ABSTRACT
During the 1930s, Mexican cinema’s prostitute melodrama focused on the representation of the fallen woman narrative. An important component to this construction was music, particularly the danzón. Its use in these films emphasized the sexuality of the protagonist, and contemporary consumer culture. Looking specifically at the uses of the danzón in the film La mancha de sangre (1938), this chapter argues that the danzón maintained a precarious position in early Mexican cinema as not just a popular transnational dance genre with sexual connotations, but also a marker of cosmopolitanism in a film industry searching for and constructing a national identity.
