Twenty-five years ago, English-language scholarship on Latin American film was almost entirely identified with the New Latin American Cinema movement. The emerging “new” cinemas of Brazil, Cuba and Argentina, linked to evolving social movements and to the renewal of the pan-Latin American dreams of Martí and Bolivar (Nuestra América, “Our America”), had captured the imagination of U.S.-based and other scholars. As I argued in a 1991 review essay, unlike other national cinemas which were introduced into English-language scholarship via translations of “master histories” written by nationals (for example, the German cinema, which was studied through the histories of Sigfried Kracauer and Lotte Eisner), the various Latin American cinemas were first introduced in English-language scholarship in the 1970s ahistorically, through contemporary films and events reported in non-analytical articles that provided above all, political readings and assessments. Overall, this first stage of Latin American film scholarship was plagued by problems that continued to haunt researchers through the 1980s: difficult access to films, scarce historical data, and unverifiable secondary sources. Above all, this work displayed a blissful disregard of the critical and historical work written in Spanish and Portuguese and published in Latin America.

In her study of early cinema and modernity in Latin America, Ana López wrote: “Latin American modernity has been a global, intertextual experience, addressing impulses and models from abroad, in which every nation and region created, and creates, its own ways of playing with and at modernity.” Early Uruguayan cinema exemplifies this interaction of global phenomena with local realities and thus provides an instructive window onto some of the ways Latin Americans were “playing with and at modernity” in the early twentieth century. During that era, Uruguay emerged as Latin America’s first welfare state and a model of progressive reform in the region. The complexities of that transition are reflected in so-called cine de beneficencia (beneficent cinema), film made by and for social assistance organizations for fundraising and propaganda purposes. Film historian José Carlos Álvarez identifies beneficent cinema as “something that we think was purely Uruguayan, and specific to this era.”

In June of 1930, Dr. J. M. Puig Casauranc, who held the post of Jefe del Departamento del Distrito Federal (a post then somewhat akin to mayor) received a lengthy letter from the Confederación de Sociedades Mexicanas in Los Angeles, California. The letter asked Dr. Puig if a Committee for the Supervision of Film could be constituted in Los Angeles, a committee to be made up of members of the Confederation and the Mexican consulate in Los Angeles. In their letter members of the Confederation’s steering committee displayed a clear understanding of the history of Mexico’s struggle to exert some control over the content of Hollywood films.

‘During World War II, the United States created a political, economic, I land cultural policy aimed at improving hemispheric relations between the U.S. and Latin America. Dubbed the “Good Neighbor Policy,” its objectives were twofold: 1) to insure that nations in Latin America were joined in the Allied war effort and were not associated with the Axis or Communist sympathizers, and 2) to allow the U.S. access to Latin America as a source of raw materials and a market for goods, including films. Because Argentina did not side with the Allies, instead preferring neutrality, it was castigated by an economic boycott. Beginning in 1941, the U.S. sold small rations of raw film stock to Argentina, and over time, refused to sell it all together. The film industry in Argentina, at the time considered the most profitable and advanced in Latin America, began to lose its hold on the Spanish-language market.

As a historian of Mexican history who studies Middle Eastern immigrants to Mexico in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, I have approached the topic of ethnic film with both trepidation and great interest. Attuned to the historiography of what and who is Mexican, I view the films El baisano Jalil and Novia que te vea for their representations of ethnic difference and suggestions of a multicultural Mexico. Here, I wish to explore how these films not only show the presence of immigrant groups in the cultural fabric of Mexico, but also how the films demonstrate that public discourses (via film) can enhance scholarly understanding of multiculturalism. My purpose is to make a discrete intervention in Mexican historiography by underscoring the importance of film in conceptualizing the dimensions of ethnic identity. I suggest that these films are rooted in a particular Mexican social context in which both Arab and Jewish immigrants have been able to manipulate the ambiguities of what it means to be Mexican.