ABSTRACT
As cinema fades from the hegemonic position it has held over most of the twentieth century as the purveyor of socially shared fictions, one would expect that the allegories studied in this book, as well as the modes of inter-American relation they model, would undergo a dramatic change, or even disappear altogether. It is also very possible that the cinematic contact zone of the Americas, as reconfigured in the 1930s and constructed over the last 80 years, might continue to thrive fueled by the growing array of communication technologies that now multiply the opportunities for instantaneous multiple access to the existing archive of films, videos and visual documents. Both the old and new films projected in the new media will tend to keep critiquing and perpetuating the most enduring of colonial legacies in the Americas, the depiction of Latin and Anglo America as the principal, competing and opposing poles of hemispheric cultural identity.
