Biography: Emilio "El Indio" Fernández Romo, who was born on March 26, 1904 in the state of Coahuila, Mexico, is the most famous person in the history of Mexican movies. For an era, he symbolized Mexico due to his violent machismo, rooted in the Revolution of 1910-17, and because of his staunch commitment to Mexican cultural nationalism. Sired by an ethnic Caucuasian father and born to an Indian mother, Emi ... show all Emilio "El Indio" Fernández Romo, who was born on March 26, 1904 in the state of Coahuila, Mexico, is the most famous person in the history of Mexican movies. For an era, he symbolized Mexico due to his violent machismo, rooted in the Revolution of 1910-17, and because of his staunch commitment to Mexican cultural nationalism. Sired by an ethnic Caucuasian father and born to an Indian mother, Emilio was himself a "mestizaje" (mestizo) that his films would later glorify. The teenaged Fernández abandoned his studies to serve as an officer in the Huertista rebellion, which broke out on December 4, 1923. On July 20th of that year, Francisco "Pancho" Villa had been ambushed and killed, one theory being that he was assassinated by agents of Mexican President Álvaro Obregón Salido. Obregón, when he served as a general during the revolution, had defeated Villa in four successive battles collectively known as the Battle of Celaya. The Battle of Celaya was the largest military confrontation in Latin American history before the 1982 Falklands War. Under the Constitution of 1917 that Obregón himself helped write, Mexican presidents could not succeed themselves. (Obregón would later have the constitution amended so he could serve a second, non-consecutive term; after winning the presidential election of 1928, he was assassinated before his inauguration.) Obregón had won the presidency in 1920 after inciting a successful military revolt against President Venustiano Carranza, who had planned on naming Ignacio Bonillas as his successor rather than Obregón. The revolt began when the governor of the Mexican state of Sonora, General Adolfo de la Huerta, broke with President Carranza and declared the secession of Sonora. This was a signal for the beginning of the successful uprising against Carranza led by Obregón and supported by General Plutarco Elías Calles. After Carranza was killed in an ambush, General Huerta served as provisional president of Mexico from June 1 to December 1, 1920, until elections could be held. When Obregón won the federal election, Huerta became Minister of Finance in the new government. General de la Huerta considered himself the natural successor to President Obregón, just as Obregón had considered himself Carranza's natural successor. The murdered Villa was seen as an ally of de la Huerta, who had publicly announced his candidacy for the presidency. Obregón, however, planned to remain in power by handpicking his successor, a tradition that lasted throughout 20th century Mexican politics. When President Obregón named his anti-clerical Minister of the Interior Plutarco Elías Calles as his heir, General de la Huerta rose up in a rebellion that eventually affected half of the Mexican army. A native like de la Huerta of Sonora and a general in the Mexican army, Calles had preceded him as governor and military ruler of their home state in the period of 1915-16. De la Huerta thought his service and loyalty to Obregón would have brought him the presidency, but Mexican presidents, not allowed to succeed themselves and limited (mostly) to one term, tried to extend their power by naming political puppets as successors. (Calles would outdo Obregón by controlling the Mexican presidency outright or through puppets from 1924 to 1934.) The rebellion was very serious, but President Obregón was able to quash it by using loyal army units, battalions of workers and farmers, and United States intervention. By the time the rebellion ended in March 1924, 54 generals and 7,000 soldiers had been terminated from the country's armed forces via death on the battlefield, execution, exile, or dismissal. Obregón banished de la Huerta to exile in the United States, where he lived in Los Angeles, supporting himself as a music teacher. Such was the cauldron of violence and nationalism in which the young Fernandez came into his manhood. He received a 20-year prison sentence for his participation in the rebellion on the losing side. Escaping prison by following de la Heurta into exile in Los Angeles, Fernández absorbed the rudiments of filmmaking as a bit player and extra working in Hollywood in the 1920s and early `30s. With the election of Lázaro Cárdenas as president in 1934, the Heurista rebels were granted an amnesty. (General de la Heurta was recalled from exile by Cárdenas in 1935 and served in several posts, including Inspector General of Foreign Consulates and Director General of Civil Pensions.) Fernándezk returned to Mexico in 1934 and began working in the Mexican movie industry as a screenwriter and actor. His Indian looks, which gave him his nickname "El Indio," also brought him his first lead role, playing an Indian in "The Janitzio (1935)". Due to his physicality and Indian countenance, El Indio was cast as bandits, charros (cowboys), and revolutionaries. The Cárdenas government of 1934 to 1940 established the framework in which the Mexican Golden Age of Cinema could be realized. The political system that dominated Mexico for over half a century was consolidated during his regime. The government incorporated trade unions, campesino (peasant) organizations, and middle-class professionals and office workers into the ruling Party of the Mexican Revolution (later the Party of the Institutional Revolution). Cárdenas oversaw the redistribution of millions of acres of land to peasants and the expansion of collective bargaining rights and wage increases to workers. Cárdenas and all subsequent PRM/PRI presidents (all presidents of Mexico in the 20th Century beginning with Calles were PRM/PRI members; Vincente Fox was the first from outside the party in three-quarters of a century) maintained political control of Mexico by granting favors and concessions to their constituencies inside the corporatist party structure in exchange for worker and campesino organizations delivering votes and suppressing discontent among their constituencies. The PRM/PRI itself created an organizational structure for the government that allowed citizens access to the political realm, in the sense that they could interface with government agencies. Once inside the government machine, seeking redress, favors, etc., the non-connected citizen was led through a maze of layers of bureaucracy that never permitted a satisfactory output. Citizens caught in the maze were eventually frustrated and discouraged, but the ingenious if disingenuous system worked as it gave them input, just no guaranteed output. By frustrating them within an institutional structure, the PRM/PRI governments, federal and state, took the fight out of them. The PRM/PRI sought to control frustration that had led to violence in the past, particularly with among the generals who had the power to destabilize the society and economy. That government structure thus served as a homeostatic device for the people's frustration, relieving it and never allowing it to build up again into a revolutionary situation. Cárdenas' most notable achievement arguably was the nationalization of Mexico's oil industry. After unsuccessfully trying to negotiate better terms with Mexican Eagle, the holding company owned by Royal Dutch/Shell and Standard Oil of New Jersey, Cárdenas nationalized Mexico's petroleum reserves and expropriated the equipment of the foreign oil companies on March 18, 1938. A spontaneous six-hour parade broke out in Mexico City to celebrate the event. Unlike Castros nationalization of foreign assets in Cuba, Shell and SONJ were compensated for their expropriated assets. Petróleos Mexicanos (Pemex) and the Mexican model became a beacon for other oil-producing nations seeking to gain control over their own energy resources from foreign companies. Lázaro Cárdenas was the only PRM/PRI president who did not make himself rich. After retiring as Minister of Defense in 1945, the post he took after relinquishing the presidency, he assumed a modest lifestyle. He spent the last years of his life supervising irrigation projects and promoting education and free medical care for the poor. This was the man who set the tone of the modern Mexico that arose from the Revolution and Civil Wars of the 1920s, who cleared the ground for the great economic boom of the 1940s in which the Golden Age of Mexican Cinema reached its apogee. The classic Mexican cinema has mostly been ignored in the United States due to the language barrier and a colonialist mindset suffused with racism. When the Mexican cinema has been addressed by those north of the border, primary the focus falls on the brilliant cinematography of `Gabriel Figueroa, who shot films for `John Ford (qv) and `John Huston, or on former Hollywood star `Dolores del Rio' (qv). Emilio Fernández's reputation was so great that El Indio even was appreciated in the U.S. in his lifetime, but his notoriety as a sort of wild-man of the Mexican movie industry and his appearances as an actor in Sam Peckinpahs "The Wild Bunch" (1969) overshadowed his greatness as a director. While Mexico has often served as a locale for American films - the genres of sweet (white) young things imperiled by Mexican bandits and of Americans in revolutionary Mexico, to say nothing of Zorro and The Cisco Kid - have been part of the Yankee cinema since the East Coast-based film companies began relocating to southern California in the early 1910s. Gringo Warner Baxter won the second Oscar ever awarded for Best Actor playing The Cisco Kid in a role originally intended for `Raoul Walsh, of all people. Mexico has been the site of such blockbuster films as "Viva Villa! (1934)", "Juarez (1939)", "Viva Zapata! (1952)", "Vera Cruz (1954)", "Professionals (1966)", and "The Wild Bunch," but except for "The Caza del oro, La (1972)", a Johnny-Come-Lately to the genre, they seldom featured Mexican actors in anything other than bit parts, if at all, with the exception of `Anthony Quinn (qv), one of the few Mexican-Americans to achieve superstar status. Mexican performers taken up by the Hollywood industry, such as Ramon Novarro, Rita Hayworth, John Gavin, and Raquel Welch were, like half-Mexican baseball great Ted Williams (born in San Diego), de-ethnicized in a sort of cultural ethnic cleansing. Salma Hayek, who is of mixed Mexican and Arab parentage, is arguably the first Mexican since `Lupe Valdez and Delores del Rio to cross-over as a Hollywood super-star and remain identifiably Mexican. (Even at the dawn of a new millennium, she was urged by her Hollywood agents to play up her Arabic ethnicity, even with anti-Arab feeling rife in Hollywood and the U.S. at large, as no-one would go see a Mexican in movies since their cleaning ladies were Mexican, they reasoned.) Until the 1990s, with "Como agua para chocolate (1992)" ("Like Water for Chocolate"), Mexican movies themselves seldom strayed into Yankee consciousness, except for the rare one like "Perla, La (1947)", based on a novel by Californian John Steinbeck and a prize-winner at the Venice Film Festival. "La Perla" was directed by Emilio Fernandez, the greatest director to come out of Mexicos golden age of cinema. The first Mexican feature was released in 1906, though production often was eclipsed by political and economic conditions. There were documentaries made about the Mexican Revolution in the 1910s, but very few films were made in the 1920s. `Sergei Eisensteins trip to Mexico in the early 1930s to make "Viva Mexico" (1936), which remained unfinished due to his problems with his American backer, `Upton Sinclair, injected a new enthusiasm into the Mexican movie industry. While most American cine-historians place the Golden Age firmly in the 1940s, some specifically to the period of 1943-46, and others extend it until the mid-`50s, the Golden Age of Mexican cinema properly stretches back to 1936, peaks in the mid-1940s (when the Mexican cinema receives international recognition when two of Fernandez's films won the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival and was nominated for the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festivals), and terminates in the mid-`50s, with the end of Fernandezs 25-film collaboration with cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa Mateos. `Fernando de Fuentes, the Mexico movie industry's first great director, inaugurated the Golden Age in 1936 with two hits, "Allá en el Rancho Grande" ("Out at Big Ranch") and "Vamonos con Pancho Villa" ("Let's Go with Pancho Villa"). Both were "political message" movies addressing the social and cultural issues lying at the heart of Mexican Revolution. "Vamonos con Pancho Villa" has the distinction of being the first feature produced at the Mexican government-subsidized studio Cinematográfica Latino Americana S.A., while "Allá en el Rancho Grande" made Tito Guizar a star. Guizar eventually became the Mexican movie industrys first superstar by playing in the "comedias rancheras" (ranch comedies) genre that were the most popular type of film in Mexico in the 1930s. A hit with audiences throughout Latin America, "comedias rancheras" were set in an idyllic, pre-Revolution Mexico. The vaudevillian Mario Moreno, who became a Latin American superstar under the name `Cantinflas, made his short-subject debut in 1936, and would soon become the Latin American movie's leading comedian when he made his feature film debut in "Ahi esta el detalle" ("There is the Detail") in 1940. The Cantinflas character is rooted in the image of the "pelado," or poor white trash, and his character deflates respectable society through his sharp repartee. Peace, i.e. a lack of overt domestic political turmoil, laid the groundwork for the development of a truly popular indigenous cinema in the 1930s and `40s. The comedias rancheras and Cantinflas comedies helped make the Mexican cinema commercially viable. With Hollywood distracted by turning out propaganda and military training films during World War II, there was an opening in Latin America that the Mexican industry filled. Without competition from Hollywood, the Mexican movie industry dominated Latin American cinemas for most of the decade. Movie production tripled in the 1940s as compared to the previous decade. The Mexican film movie industry underwent a consolidation and developed a star system, some of whom crossed over to achieve international recognition. The peak of the Golden Age of Mexican cinema came in the 1940s, spurred by rapid industrialization and a resulting affluence, inequitably distributed, caused by trade with the United States, as World War II boosted American demand for Mexican raw materials. The Mexican movie industry became the worlds largest producer of Spanish-language films, helped by the fact that the other large producers, Argentina and Spain, were headed by fascist governments. Though the Mexican government was conservative and repressive in the `40s, it encouraged the production of nationalist films during that helped articulate a Mexican identity. During the `40s, Mexican movie stars and directors became popular icons, and some even became public figures with effective political influence. Among the movie stars blossoming during the decade were Dolores del Río, Pedro Infante, Jorge Negrete, Joaquín Pardave, and María Félix, while Fernández and Figeuroa became globally known. `Luis Buñuel moved to Mexico and would direct some of the country's major movies in the following decade. Mexican movies typically were genre pictures, melodramas, romances, musicals, comedies, and horror, which addressed all aspects of Mexican society, from love stories about the lumpen proletariat to dramas about the Indians. Mexican movies are a mirror of Mexican society, including history (19th century dictator Porfirio Díaz and his court, The Revolution and Villa and Zapata), obsessions (both familial and erotic), and mythology (Indian and big-city culture). Mexican cinema did this using the classic genres of the the melodrama, the comedy (in its romantic, musical, and ranchera versions, and slapstick and farce), and even the horror film. With its proximity to Hollywood, and the fact that many leading lights of the Mexican cinema were familiar with Hollywood production values, the indigenous movie industry set a high standard for itself, as it had to measure up to Hollywood product. Fernández made his motion picture debut as an actor in Chano Urueta's "Destino, El (1928)", but his early work in movies was in American westerns churned out by Monogram director Joseph P. McCarthy, including the Bob Steele programmers "Oklahoma Cyclone (1930)", "Land of Missing Men (1930)", "The Headin' North (1930)" "Sunrise Trail (1931)", and the Tim McCoy hoss opera "Western Code (1932)". After playing a supporting player in Enrico Caruso, Jr.s Buenaventura, La (1934)_, he made his return to Mexican pictures in 1934, starring in "Corazón bandolero" (1934) and director `Fernando de Fuentes "Cruz Diablo (1934)". Fernándezs first film as a director was "La Isla de la Pasion" (1942), in 1941, which he also wrote and played a bit part in. The movie starred "Pedro Armendáriz, who El Indio would cast in many of his films. Another favorite collaborator was his wife `Columba Dominguez' (qv). El Indio rapidly gained a reputation as Mexico's premier director making populist dramas. His film "María Candelaria (1944)" put Mexican film on the map when it won Grand Prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 1946. The film has been variously praised as "the highest triumph of Mexican plastic arts on celluloid" and as "a titanic promise for strictly patriotic [Mexican] cinema." French film critic Georges Sadoul, in his 1954 book "Histoire Général du Cinema," praised the film for its "authentic" portrayal of rural Mexican life and for addressing race relations. The film remains controversial in Mexico over El Indios aesthetic choices, which emphasized the exotic and primitive, and his representation of Mexican Indians, which some critics believed was inauthentic or "touristy." The nationalistic Fernández wanted to articulate an idea of what it meant to be Mexican that was uniquely Mexican, and not influenced by Hollywood, whose films he felt were Americanizing Mexican cinema audiences. Terming his films "autos sacramentales (passion plays) of mexicanidad," the director Fernández wanted to create a Mexican cinema that Mexicanized Mexicans. The film stars `Dolores del Rio, the Hollywood movie star who had returned to Mexico after becoming disillusioned with the American movie industry, as the daughter of a prostitute trying to survive just before the Revolution. Set in the floating gardens of Xochimilco in Mexico City, del Rio's character is shunned by the locals, who are indigenous people. Her great desire is to marry her lover, played by Pedro Armendáriz, but their romance proves to be star-crossed. Fernández's direction was flawless, and Figeuroas black-and-white cinematography was masterful. The collaborators created one of the classics of not just Mexican movies but of world cinema. When El Indio and Figueroa were making "María Candelaria," they were part of a movement in which Mexican filmmakers were consciously attempting to create an indigenous art cinema that could compete with Hollywood product while simultaneously articulating a vision of Mexicans that was rooted in the "indigenismo" and "mestizophilia" of Mexican intellectuals. José Vasconcelos, the Minister of Education during the Obregón administration, was particularly influential due to his concepts of "mexicanos en potencia" and the cosmic race. In Vasconcelos philosophy, the "barbarous" Indian was redeemed by a modernization program based on education, and by the assimilation of the Indians with the Caucausian Europeans into "la raza" of mestizos ("mestizaje"). Gabriel Figueroa was conscious of the fact that he and Fernández, a creative team that became known as "Epoca de Oro," invented an idea of rural Mexico that did not actually exist. Figueroa established himself as the leader in imagining a new, post-revolutionary Mexican consciousness though the vehicle of the visual image. A "painter in light," Figueroa learned his craft from `Gregg Toland and `Edward Tisse' (qv), Eisenstein's cinematographer. Figueroa is credited with creating the classic Mexican film aesthetic in collaboration with El Indio and other film directors. In over 200 movies, he developed the classic imagery and aesthetic of Mexican cinema, which also influenced and was influenced by contemporary Mexican artists. Figuerora pioneered an indigenous visual vernacular that affected the muralist movement, and he has been referred to as the fourth of the most important Mexican muralist after Orozco, Diego Rivera, and David Siqueiros. Siqueiros himself called Figueroa's cinematography "murals that travel." In their 25 films together between 1942 and 1958, El Indio and Figueroa created the idea of "mexicanidad" cinema while elevating the mestizaje (mixed race) identity, as well as the status of the pre-Columbian culture. The epic visual style they developed was indebted to Eisenstein's unfinished "Que viva Mexico." Their style fetishized the Mexican landscape through beautiful, carefully composed, stationary long shots. For two decades, Mexican art cinema was identified with the films resulting from the Fernández-Figueroa collaboration. Their films not only affected Mexican audienc hide |
