ABSTRACT
In the early 1920s, conservative and liberal observers alike agreed that Mexico seemed to be Americanizing at a frighteningly rapid pace. Many blamed this state of affairs on American motion pictures and the new models of gender, class relations, and consumer behavior they offered to Mexican audiences. The country had come under the sway, as one journalist phrased it, “of the characteristic North American film . . . a docile and faithful instrument of tenacious and unbreakable propaganda” (Alvarez 1924). These concerns echoed those being raised in other countries as the increasingly consolidated US film industry went about selling America and itself to the world. The notion that the consumption of American popular culture inexorably leads to ideological dominance, pace Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart (2002), and inevitably displaces national or local culture continues to be central to debates about the globalization of media past and present. While scholars such as Toby Miller (2008) focus on the seemingly ever-growing power of the contemporary US film industry, others have questioned the Hollywood-as-hegemony thesis by focusing on the “activities of local agents” (Maltby 2004, 7) and examining the historical reception of Hollywood film in local contexts.1
