ABSTRACT
In recent years it has become a commonplace to say that silent Hollywood owed much of its rapid growth and maturity to the waves of international talent that graced the southern California landscape during the industry’s infancy. As John Russell Taylor notes in his groundbreaking history Strangers in Paradise, the studio system was primarily founded by foreign-born men like Louis B. Mayer, Samuel Goldwyn, Adolph Zukor and William Fox. If some of the biggest stars of the silent era were immigrants-Chaplin, Mary Pickford, Rudolph Valentino, Greta Garbo-so too were many of Hollywood’s most notable directors, such as Erich von Stroheim, Ernst Lubitsch and F. W. Murnau. Though other fi lm historians have tended to attribute the arrival of such talent purely to the money, fame and glamour Hollywood represented for so many foreigners-or conversely, to the U.S. industry’s attempt to elevate the prestige of fi lmmaking through its association with “high-class” European artists-Taylor rightly points out that Hollywood actively encouraged the recruitment of international talent primarily as a way of eliminating competition from rival industries, which it is was “better to enlist than oppose” (19). Entirely missing from Taylor’s otherwise excellent account, however, is the central role played by Latin American émigrés in the late 1920s and early 1930s, and the particularly traumatic way the arrival of sound treated them. If European directors and actors suffered the consequences of the silent-to-sound sea change, Latin American actors-as aggressively pursued by the studios as the Europeans earlier in the decade-played an equally prominent role in the Hollywood imaginary at the end of the silent era.
