ABSTRACT
In her introduction to an important collection of essays on regionalism in Latin America, Doris Sommer (1996) notes that the postmodern celebration of hybridity risks replicating the populist promotion of syncretism and miscegenation that has been central to much post-independence Latin American nationalist discourse, which set out to construct a seamless, unified national body via the assimilation of cultural and racial differences.1 As Sommer stresses, our contemporary celebration of hybridity should not lose sight of the perceptions of the early twentieth-century Cuban ethnographer Fernando Ortiz, who coined the term ‘transculturation’ in order ‘to distinguish the unresolvable, often violent tension among cultures in conflict from the neat resolutions of difference suggested by such ideal concepts . . . as syncretism, hybridity, or mestizaje’ (Sommer 1996: 121-2). In insisting on the tensions between cultures – exemplified in the title of his Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar (1940) – Ortiz was rejecting the acculturation process through which the dominant culture procures social ‘improvement’ through the assimilation of subaltern cultural forms. In this chapter I explore the ways in which the early Franco regime used popular cinema to promote a totalitarian model of nationhood based, paradoxically, on miscegenation: a classic example of how hybridity can be invoked by those hostile to racial difference. I hope to show how, even in this totalitarian project, the signs of racial difference refuse to be elided.
