Finding Emilio Fernández: Mexican Extras and Latinx Representation in Early Sound Era Hollywood

Abstract

Emilio Fernández is well known as one of the biggest directors of classical Mexican cinema in the 1940s, who made a string of critical successes that attracted global critical attention and acclaim, including María Candelaria (1943), Flor Silvestre (1943), and Las abandonadas (1944). What is less well known is that, as a young man between 1926 and 1933, he lived and worked in Los Angeles as a Hollywood extra and bit player. Using textual analysis of his small appearances in five key films, this article shifts the focus onto the under-studied figure of the extra to explore Fernández’s little known sojourn in Hollywood. It argues that allowing attention to be drawn away from the centre of the films to Fernández on the margins makes space for a centering of Latinx experiences in early sound era Hollywood otherwise ignored in scholarship, and for a greater understanding of the role extras played in shifting representational imperatives as the film industry made its transition to sound.