Pancho Villa Meets Sun Yat-sen: Third World Revolution and the History of Hollywood Cinema

Abstract

Although today we tend to isolate them as distinct groups, Mexicans and Chinese in the US have often been linked. These links derive in part from similar histories of immigration and labor but also from related histories of revolution. Some dates are in order here: the Chinese “Boxer Rebellion” took place in 1904; Sun Yat-sen’s revolution occurred in 1912; the Mexican Revolution is conventionally dated to 1910–20; and the May 4th Movement began in 1919. The connections between Mexicans and Chinese in the US find expression in a variety of mass cultural forms including vaudeville, where Mexican and Chinese performers often shared the stage; in a film like The Son Daughter (1932), where Mexican actor Ramon Novarro plays a Chinese revolutionary; and in Hollywood westerns in which Chinese and Mexican villains are in cahoots. In what follows, I argue that the Chinese and Mexican revolutions helped to shape both Hollywood’s global hegemony and resistance to it. I find support for this claim in the careers of two Hollywood film workers—the Californio actor Leo Carrillo and the Oscar-winning Chinese American cinematographer James Wong Howe. I conclude by arguing for the need to rethink US film studies in relationship to anti-imperial struggle and by suggesting the critical importance of triangulating American studies, Latin American studies, and Asia Pacific studies. To both historicize the cultural and political economies of globalization in the Americas and to project future possibilities for radical transformation, the north/south orientation of American studies and Latin American studies must be supplemented, I conclude, by the east/west axis of Asia Pacific studies.