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Cinéma & Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal
Ph.D. Thesis Abstract - A Trans-American Dream: Lupe Vélez and the Performance of Transculturation, 1925-1999 
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Kristy Rawson
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Ph.D. Thesis Abstract - A Trans-American Dream: Lupe Vélez and the Performance of Transculturation, 1925-1999 
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           A TRANS-AMERICAN DREAM: LUPE VÉLEZ AND THE PERFORMANCE
           OF TRANSCULTURATION, 1925-1999
           Kristy Rawson / Ph.D. Thesis Abstract1
           University of Michigan




              My dissertation on the Mexican actress, Lupe Vélez, represents the first Hollywood star study
           committed to a transnational, trans-cultural, and trans-temporal exploration of Mexican and U.S.
           culture industries of the twentieth century. As a Mexican woman achieving transnational star sta-
           tus without benefit of class advantage, Lupe Vélez is a singular figure of her era. My synthetic
           account of Vélez’s life and work draws on archives of news and fan discourse produced in
           Mexico, Mexican-American Los Angeles, and the Anglo-hegemonic United States. For, as my
           project demonstrates, culturally produced images of the Mexican/U.S. border – which inherently
           involve (trans)national negotiations of race, class, ethnicity and gender – were constructed in the
           overlapping contexts of these three discursive spheres. Lupe Vélez, as my project demonstrates,
           was an embodied “contact zone,”2 that is to say, her stardom came to signify the Mexican/U.S.
           border itself. Evolving as such, it is perhaps unsurprising that her stardom became a lightning rod
           for anxiety and contestation.
              My study centers on the notion of performance as both a central quality of Vélez’s profession-
           al craft and a concept through which to understand the industrial strategies underlying her repre-
           sentational deployment. Vélez’s varied personae, I argue, amount to a set of industry perform-
           ances of transculturation. Vélez herself was a unique, border-crossing trans-cultural product, hav-
           ing achieved star status on the stages of popular theater in Mexico prior to her career in
           Hollywood. Thus I mobilize the term transculturation, initially theorized by the Cuban
           Anthropologist Fernando Ortiz,3 with an emphasis on the term’s double valence. That is to say,
           my project recognizes the distinct operations of – and the complex, sometimes irresolvable con-
           tradictions between – intra-national and trans-national functions of transculturation.
              I trace Vélez’s discursive footprint as she negotiates multiple cultural stages and three national
           cinemas. My analysis moves with Vélez from theater to cinema, silent film to sound, drama to
           comedy, A-movie to B-series programmer, traveling from Mexico to Los Angeles to Broadway to
           London and back to Mexico. Arguing the centrality of history and memory to star images and
           their afterlives, I track Vélez beyond her suicide where, posthumously, she would move through
           relative obscurity to emerge as camp emblem, then avant-garde muse and, finally, underground
           queer icon. Vélez’s history is anomalous. Her many and varied talents, her tenacious commitment
           to fame, and her persistent performative adaptability, all conspire to render her case “exception-
           al.” Nevertheless, the categories to which she was consigned are often familiar. Ultimately, her
           image, on screen and off – articulated on the embattled twentieth century frontiers of nation, race,

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         KRISTY RAWSON

         class, ethnicity and gender – testifies to the rigidity of each of these culturally constructed cate-
         gories. For, despite Vélez’s talent for crossing borders of nation, medium and genre, she was
         unable, I argue, to bridge historical borders demarcating social and cultural identities. Underlying
         her shifting, performative identities, these borders remain as powerful conceptual divides
         imposed by the industries and the nationally and ethnically inflected fields of reception that
         shaped her various professional personae. From my study, then, Lupe Vélez emerges as a quin-
         tessentially trans-cultural figure who was actively “included out,” discursively and professional-
         ly, of every region she inhabited.
            My project begins in post-revolutionary Mexico City, 1925. Vélez’s stage debut, which featured
         parodic performances imitating the personae of her popular female star colleagues, launched a
         “fever of imitation” on the city’s stages and led to Vélez’s unofficial christening as “la tiple
         [female first soprano] 1925.”4 Her celebrated notoriety incited the chagrin of those loath to see la
         niña Lupe – the young “jazz” soprano who, for many, represented a foreign-affected affront to
         Mexican national identity – elevated by critical acclaim. While Vélez was ultimately unable to
         defend her tiple-of-the-year nomination, her star currency was undiminished by the defeat: she
         was, I posit, the first celebrity antagonist to emerge within urban Mexico’s nascent mass culture.
         One might even speculate her transition to Hollywood as having been inevitable.
            My second chapter documents Hollywood cinema’s sexualized romanticization of female eth-
         nic difference in films of the 1920s, a dynamic that imaged the “eroticization of marriage”5 to
         compellingly articulate a “melting pot” American identity. The period held, for Vélez, a promise
         of assimilation – that is, a measure of potential U.S. cultural citizenship based on her “probation-
         ary white” status.6 But with the rise of nativist sentiment in the Depression years, the promise of
         inclusion was rescinded. Vélez’s films of the early ’30s enunciate a racialized image that discur-
         sively foreclosed on the assimilability of her (previously ethnic) difference. Discourses circulat-
         ing within and between urban Mexico and Mexican American Los Angeles reveal nationalist ten-
         sions turning, as well, on expressions of gender and sexuality. Vélez’s highly eroticized persona,
         cultivated in 1920s’ Hollywood, is met with hardening borders on multiple fronts.
            Theorizing an “immigrant paradox” structured by contradictory pressures of acculturation and
         cultural protectionism, Mark Winokur7 cites Samuel Goldwyn’s famous supposed malapropism,
         “include me out!” as an adroit speech-act discursively performing the ethnic immigrant predica-
         ment. In Chapter 3, I appropriate Winokur’s “immigrant paradox” to address the comedic persona
         that Vélez – working in partnership with (the vaguely “pan-ethnic”) Jimmy Durante – honed on
         Broadway. Vélez and Durante return to Hollywood for three productions that rehearse the pair’s
         mutually embattled stage dynamic. Crashing Durante’s Hollywood Party (Charles Reisner et al.,
         MGM, USA 1934), Vélez, playing herself, must fight (literally) for her cultural and professional
         citizenship. The racialized Vélez, I argue, was utilized to facilitate, by way of aggressive contrast,
         the cultural inclusion of ethnic personae deemed more assimilable than she.
            Subsequent to the 1934 Hollywood Party, Vélez was almost entirely absent from Hollywood,
         until, that is, the World War Two era’s federal/Hollywood “Good Neighbor Policy” (1939) saw
         the initiation of the Mexican Spitfire films (The Mexican Spitfire series, Leslie Goodwins, 1939-
         1943). I mobilize this series of “remarriage comedies”8 – which repeatedly stage the “problem”
         of a Mexican woman married to an Anglo man – to interrogate the neighborly partnership sup-
         posedly uniting bordering nations. Analyzing the trajectory of the series, I trace the economics of

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                                                                                     A TRANS-AMERICAN DREAM

           the series’s character relationships to document the “centrifugal force”9 that increasingly margin-
           alizes Vélez’s character. The films further strain Vélez esteem within Mexican and Mexican-
           American critical establishments but do not appear to undermine her persistent personal popular-
           ity within her country of origin. Vélez’s two Mexican films (Naná, Celestino Gorostiza, Roberto
           Gavaldón, 1944 and La Zandunga, Fernando de Fuentes, 1938) – which, as a pair, form a literal
           virgin/whore binary system – are jointly emblematic of the irresolvable position she occupied
           within Mexican national cinema. Among the heterogeneous population that Mexican cinema
           sought to consolidate, Vélez’s star currency never seemed to fade.
              My final chapter follows Vélez’s posthumous representation, not in pursuit of her individual
           legacy but, rather, to illuminate the circumstance of her having no stable legacy. We have no point
           of access to Vélez’s image in cultural memory, I argue, so occluded are we by the facts and fic-
           tions surrounding her suicide. Queer texts of the 1960s10 and 1990s11 appropriated Vélez’s
           Hollywood image within creative vehicles whereby normative visual and sexual economies of
           representation are turned on their heads. Even so, I argue, in death as in life, Vélez, as Mexican
           female subject, was “included out”; she was rendered remote within discourses produced for the
           cultural liberation of others.




           1  Ph.D. dissertation supervised by Prof. Johannes von Moltke and Prof. Amy Sara Carroll. For informa-
              tion: krawson@umich.edu.
           2 Mary Louis Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, Routledge, London 1992, pp. 6-
              7.
           3 See Fernando Ortiz, Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar (trans. Harriet de Onís), Vintage Random
              House, New York 1947.
           4 Jorge Loyo, “Lupe Vélez,” in El Universal Ilustrado, July 18, 1925 (unpaginated).
           5 Julian B Carter, The Heart of Whiteness: Normal Sexuality and Race in America, 1880-1940, Duke
              University Press, Durham, NC 2007, pp. 20-21.
           6 See Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of
              Race, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA 1998.
           7 Mark Winokur, American Laughter: Immigrants, Ethnicity, and 1930s Hollywood Film Comedy, St.
              Martin’s Press, New York 1996, p. 60 and p. 180.
           8 See Stanley Cavell, Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage, Harvard University
              Press, Cambridge, MA 1981.
           9 Fernando Ortiz, Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar, cit., pp. 69-70.
           10 Kenneth Anger, Hollywood Babylon, Associated Professional Services, Phoenix, AZ 1965; Lupe (Andy
              Warhol, USA 1966); Lupe (José Rodriguez-Soltero, USA 1967).
           11 The Assumption of Lupe Vélez (Rita González, USA 1999).




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