhibition of Mexican entertainment, or uncover Mexican culture as Los Angeles' repressed expression.
[i] For further exploration of “México Lindo,” see Arturo F. Rosales, “In Defense of México Lindo,” in Chicano! The History of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement (Arte Publico Press, 1996), 55–71.
Video annotations:
Canción Mixteca in MEXICO DE MI CORAZON
From Million Dollar to Broadway in YAKO, CAZADOR DE MALDITOS
Rally for workers rights in LA JAULA DE ORO
Opening of Jaripeo ("rodeo") and religious fireworks display in Puerta del Rio, San Luis Potosí, Mexico
Club Silencio in MULHOLLAND DRIVE
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