Emilio Fernández

The Fall of Virtuous Men: Mexican Film Noir, and the Crisis of Values in the Postrevolutionary State, 1950–1959

“…Armendáriz's role as Marcos the pelotari was miles away from the charros in black flannel and silver-threaded suit, or the innocent peasants dressed in immaculate white cotton garb that he had portrayed during the previous decade (Fernández 2016;Tierney 2012). Moreover, the chivalric values, the indigenous innocence, and the revolutionary solidarity championed in earlier rural films of Mexican cinema are nowhere to be found in this fast-paced urban drama.…”

Photographing Children in Mexico City's Red‐Light Districts

“…The abuse she suffered, evident from her harrowing testimony, is in sharp contrast to the close relationship between her and her daughter Afrodita. The girl's presence within the album is crucial to Goded's visual mediation of what it means to be both a prostitute and a mother on the streets of Mexico City, challenging filmic and narrative heritage which very rarely portrays prostitutes as good mothers (Tierney, ).…”

“…By making women young and old the main protagonists of her work she resists the patriarchal sidelining of the images of women as significant players in their country's visual history (Mraz, : 73). She productively engages the dichotomous relationship between prostitution and motherhood in popular imagery (Mora, ; Tierney, ) by positioning Afrodita at the centre of her mother's life. Her photographs remain ambiguous in their portrayal of prostitution as corporeal entrepreneurialism (Hofmann, : 233) because they represent both the material fruits of sex work and the emotional and physical toll of such labour.…”

“…Based on the book, Santa the film (1931) was the first Mexican feature with direct sound, where Lupita Tovar played the title character. It was also the first brothel melodrama, an important national form, which later spurred the cabaretera (cabaret/brothel melodrama) (Tierney, : 22) and fichera (Mora, : 109) subgenres, all of them concerned with portraying fallen women or their places of work. In Cinemachismo: Masculinities and Sexuality in Mexican Film (2006), Sergio de la Mora devotes several chapters to charting representations of prostitution in literature and cinema throughout the twentieth century, examining them as repositories of the nation's anxieties about its myth of origin and changing gender roles over the decades.…”

“…Goded's visual reinterpretation of the trope of prostitution challenges its usual separation between fallen women and mothers, which are ordinarily presented as two separate categories (Tierney, ). The representations of children in her album and their relationship to their mothers, who work on the streets of Mexico City, contrast that reductive cultural trope with documentary evidence of family life happening alongside sex work.…”