Hoisting the Mexican Death Totem: Macario (dir. Gavaldón, 1960) and the Projection of mexicanidad

Abstract

Though commercially successful at home and widely recognized abroad, Roberto Gavaldón’s 1960 film Macario has been underexamined by critics and scholars due to its effortful artistic pretensions, strategies for exalting popular nationalist culture, connections to foreign cultural products, and place within Mexican film history’s narrative of post–golden age decline. In alignment with recent scholarship questioning the role of tastemakers and their verdicts on popular Mexican cinema, this article draws on Andrew Higson’s theorization of national films as strategic interventions within the heterogenous and even contradictory symbolic field of national-identity discourses. Through film analysis and informed by Claudio Lomnitz’s understanding of Mexico’s three national totems, this study demonstrates how Gavaldón’s Macario promotes popular death culture by embedding it within key preexisting discourses tied to Mexican identity. In so doing, this article illuminates Macario’s significance within Mexican cinema history as the most prominent filmic contributor to the hoisting of Mexican death culture as the symbol of mexicanidad. Moreover, this study posits Gavaldón’s film as an indispensable precursor for understanding how Mexican death culture today operates matter of factly as metonym for the nation in audiovisual mediums consumed globally.