Introduction

Abstract

Film critic Jorge Ayala Blanco writes, “In Mexico, there no longer exists a film industry, only the remains. NAFTA delivered its coup de grâce” (cited in de la Vega Membrillo 2009).² A common response to an inquiry on Mexico’s current film industry is, “What industry?” Many consider what exists today to be a specter of its old self and its participants often express nostalgia for what “film industry” meant in Mexico six decades ago. Since the economic changes made in the late 1980s and early 1990s that opened Mexico’s industries to trade liberalization, the cinema that was once considered intrinsic to its nationalistic cultural production has been subsumed into a market in which it exists almost exclusively as a marginal genre among Hollywood action films and romantic comedies. But this notion of a contemporary cinematic void does not account for the ongoing critical and box-office successes, domestically and internationally. Like the 2000 presidential elections, a wave of fin de siècle films carried with it the hopefulness for the industry’s rebirth and a drastic change in filmmaking policy and practice. The entirety of commercial-film production³ throughout the presidential terms of Ernesto Zedillo Ponce de León (1994–2000) and Vicente Fox Quesada (2000–2006)—the two sexenios (six-year political terms) falling on either side of this ephemeral millennial hubbub of cinematic and political renaissance—has been dubbed by film scholar Juan Carlos Vargas as “post-industrial cinema” (2005, 16).

In a certain way we could say that [Mexican political culture’s entrance into the world of Western democracy] is already a fait accompli: the conquest, the war for independence and the revolution have already integrated the country into Western culture. Yet that integration produced a revolutionary nationalism that attempted to exalt Mexican culture but instead led it into an implicit acceptance of its semi-Western condition, stained by its officious mixtures, doublings, and twists. What is bleeding out of this wound is the heart of darkness of Mexican culture: the mythical and primeval core whose beating is about to cease.

—Roger Bartra