¡Que Naco! Mexican Popular Cinema, La Banda del Carro Rojo and the Audience

Abstract

I vividly remember those hot summer weekends when our parents and my older siblings would go to work and leave us kids tuned in to Channel 21, the only Spanish-language television station in California’s Central Valley. We would watch with excitement the old black and white films of Mexico’s Golden Era with stars like Pedro Infante, Jorge Negrete, and María Felix. This was the cinema of our parents. It was the cinema that played in the background after my mother’s 12-hour shift at one of the local grape-packing houses. As she made tortillas and prepared food for the family, she would steal a glance at the television to see her favourite movie stars sing about love, heartbreak, separation, and home. My mother lived for these precious moments when she could escape her reality to live in the world of movies, where, no matter how difficult things appeared in the end, a beautiful sunset fell on the face of her beautiful Pedro.

Contemporary Mexican Film Producers ‘… show little concern for making movies that reflect national issues in an interesting manner.’

(D. R. Maciel, 1990: 29)