Abstract
This chapter discusses the findings of 40 interviews with informants 64–95 years old born and/or raised in Laredo, Texas, a small city on the US border with Mexico, where Mexican Americans have always been the demographic majority and where Spanish-language movies from the neighbouring country were profusely exhibited for decades. The study focuses on the memories of Mexican and Hollywood films among this group of respondents when they were children or teenagers. The chapter explores the way American and Mexican films interacted with their complex double ascription to the US and to Mexican linguistic and cultural features and were part of their complex strategies to navigate between their new American national identity and their still strong and pervasive Mexican cultural roots.
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Notes
- 1.
The interviews were conducted by students attending a South Texas university. Each student selected one informant among his or her relatives who had been born and/or raised in Laredo, Texas, and who was 70 years old or older. The focused interviews, based on a basic questionnaire covering childhood, youth, and adulthood, and lasting between 50 and 120 minutes, were recorded and transcribed by the students during 2015 and 2016.
- 2.
Texas-born citizens of Mexican ancestry.
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Lozano, J.C., Meers, P., Biltereyst, D. (2018). The Social Experience of Going to the Movies in the 1930s–1960s in a Small Texas Border Town: Moviegoing Habits and Memories of Films in Laredo, Texas. In: Treveri Gennari, D., Hipkins, D., O'Rawe, C. (eds) Rural Cinema Exhibition and Audiences in a Global Context. Global Cinema. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-66344-9_9
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