Silent Film Culture in Yucatán: Entrepreneurship and Entertainment

The history of Mexican cinema remains a story told about the country’s center, Mexico City, and in a nationalist register.  As a corrective, this paper uses archival and print sources to examine the development of film culture—production, distribution, and exhibition—during the teens and early twenties in the Yucatán, a region of Mexico oriented most insistently toward the United States and Cuba and shaped by its role in global capitalism.  I argue that Yucatán’s film culture was deeply imbricated with the region’s trade networks, a relationship which superseded notions of the development of a national cinematic tradition, and a product of a local understanding of the place of culture in modernization and economic development.  Documenting cinema’s place in these networks and in particular the region’s film culture’s indebtedness to Cuba suggests alternative regional histories of cinema in Mexico and in Latin America that remain obscured by film studies’ focus on “national cinema.”