Lupe Vélez and her spicy visual “accent” in English-language print media

Abstract

This article analyzes the visual linguistic “accent” of Mexican film actor Lupe Velez in US English-language fan magazines from 1928 to 1941. The form in which Velez was quoted in fan magazines, with a Spanish-inflected English (SIE) “accent,” is telling of how language can racialize, exotify, and gender bodies by representing linguistic differences through text. Some visual techniques used to emphasize Velez’s foreignness were italicizing certain words, publishing words with missing consonants, and adding double vowels to represented speech. With a feminist critical discourse analysis (FCDA), Velez’s “accent” not only shows readers the gendered and racialized side effects of this form of representation but also reminds readers of the continual form in which media categorizes Mexican women in the United States.