Dolores del Río: Beauty, Celebrity, and Power in a Transnational Context

Dolores del Río began her career as a Hollywood actress in 1925 when she and her husband left Mexico in the wake of the Mexican Revolution, seeking artistic careers in the United States. She became an international star, as the movies she made circulated throughout Europe as well as the Western Hemisphere. She was always coded as white and permitted to play romantic heroines, despite her Mexican nationality, class in this case overcoming ethnicity. Her beauty led to celebrity and artistic success in the United States and internationally. This very celebrity gave her significant power in Mexico, social and artistic as well as economic, when she returned permanently in the early 1940s. She became one of the great divas of Mexican film and both patron and beneficiary of the Mexican cultural renaissance, retaining her reputation as a great lady despite challenging gender ideologies in both the personal and professional realms of her life. A major challenge in re-creating her life is reading through the narrative that she herself developed and presented in interviews a number of times and determining and understanding the ways in which this preferred story included, augmented and/or omitted particular portions of her documented personal history. Her life story raises and illuminates issues of gender, race and ethnicity, as they interact with power and celebrity.