The Frivolous Scene: Cosmopolitan Amusements in Mexico City's 1920s

Abstract

This article historically excavates the ludic performance scene and transregional leisure culture that significantly shaped Mexico City’s farandula , or entertainment industry. It focuses on theatrical revue, cinema, and the cabaret scene of the 1920s, an overlapping arena of cosmopolitan combustion, frivolous pleasures, and aesthetic experimentation that would play a critical role in revamping public life after the Revolution (1910–1917). Defined by the commercial exchange of music, song, dance, and also sexuality, the city’s theater and dance venues created a key matrix for the emergence of sound media, particularly the radio and musical film industries of the 1930s. More than any other phenomena, including silent cinema and Hollywood, the city’s amusement milieus established the conditions of possibility for show business, as they created a space for emerging social relations, aesthetic formats, and genres of labor and leisure. This article argues that the city’s expanded arena of lowbrow diversions was fundamental, and not merely incidental, to the consolidation of an entertainment industry as a counter-public sphere. The implications of this shift are crucial to writing an account of public amusements and mass culture that challenges existing national and transnational historiographies: grounded in urban history, my exploration of entertainment practices reveals how travelling comediennes and troubadours, regional migrants and itinerant impresarios, congregated in the capital as they moved to the beat of show business. In doing so, I outline an argument for how to think about the ways in which Mexico City’s frivolous, playful, and commercial culture played a pivotal role in the making of the modern.