Adapting Race

Abstract

This article considers how Mexican cinema has engaged with and dramatized global political conversations about Black oppression and power. It builds off recent scholarship that analyzes the visual representation of Afro-Mexican subjectivities, as well as scholarship that criticizes Mexican cinema’s long history of privileging whiteness, justified through the ideology of mestizaje. Analyses of Blackness in Mexican cinema have so far focused on its Golden Age (1930s–1950s). This article extends this area of inquiry by looking at the 1970s, a period that is generally dismissed by Mexican film scholars for its inferior quality. I argue that the exploitation genres that proliferated in the seventies allowed Mexican filmmakers to play with race in notable ways. As evidence, I consider one film in depth, El hombre de los hongos (1976, dir. Roberto Gavaldón). This film innovatively translates the blaxploitation subgenre to the Mexican context, giving rise to what I call Mex-blaxploitation. It interweaves references to the Black Panther movement with examples of colonial Black resistance in Latin America, articulating a hemispheric account of antiracist revenge. I signal how certain elements of the film reify existing stereotypes of Blackness in Mexico, but also note its innovative framing of the Afro-Mexican subject as the only viable hero of postindependent Mexico.