Revista del Cinema: Silent Cinema in Yucatán

Laura Isabel Serna

Film History: An International Journal, Volume 29, Number 1, 2017, pp. 1-29
(Article)

Published by Indiana University Press

For additional information about this article

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L AURA ISABEL SERNA

Revista del Cinema: Silent Cinema in Yucatán

ABSTRACT: This essay examines a regional film magazine, Revista del Cinema, to illumi-
nate the vibrant film culture that flowered in Yucatán in the late teens. As a close analysis
of the publication shows, cinema was conceived of as part of a broader, regional commer-
cial culture and its growth the product of the region’s place along global trade networks.
Revista del Cinema exposes the intimate links between other cultural forms, which likewise
circulated via trade networks and regional film production and exhibition. In the journal,
distributors, exhibitors, and even projectionists emerge as artists who contributed to the
production of the filmic text.

KEYWORDS: Mexico, Yucatán, film culture, trade journals, exhibition

In September 1917, Moving Picture World quoted extensively from a letter writ-
ten to the publication by American cameraman Robert A. Turnbull. Turnbull
reported that in those parts of Mexico where the revolution had wound down,
the film business was booming. Toward the end of his missive, Turnbull offered
an intriguing anecdote drawn from his recent travels through the Yucatán
peninsula. “One man, a millionaire [in Yucatán],” he wrote, “makes pictures
his hobby.” Turnbull proceeded to describe this hobbyist’s latest production in
detail: “he built the forts, houses, streets, canons etc.—everything a la Griffith;
even imported some scenic artists from Cuba to do the sets. . . . He took the
picture, developed it, cut it, and showed it, all by himself and he had never seen
a motion picture studio in his life.” This unnamed film, Turnbull declared, was
“not bad at all”; the photography, “perfect.”1
At the end of the transitional era, an era during which the industrial
structure of cinema, particularly in the United States, began to solidify, the
idea of someone who had never been inside a film studio making a feature
film clearly struck Turnbull as an amusing oddity.2 He, like the Moving Picture
World’s readers, probably thought of Yucatán as an appropriately exotic sub-
ject for travelogues—he was there after all to take scenic footage—or perhaps

Film History, 29.1, pp. 1–29. Copyright © 2017 Trustees of Indiana University. doi: 10.2979/filmhistory.29.1.02
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Fig. 1: A rare image, most likely a photographic still, from ¡1810! O los libertadores (1916).
(Enciclopedia Yucatanese, s.v. “El Cinematógrafo” [Mérida, Yucatán: Gobierno del Estado, 1945],
5: 319)

newsreels, but not as a site of film production. However, as Turnbull made clear,
audiences in Yucatán welcomed this homegrown film, which made over $7,000
in a local run. The film Turnbull describes in his letter was in point of fact the
first feature-length narrative film ever produced in Mexico: ¡1810! o los liber-
tadores (1810 or the Liberators), a ten-reel, romantic rendering of the Mexican
struggle for independence from Spain produced by a local production company,
CIRMAR (fig. 1).
Yucatán could lay claim not only to early feature-film production but also
to a vibrant film culture comprised of local distribution firms and numerous
motion-picture venues. In the spring of 1917, the Yucatecan correspondent to
Cine-Mundial, Moving Picture World’s Spanish-language counterpart, offered
an extensive report of the principal (i.e., most elegant) motion-picture venues in
Mérida, a list of films recently released in the city, and a short account of local
film production (e.g., the activities of CIRMAR), before concluding, “in this rich
state of the Mexican republic the cinema is very developed.”3 By 1923, during
socialist governor Felipe Puerto Carillo’s administration, Yucatán had a larger
number of cinema seats relative to its population than any other Mexican state

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or Mexico City. Data gathered by the Departamento de Trabajo (Department of

Labor) for a 1923 census of the cinema exhibition business across the republic
indicates that there were approximately sixty motion-picture venues in Yucatán
that could seat around 35,000 people, almost 10 percent of the state’s popula-
tion as reported in the 1921 census, at any given time.4 Though there are other
examples of regional film production in Mexico, in states such as Durango, Que-
retero, and Puebla, the Yucatán’s combination of film production and a booming
exhibition sector begs to be historicized.5
How might we explain this burst of cinematic activity outside of not only
the major sites of international film production, namely the United States and
Western Europe, but also outside of Mexico City, the center of the Mexican film
industry, such as it was, during the silent period and the site most often asso-
ciated with early filmgoing in Mexico? Accounts of Mexican film production
during the silent period often overlook ¡1810!, identifying La Luz (The Light,
1917), a remake of the Italian melodrama Il fuoco (Io fosco [The Flame], 1916)
produced in the capital, as the country’s first feature. On the rare occasions
that the film is recuperated into Mexican film history, scholars often focus on
its premiere in the capital or its nationalist subject matter, thus folding it into
a centralist, nationally defined history of film production.6 In turn, Yucatán’s
vibrant exhibition culture has gone virtually unnoticed save by local histori-
ans. As a corrective, this essay situates the emergence of this vibrant regional
film culture in the context of Yucatán’s “pronounced geographical affinity for
the United States and Cuba” and a culture and economy that represented a
unique expression of Mexico’s modernizing aspirations, positioned as it was
along important circuits of regional and international trade.7
To that end, I mine a previously unstudied weekly trade magazine, Revista
del Cinema, published in Mérida, the state’s capital.8 In the context of the history
of cinema in Mexico, where virtually all film magazines from the silent era,
whether trade journals or fan magazines, have been lost, Revista del Cinema
represents a unique resource.9 Its first issue appeared in the fall of 1916, though
it is unclear whether the weekly publication continued after the late spring of
1917, the date of the last issue preserved by the Hemeroteca Histórica de Yucatán
(Historic Newspaper and Periodical Archive of Yucatán). Regardless, the extant
issues of the magazine, along with evidence drawn from El Espectador, a weekly
entertainment magazine published in the early teens, and La Voz de la Revolu-
ción, a daily newspaper that began publication in 1910, allow me to sketch the
contours of regional distribution, exhibition, and reception, demonstrating that
CIRMAR’s seemingly anomalous production was, like the state’s cinema culture
more generally, the product of the region’s position along trade networks that
facilitated the circulation of both goods and culture.

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In the pages of Revista del Cinema, motion pictures emerge as: a commod-
ity that traveled the routes of exchange that connected the interior of the state
to the capital and Yucatán to other parts of the Caribbean, the United States,
and Europe; a cultural formation that was perceived as the product of the busi-
nessmen and technicians who brought films to the public; and a reflection of the
region’s preoccupation with imported goods and culture. These dimensions of
film culture in the Yucatán suggest the ways in which economic relationships
and their attendant local cultural geographies rather than national identity
or nationalist sentiments—though they sometimes come into play as well—
conditioned cinema’s localization during the silent period.
I have adopted the idea of localization from Miriam Hansen who mobi-
lizes it as a means of assessing the encounter between early classical Hollywood
cinema and local contexts of reception and production. To date, this phenome-
non has been most closely analyzed in relationship to Shanghai cinema.10 Here,
I intend to signal a more expansive localization of global cinema, which would
include the reception and recontextualization of international and national
production. A case study focused on a regional film culture demonstrates the
productive potential of mobilizing multiple levels of analysis simultaneously,
allowing us to see the connections between local, national, and transnational
networks along which cinema traveled during the silent period.11
THE YUCATÁN PENINSULA AND
TURN-OF-THE-CENTURY MODERNITY
Since the early nineteenth century, when the region (at the time Yucatán and
Campeche) was annexed to the newly independent Mexican republic, Yucatán
has been described as culturally, politically, and economically distinct from
the rest of Mexico. In 1941 the anthropologist Robert Redfield summed up this
view of the region writing, “Yucatan is insular politically and sentimentally.
. . . [T]he inhabitants think of themselves as different from the other people of
Mexico.”12 The state’s seemingly unique path of development vis-à-vis the rest
of the country has been the subject of extensive study, some of which, à la Red-
field, has characterized it as “a world apart.”13 But as historians Allen Wells and
Gilbert Joseph observe, the region’s most notable and seemingly unique charac-
teristics, at least from the mid-nineteenth century onward, can be understood
as a localized manifestation of the Mexican state’s commitment to its broader
project of modernization in the late nineteenth century, frequently limned as
“order and progress.”14
The form that this modernizing ideology took in Yucatán, a region with a
geography distinct from that of the rest of the country and unconnected to Mex-
ico City by land until after World War II, made the region fabulously wealthy,

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strengthened its ties to Europe and the United States, and fostered a cultural
milieu that simultaneously nurtured regionally specific cultural production
even as it sought to emulate that of the nation’s capital and European cities.
Briefly, the development of the twine binder in the 1870s led to a huge growth
in North American demand for the one crop that would grow in the region’s
rocky soil—henequen, a plant whose fibers were used to make twine.15 In the
late nineteenth century, this economy based on the cultivation and export of
a single crop generated fantastic amounts of wealth for a small group of land-
owners who came to be known as the casta divina (the divine caste). It also
brought into existence a racialized agricultural labor economy, only nominally
different from slavery. Maya, displaced from their ancestral lands and no lon-
ger able to sustain their families via the rotating crop system they had devised
to make the region’s unwelcoming terrain productive, Yaqui Indians who had
been detained by the state, and Korean and Chinese contract workers found
themselves ensnared in a vicious system of debt peonage.16 At the same time,
the boom attracted a small but active population of immigrants from Spain,
Cuba, and the Middle East, as well Asian workers who had fulfilled their labor
contracts and nationals from other parts of Mexico who found opportunities for
work in the transportation, technology, and commercial sectors that emerged
to service the henequen industry. 17
At the onset of the revolution, Yucatán, which had remained outside of
heated military conflicts and popular protests, was the richest state in Mexico,
and its capital had been transformed from a colonial backwater to a modern
city.18 During this so-called Golden Age, the state’s richest families, the casta
divina and those who aspired to that status, lived lives defined by conspicuous
consumption that were to a large degree oriented abroad. These families took
frequent trips to Europe and the United States, sent their children abroad to be
educated, purchased fine imported furniture and clothes, and administered
the affairs of their haciendas (large estates) from ostentatious mansions that
lined the main streets of Mérida. During this period, the capital’s urban infra-
structure was modernized to the extent that Mérida had electric lighting and a
trolley system before Mexico City, and Yucatán boasted hundreds of kilometers
of primary and secondary rail lines that linked its major cities, Mérida and the
Port of Progreso, to towns and haciendas in the interior.19 This modernizing
agenda included the establishment of institutions—such as the Peón Contreras
Theater— that would lend the city, and thus the state, an air of cosmopolitanism
and sophistication.20
Apace with these changes, which tracked the broader modernizing
project of the Porfirian regime, a series of government decrees influenced by
paternalistic social reform movements sought to shape popular entertainment

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culture. During the administration of Governor Olegario Molina (1902–10), the

state government enacted a series of measures designed to police lower-class
leisure and curb vices such as drinking and gambling.21 Revolutionary governor
Salvador Alvarado, who came to power in 1915 as an appointee of the revolution-
ary government, also sought to reform popular morality by outlawing cantinas,
gambling, and bullfights.22 In the teens, Yucatán’s wealth, international ties,
and modernizing and reformist preoccupations created the conditions for the
emergence of a dynamic film culture.
Yucatán’s fascination with the cinema began slowly. Local historian
Gabriel Ramírez quotes from a description of Mérida’s entertainment scene at
the turn of the twentieth century: “with the exception of theatrical functions,
some concerts or evening soirees, in Mérida there only existed a short season
in which all the world had fun and this time was that of carnival.”23 This lean
entertainment culture would expand over the course of the next decade and
a half with the introduction and gradual popularization of motion pictures.
Shortly after being introduced in Mexico City in 1896, motion pictures became
part of Mérida’s entertainment scene in the form of seasonal programs brought
to the city by itinerant exhibitors. As Ramírez notes, the establishment of an
unnamed distribution firm in Mérida in 1904 facilitated the opening of a small
handful of permanent venues.24 Further, Mérida and its public and political
celebrations became the topic of several films by visiting filmmakers. In 1906
Enrique Rosas, who would later direct the important silent serial El automovil
gris (1919), filmed the activities around President Porfirío Díaz’s visit to Mérida
and the city’s carnival celebration. In 1909 the Alva brothers documented the
tour of the state by then-presidential candidate Francisco  I. Madero, giving
Mérida a place in the nation’s political imaginary.
During the revolution, which initially had only a glancing effect on
Yucatán, cinema gained a more stable place in Mérida’s entertainment culture.
It was during this period that the region’s exhibition infrastructure expanded
and local filmmaking emerged. This process is well documented in El Espect-
ador, a general-interest magazine devoted to entertainment of all sorts—the
theater, carnival, private dances organized by young members of the city’s elite
families, and so on. The publication advertised itself as a weekly of information,
entertainment, and varieties. Its front page regularly featured articles that cast
the presence of touring performers in Mérida as “a benefit to our artistic cul-
ture.”25 Large black-and-white photographic portraits typically accompanied
these features, indicating the privileged place these performers occupied in
Mérida’s cultural hierarchy.
In this context, the cinema appears primarily as a Lenten alternative to
theatrical performances, which were proscribed during the forty days before

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Easter.26 During this period, Mérida’s theaters mounted film programs, often
availing themselves of the services of itinerant exhibitors who brought slates of
new films to the region. For example, in February 1912 El Espectador’s readers
were informed that the Alva brothers, who just a few months later would be
filming footage that would become part of La revolución Orozquista (1912), were
bringing the Pathé Frères film Nuestra Señora de Paris (Notre-Dame de Paris,
1911) to Mérida as part of their seasonal film offerings.27 The seasonal nature of
these exhibition practices cast cinema as an alternative to more desirable forms
of entertainment, namely the theater, for the middle-class and elite audience El
Espectador addressed.
Issues from the fall of 1912 indicate that cinema came to occupy a distinct
and growing niche in Mérida’s entertainment ecology beyond that of a poor
substitute for real culture. In late fall of 1912, the editors of El Espectador wrote,
as they announced the opening of another cinema, “In Mérida the cinema has
established itself in a definitive manner.”28 The new popularity of cinema was
described as a “furor.” And then, in January 1913: “now it’s not a hobby, but a
fever, what there is in Mérida for the cinema.”29 First, two important venues—
the Teatro Peón Contreras and the Circo Teatro Yucateco, a site that offered
everything from circus performances to bullfights—began to offer motion pic-
tures in the form of periodic “seasons.” These two locations were joined in 1912
by a third, the Salon Actualidades. The success of this third spot, which charged
just ten centavos, was offered up as proof that “in Mérida there is sufficient
public for various [motion-picture theaters].”30 Though in 1913 the question
of whether or not Mérida could support so many cinemas again arose, in 1916
when Revista del Cinema began publication, there were at least seven cinemas
in Mérida, as well as others in the outlying areas around the capital, referred to
as the henequen zone, where most of the region’s henequen crop was cultivated.
A survey of advertisements from the newspaper La Voz de la Revolución
in 1915 indicates that the fare on offer during the midteens came primarily from
Italian and Danish studios. The dominance of European pictures was occasion-
ally broken by the exhibition of an American production, such as the serial La
señorita del misterio (Lucille Love: Girl of Mystery, 1914). Notably, that film was
marketed not as a serial, which likely would have had little purchase in a local
market conditioned to shorts combined with dramatic features, but rather as a
cinta de largo metraje or feature film, which contained scenes “that take place
in Mexico.”31 Film programs in Mérida circa 1915 depended on the size of the
venue. The Peón Contreras regularly offered two screenings, one that began
in the late afternoon and another that began in the evening. Each program
featured two longer films, typically dramas, with musical intermissions, and
in the late evening symphonic music and a comedy. Smaller venues appear to

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have only shown films. For example, the same week that the Peón Conteras was
advertising Lucille Love, the San Juan featured a simple program consisting of
the Italian short film Supremos Sacrificios (Supreme Sacrifice, 1912); a five-reel
German drama, Eva (1913), starring Henny Porten; and the short Italian drama,
Despues de la muerte (Dopo la morte [After Death], 1913).32 Newspaper adver-
tisements for these films were replete with declarations of their artistic merit.
However, in the pages of Revista del Cinema, a film’s artistic merit, if remarked
upon at all, was valued for its contribution to a film’s profitability.
FILMS FOLLOW TRADE
As in other parts of the world, Mérida’s film exhibition infrastructure emerged
within the broader context of an expanding commercial culture, a relationship
that can be seen in both El Espectador and Revista del Cinema. In El Espect-
ador features about entertainment shared space with social news, romantic
poetry, and perhaps most importantly advertisements for commodities and
services ranging from toys and chocolates to imported ready-made clothing
and funerary services. Revista del Cinema, which focused more squarely, though
not exclusively, on cinema, likewise ran ads for everything from department
stores, furniture, and beauty products to machinery and beer. It also included
regular reporting and features on issues of interest to women (beauty, fashion,
morality, etc.), baseball, literature, the activities of the boy scouts, and the social
lives of friends and colleagues of the magazine’s staff. Given the impoverished
state of most of the state’s laborers, these publications clearly addressed Méri-
da’s middle and upper classes who were most likely to have disposable income
and to inhabit the urbanizing spaces being created by Yucatán’s participation
in international trade.
Although cinema and consumer culture went hand in hand around the
globe, these publications allow us to map the local commercial networks that
facilitated cinema’s spread. Along with its entertainment news, El Espectador
published reports about commercial activity both in Mérida and farther afield
in the henequen zone. Revista del Cinema, for its part, covered the business of
cinema in the capital and what its writers referred to as “the interior” of the
state, essentially the henequen zone, with irregular coverage of the activi-
ties of film entrepreneurs in Progreso, the state’s main port, and the state of
Campeche, which until it seceded in 1862 had been part of Yucatán. Railroad
lines that had been built to connect henequen plantations to Mérida, Progreso,
and ultimately the United States and the rest of the Caribbean linked these
locations, demonstrating how cinema—films and film men—made use of the
transportation networks developed to connect Yucatán to Mexico City and
international ports.

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This logic of commerce defined the larger geography of the film trade
described in El Espectador and Revista del Cinema. From both publications we
learn that Mérida received films from Europe via the Caribbean Atlantic (New
Orleans and Havana) and much less frequently from Mexico City. Regardless
of provenance, every film arrived in Yucatán aboard one of the steamships
that docked at Progreso bringing goods and passengers from the United States
or Europe and left carrying sisal, the processed henequen fiber used to make
binder twine, to New Orleans or other US ports or the domestic vessels that
connected Progreso to Veracruz and thus to the rest of the country. Film men
traveled regularly between Yucatán, Cuba, New Orleans, and New York, with
the occasional voyage to Europe. Their names pepper ship manifests with their
occupation listed as “comerciante” (merchant) or “empresario” (businessman/
entrepreneur).33 Revista del Cinema tracked the comings and goings of these film
men’s journeys to ink new deals or obtain the latest releases in detail in its Notas
Locales (Local Notes) section.34 Within this Atlantic network, ties between
Mérida’s film culture and that of Cuba were particularly strong. Indeed, some,
like Cuban immigrant Gonzalo Arrondo, a principal in the distribution firm
Álvarez, Arrondo, y Cia and regional representative for the Cuban entertain-
ment circuit Santos y Artigas, maintained business interests in more than one
country. Thus, cinema, like other imported goods arrived in Yucatán, as adver-
tising copy liked to phrase it, aboard “el ultimo vapor” (the latest steamship), the
key transportation technology that facilitated Caribbean Atlantic commerce.35
As film men’s identification as merchants and businessmen indicates, for
those involved in the film industry, motion pictures were first and foremost a
business endeavor. Revista del Cinema’s owner and editor, a Cuban named Vale-
riano Ibañez, seems to have been involved in film distribution as early as 1914
when his name appeared in an advertisement for the Salon Popular in El Espect-
ador.36 His editorial in the inaugural issue pointedly states that the magazine
sought to “[make] known the enormous and profitable advantages produced by
the cinema” to the public at large. In that same editorial, Ibañez celebrated the
revolutionary government’s interest in using cinema for educational purposes
because he believed it would generate “moral and material” support for “our
mission.” Thus, from its inception Revista del Cinema sought to promote motion
pictures as an instrument of progress and modernization, while maintaining
a clear focus on the business of cinema and its possible contributions to the
region’s commercial culture.
This focus explains the publication’s appeal to the men involved in all
facets of the film exhibition industry, rather than to local moviegoers, though
the magazine featured information that would have interested them as well. In
addition to advertisements for the range of consumer goods described above,

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Fig. 2: “Directorio” (Revista del Cinema, December 1, 1916)

Fig. 3: “Cinema en el interior” (Cinema in the Interior)

the magazine also advertised goods and services that pertained directly to the
business of film exhibition. For example, the Allis Chalmers Manufacturing
Company, an American firm with a branch office in Mérida, took out ads that
touted the company’s ability to provide “complete installations for cinemas.”37
Advertisements for the material components required for film exhibition were
complemented by a regularly published directory of the names and addresses
of individuals and companies who could repair, tune up, or operate projectors
and create advertising slides for local businesses (fig. 2).
In its organization Revista del Cinema clearly privileged the local. Pub-
lished exhibition schedules for Mérida’s theaters were presented on the earliest

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Fig. 4: “Cinematografia Mundial” (World Cinema)

pages of each issue. Regular features that linked Mérida’s cinema culture to the
broader world accessible by rail or steamship followed this local information.
For example, each issue had reviews of recent screenings at cinemas in the
interior of the state. The heading of this section, Cinema en el Interior (Cinema
in the Interior [of the state]), made use of a filmstrip motif to connect the state’s
rural regions to the larger world of cinema. In the drawing a magnifying glass,
framed by bunches of tropical flowers, motivates our viewing of the content of
one of the film frames: a small boat, an almost indiscernible figure, and a body
of water (fig. 3).
Other features such as Cinematografía Mundial (World Cinema) made
clear that Yucatán’s film culture constituted part of a broader, global cultural
formation. That section offered production updates from the United States and
Europe as well as Mexico City. News that the magazine’s editorial staff regularly
received film publications from Italy, Japan, and Spain, as well as Cine-Mun-
dial, the Spanish-language version of Moving Picture World, shows how the
local industry depended on international networks, here those fostered by print
culture.38 Revista del Cinema was apparently on the radar of film companies,
at least in the United States.39 The magazine represented these relationships
visually in an illustration depicting a bearded, older man cranking the handle
of a globe-shaped projector loaded with film bearing the words “Cinematografia
Mundial” (world cinema) (fig. 4).
The images that accompanied these distinct sections suggest the ways
in which the staff of the Revista saw cinema as simultaneously a mechanism
by which the world could be brought to Yucatán and by which the region’s
characteristics could be revealed. From its coverage of the travels of film entre-
preneurs and weekly reviews of the cinema scene in Mérida and other towns in
the henequen zone to its reports on the world cinema scene, Revista del Cinema
sketched a cinematic geography that placed Mérida at the center of a series of

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Fig. 5: The cover of Revista del Cinema, January 5, 1917

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networks that connected towns in other parts of the peninsula, the Caribbean
Atlantic, Mexico City, New York, and Europe. In this way, the magazine makes
visible the way the local film industry was imbricated with its national and
international counterparts.
THE LABOR OF CINEMA IN YUCATÁN
Even as the film industry in Yucatán developed along these networks that con-
nected the region to the rest of Mexico, the Caribbean, the United States, and
Europe, local understandings of who generated any given filmic event, what I
will refer to as local framing, created a distinct form of cinematic celebrity. As
a visual example of this local framing, in its first six months the cover of Revista
del Cinema regularly featured an image of a foreign film actress confined to a
small rectangle that was often hard to make out given that it was inserted into
a larger illustration that was generated by local illustrator I. F. Quijano. In visual
terms, local artistic production frames and dominates the female star, even as
she was quickly becoming the dominant figure for cinematic celebrity around
the world (fig. 5).
Similarly, local framing extended to the advertisement of films them-
selves. In Revista del Cinema, still images from recent releases appeared not
with the names of their production companies, directors, or even stars, but
rather in conjunction with the name of the local, regional distribution company
that had made the film available to exhibitors and thus to the public. Copy
described films as part of this or that distributor’s “repertory,” indicating that
the distributor exercised a type of authorial function in the act of selecting and
circulating specific films. The magazine features countless examples of this sort
of attribution. For example, when Alvarez, Arrondo y Cia made the Universal
serial Soborno (Graft, 1915) available in the region, the magazine wrote, “the . . .
proprietors of this masterwork of cinema can be proud of having acquired a film
of inarguable merit.”40 That is, Revista del Cinema focused on the distributor as
not merely a link between the production company and the exhibitor but also
as a participant in the local production of cinematic texts (fig. 6).
The attribution of films to their distributors and the power of that associ-
ation to market and move films in Yucatán reflect the way that broad trends in
international film history took alternate forms in local contexts. Eileen Bowser
has detailed, primarily in reference to the United States, how, before the rise of
the star system, films were marketed via their brands. A quick glance at trade
magazines or early fan publications confirms that making the brand identifiable
was indeed a clear goal of marketers, whether that brand was the production or
distribution company.41 As Bowser notes, by the late teens, star actors had all
but eclipsed the production company’s brand in terms of marketing power.42

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Fig. 6: An advertisement for Soborno (Graft, 1915) distributed by Álvarez, Arrondo y Cia. (Revista
del Cinema, December 14, 1916)

In Yucatán, film stars competed not only with local artists as dis-
cussed above, but also with impresarios whose actions contributed not to
the film’s production but its circulation and thus the cinematic experience
writ large. As Yuri Tsivian’s characterization of film distributors in prerev-
olutionary Russia as “actuators” of a nascent domestic cinema suggests,
during the silent period local context shaped the dimensions of standard
industry roles.43 In the case of Yucatán, distributors played a vital role in
ensuring the health of a broader cinema culture, a role that was celebrated
rather than obscured behind recognition of the artistic personnel or even
corporate producers of the films that circulated. Given Yucatán’s relative
geographic isolation, even from Mexico City, distributors played a pivotal
role in providing access to motion pictures; it was their hard work traveling
across the Atlantic and inking deals, or even obtaining pirated material, that
made the Yucatán’s film culture possible.
The distributor, recognized for his ability to obtain and make available
quality films, laid the foundation for the other performances critical to Yucate-
can film culture’s growth and vibrancy: the activities of the exhibitor and projec-
tionist. In a manner similar to early fan culture’s behind-the-scenes explorations
of the new and fascinating space of the film studio, Revista del Cinema sought

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to reveal the inner workings of the motion-picture theater. In regular features

and occasional editorials that outlined the characteristics of the ideal moving-​
picture theater, which likely served a pedagogical function, exhibitors emerge
as both economic and creative agents. In descriptions of the success of their
theaters, men who owned or operated theaters both in Mérida and the state’s
interior were described as “active” and “tireless” and applauded for their “zeal”
and “aptitude” for commercial endeavors.44 Exhibitors in the interior, away from
Mérida’s urban setting, were applauded for their ability to fill their theaters and
to make their theaters, often one among several commercial interests their
owners were engaged in, a profitable venture.45 As was true across Mexico, the
success of various motion-picture venues across the state was not attributed
exclusively to the films that were shown, but to the efforts or acumen of theater
owners and managers, who represented the growth of small-scale capitalism
and modern entrepreneurship.46 Other features focused on the exhibitor as a
creative force, listing the range of tasks he had to coordinate. He had to ensure
the tranquility of the space, the safety of the patrons, the appropriateness of the
musical accompaniment, and the quality of projection. That is, he orchestrated
the audience’s entire experience.47
In order for the exhibitor to achieve the ideal Revista del Cinema described,
he required the services of a skilled projectionist. Long after projection had
ceased to preoccupy audiences in the United States and Western Europe, Revista
del Cinema highlighted projection as a key element of a cinema’s success or
failure. Upon announcing the opening of new theaters or lauding the success of
established venues, Revista del Cinema underscored the quality of projection.48
The coming and goings of “manipuladores” (projectionists) were tracked in the
magazine, and given the extent to which projectionists impacted the “quality
of projection and experience,” numerous features focused on both their skill
and the conditions of their labor.49 Ibañez declared the capable projectionist
an “artist” who made films appear “with grand exquisiteness.”50 He suggested
that exhibitors name their projectionist in their printed programs, in effect con-
verting a technician into a performer, a performer who often worked in difficult
circumstances in theaters that were not completely sealed from exterior light
or without regular access to resources such as the carbon lights necessary for
optimal projection. Although the magazine acknowledged the need for balanced
coverage, Ibañez published a letter from projectionists demanding higher pay
from theater owners who “having confidence in his [the projectionist’s] apti-
tude[,] put into his hands a film, on many occasions a fortune, and the lives of
the thousands of people who attend the theater.”51 Ironically, in acknowledging
that the projectionist’s labor was “the work of someone we don’t see,” Revista
del Cinema made visible the technical and mechanical know-how that made

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Fig. 7: An editorial cartoon about the difficulties of projection in Yucatán. (Moving Picture
World, December 22, 1917)

motion pictures a viable and potentially lucrative part of Yucatán’s cultural

landscape (fig. 7).52
One possible explanation for the publication’s championing of employ-
ees whose technological expertise was essential to the success of cinema as a
commercial endeavor can be found in the emerging urban labor movement in
Yucatán. As historians have noted, the revolutionary government, especially
under Salvador Alvarado, who was appointed to govern Yucatán by President
Venustiano Carranza, had brought workers’ issues to the forefront. Urban
workers, including railroad and port workers and artisans were encouraged to
organize and pressure their employers for higher wages.53 Revista del Cinema’s
advocacy of projectionists as skilled laborers represented not only a distinctly
local understanding of the labor required to “produce” a motion picture, but also
a growing consciousness about the role of wage laborers under (revolutionary)
commercial capitalism.54 Indeed when the magazine mentioned the recently
signed constitution—in a rare acknowledgment of politics—the editor focused
on the section that dealt with “work and social welfare,” lauding the govern-
ment’s focus on equity in labor relations.55 In this way, Yucatán’s film culture
assigned both the credit and the labor of creating the cinematic experience
among a range of local players—distributors, exhibitors, and projectionists.
Regional film production, in Yucatán exclusively that of CIRMAR, thus took its
place as another example of the local labor required to create the experience of
cinema out of imported goods and culture.
CIRMAR IN CONTEXT
In 1918 El amor que triunfa (Triumphant Love), CIRMAR’s second feature-length
film, screened in Mexico City. Film critic Rafael Zartrain Bermudez, writing
under the pseudonym Hipólito Seijas, appreciated the firm’s effort but con-
cluded, “too bad this is not a Mexican film.”56 Zartrain Bermudez was referring

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Figs. 8a and 8b: Manuel Cirerol Sansores and Carlos Martinez Arredondo (Revista del Cinema,
December 14, 1916)

specifically to the composition of the cast, which was comprised of Spanish

stage actors that the company had hired during their engagement at Mérida’s
Teatro Principal. While Zartrain Bermudez’s assignment of a national identity
to a film based on the national origin of the players deserves further scrutiny,
here I want to focus on the way that given the film culture, insistently local but
tied to the national and international circulation of films, presented by Revista
del Cinema, perhaps it was not so much that the film was “un-Mexican” as that
it was very Yucatecan.
The history of the firm and its production in the mid- to late teens helps
bring this distinction into focus. CIRMAR took its name from its two prin-
cipals, Carlos Martínez Arredondo y Castro (1888–1944) and Manuel Cirerol
Sansores (1890–1966), both sons of wealthy Yucatecan families (figs. 8a and
8b). As recounted in Gabriel Ramírez’s chronicle of silent film in the region,
Martínez had studied photographic chemistry and engineering abroad, most
likely in Philadelphia, where he developed a fascination with motion pictures.57
Upon his return to Yucatán, he ordered a camera from England, which he exper-
imented with before joining forces with Cirerol Sansores. Their class position
clearly facilitated their experimentation with motion pictures by providing

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them with the financial resources to purchase expensive imported equipment

and supplies. Indeed, they were somewhat anomalous in that in Mexico most
early filmmakers came from merchant rather than aristocratic backgrounds.
Although their output follows broad trends that animated early Mexican film
production, it also reflects a specific, local context in terms of subject matter,
production practices, and generic diversity.
Initially, CIRMAR looked to the peninsula’s Mayan past and distinct
contemporary cultural and economic landscape for inspiration. Its first two
films, Tiempos Mayas (Time of the Maya) and La voz de su raza (Voice of His
Race), both shorts of approximately eight minutes, thematized the region’s
Mayan past.58 Cirerol Sansores wrote La voz de su raza, about a young Mayan
couple on a hacienda whose romance is threatened by the hacienda owner’s
lecherous desire. It was described retrospectively in La Voz de la Revolucion as
“a film of complete regional character.”59 Tiempos Mayas, “another production
of local art,” was filmed on the Arredondo hacienda where the two friends had
workers, likely the hacienda’s primarily indigenous labor force, construct repli-
cas of Mayan temples and buildings so that Cirerol could act out the role of the
rebellious Mayan prince, “Flecha que mata” (arrow that kills).60
A similar, though temporally distinct preoccupation with regional issues,
can likewise be seen even in the company’s nonfiction films. Indeed, Revista del
Cinema’s second editorial praised CIRMAR for its recent production of Yucatán,
la tierra de oro verde (1917), a sponsored film produced under the auspices of
Yucatán’s Comité de Inmigración (Immigration Committee). The ideal exhibi-
tion of the film as described in the editorial consisted of a screening accompa-
nied by a lecture that would elaborate on the images on the screen and provide a
framework for audience comprehension.61 This film came on the heels of another
short film about henequen cultivation, La industria del henequén (The Henequen
Industry), and a topical short, Las fiestas del 16 de Septiembre en Mérida (Sep-
tember 16 Celebration in Mérida), which had screened as part of a three-act pro-
gram at the Teatro Peón Contreras in 1915. 62 Together these industrial, topical,
and fictional shorts demonstrate the firm’s preoccupation with regional issues
and culture at the same time that they reflect broader, national trends toward
using cinema to document civic and social life, promote the nation’s natural
resources, and represent the country’s indigenous past.
Indeed, the local is woven throughout all of their productions regardless
of genre. ¡1810! o los libertadores, which Ana M. López designates “the first Mex-
ican feature film with a clear nationalist spirit,” is a case in point.63 Although
¡1810! takes up a pivotal event in Mexican national history, it was an episode
with distinct importance in Yucatán as it catalyzed the peninsula’s integration
into the republic. What is more, the production incorporated a host of local

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figures. The scenario was written by local poet Arturo Peón Cisneros, the actors
were both professional and nonprofessional locals (including members of the
local military regiment), and when it screened in Mérida, a score by regional
composer Fausto Pinelo accompanied it.
In addition, although Amor que triunfa appears to represent a shift from
the nationalist themes of ¡1810! and the regional topicality of the firm’s non-
fiction and narrative shorts, it too reflects local culture by making visual the
traffic in imported culture that characterized the region. The film was based on
a popular Spanish zarzuela (musical comedy), El amor que huye by Juan Pardo
y Pardo and Tómas López Torregrosa, which had premiered in Madrid in 1911
and was published in 1917. In covering the film’s production, Revista del Cinema
noted that on the set one would find “a large group of artists from all of Mérida’s
theaters.”64 Indeed, the film starred two well-known touring performers: the
Argentine born tiple (soprano) María Caballé and Spanish comic Romualdo
Tirado, and the film’s publicity revolved around the name recognition that they
brought with them from the stage. Caballé, in particular, had a strong local fol-
lowing. Her image appeared regularly in Revista del Cinema in advertisements
for hair pomade or as a visual counterpart to numerous articles about the local
theater scene. So strong was Caballé’s local appeal that when her portrait graced
the cover of Revista del Cinema, the issue sold out across the peninsula. Report-
edly, when the film premiered in Mérida, the crowd gave her sustained applause
when she appeared on the screen and “the orchestra had to play ‘Reveille.’ ”65
Caballé may not have been Mexican by birth but she represented a
regional example of the movement between the stage and the cinema that ani-
mated early Mexican film production. In Mexico City, while theater and cinema
often seemed at odds, some theater professionals were deeply intrigued by
the opportunities motion pictures presented. The most visible evidence of this
cross-pollination was the founding of the short-lived but successful production
company Azteca Films by stage actress Mimí Derba.66 Although El Espectador
had cast the theater and cinema in opposition, by the late teens, the two shared
discursive and sometimes physical space. For example, despite its stated focus
on cinema, Revista del Cinema also covered the local theater scene in Mérida,
Progreso, and even Mexico City. What is more, editorials occasionally addressed
theater, sometimes in relationship to cinema and sometimes as a discrete enter-
prise. In these editorials cinema is positioned as live theater’s competitor but
also as a cultural force that could prompt impresarios to improve their theat-
rical offerings in order to maintain the public’s attention.67 The Teatro Peón
Contreras presented live theater and screened films and for a time housed
the offices of Revista del Cinema and the Mexico City–based film distribution
company, Camus y Cia., in its basement .68

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Although Amor que triunfa’s “imported” cast was decried by Zartrain

Bermudez for being “un-Mexican,” Revista del Cinema lauded the film precisely
because it was, as one feature article phrased it (under the title “National Pro-
duction”), “a Yucatecan film that looks like it was filmed in Europe.”69 La Voz
de la Revolución described in detail some of the film’s settings—a cabaret, the
seashore, the defensive fortifications built at the water’s edge in Campeche
(which might actually have been Progreso), and a lawn tennis party—noting
that the film “made us forget for an instant that the motion picture was filmed
in our homeland, so frequently accused of a lack of beauty.”70 That article too
observed approvingly that CIRMAR “had been able to yield artistic productions
that on screen will be confused with the [films] imported from Europe.”71 At the
same time, the local press praised the film for featuring foreign artists who were
the favorites of the local, theater-going public and for showcasing well-known
local sites such as the Parque de Centenario and the beaches of the Port of Pro-
greso.72 That the film could exhibit these two qualities, the imported and the
local, at the same time was likely part of its appeal in a region that prided itself
simultaneously on its distinctive cultural heritage and the regular importation
of European goods and culture (fig. 9).
Coverage of the film’s premiere described the “avalanche” of ticket buyers,
an avalanche that purportedly destroyed the ticket booth, and congratulated
not only CIRMAR—the production firm—but also “all of the (film) businesses,”
that is, the exhibitors, for the “financial success” of the film.73 Gabriel Ramírez
speculates that the film distributor and exhibitor Artaldo Erosa had invested
in the film and was, naturally, interested in its financial success.74 As this
account of the film’s trajectory suggests, though local film production drew on
the region’s artistic culture, cinema was in the main conceived of as a business
pursuit and film exhibition as part of the region’s growing commercial culture.
Indeed, the particular visions of the local offered by CIRMAR—renderings of
the nation’s political past, promotional films for industry that had generated
the region’s wealth, or commercial films that offered a clever combination of
local performance culture with an imported text—testify to Yucatán’s position
at the juncture of regional, national, and international economic and cultural
networks. CIRMAR would dissolve in the 1920s after making a last effort in
the form of a serial, La venganza de la bestia (Revenge of the Beast), as its prin-
cipals moved on to other pursuits including participation in local government
for Cirerol Sansores and for Martinez de Arredondo, a move to Mexico City
where he worked in industrial and sponsored film production. Their two early
feature films, unlike the region’s most important crop, never went farther than
the country’s capital where they barely registered in a media culture saturated
with imported films. In context, however, their films were representative of a

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Fig. 9: A scene from El amor que triunfa (1917) as reproduced on the cover of Revista del Cinema
(March 25, 1917)

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distinct and vibrant film culture, focused on the commercial possibilities of

cinema and its exhibition, that flourished at the intersection of transnational
networks of exchange.
CONCLUSION
Yucatecan film culture during the teens, at least as seen through Revista del Cin-
ema, focused primarily on cinema as a business. During that same decade many
filmmakers in Mexico were concerned with documenting major events and
figures of the revolution—or put another way, generating political propaganda.
Yucatán’s film culture exemplified a less overtly political understanding of the
role of cinema in society. Even when they granted that cinema could serve a role
in reforming society, film men in the Yucatán hewed closely to the idea of cinema
as a mechanism for delivering culture to the working classes. To wit, El Especta-
dor followed up on its announcement of the Alva brothers’ Lenten season in 1912
with a long digression about the potential social good that (European) cinema
could work, concluding that “the cinema is a highly cultured and entertaining
spectacle that is able to attract people of all ages and every social condition.”75
Even when iterated in a revolutionary register, this bourgeois reformist sensibil-
ity obtained. For example, in a short article commemorating the anniversary of
the outbreak of the revolution, “20 de Noviembre de 1910,” Revista del Cinema’s
editorial staff drew attention to the local revolutionary government’s “suppres-
sion of many elements that end up being damaging to citizens,” namely alcohol
consumption and gambling, and predicted hopefully, “all the money that was
invested in this ugly vice, will surely pass to the box offices of the theaters and
cinemas.”76 As further evidence of this reformist sensibility, motion pictures
also constituted a regular part of “entertainments” at the Juarez penitentiary
in Mérida, which was touted during the late teens as an exemplary penal insti-
tution (it was even featured in a Universal news weekly).77
More strikingly, scattered evidence suggests that, despite high-minded
rhetoric about education and culture, cinema could be and was used to rein-
force social inequalities. For example, in 1913 in a small corner of the May issue
of El Espectador, the publication noted that a former cinema impresario Fed-
erico Padrón had sent away for a hand-cranked projector so that he could take
“instructive films” to the “fincas rusticas” (rural properties) around the state.
These projected screenings were cast as “highly beneficial for the workers” who
it was predicted would “marvel at a wonderful invention of modern machin-
ery.”78 In 1917, Revista del Cinema related that “various respectable men” had
gone to the Hacienda Yaxoporil and while there organized a film exhibition for
“all those that work on the finca.”79 The film, most probably the Italian comedy
short Kri Kri bianco e nero (Kri Kri Black and White, 1913) caught fire at the

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very moment that the “spectators were most excited.”80 The report continued
to describe how “the workers exited the house of terror (the exhibition site)
all at once” leaving in their wake two destroyed rolls of film and the burning
projection booth.81 Here the potentially inflammatory nature of film excited
mob behavior rather than proving instructive or moralizing. The cinema, cast
by Revista del Cinema as an instrument of Mérida’s social modernization, was,
then, also used to paternalistic ends—entertaining, instructing, and even terri-
fying the workers whose labor had made the henequen boom possible and whose
situation the revolution had done little to improve. 82 What is more, CIRMAR’s
production, though insistently local, visualized the local as refracted through
the lens of those who had benefited from the region’s insertion in the global
economy: the landowning and commercial classes.
At the 1921 socialist congress at Izamal, the fourteen-point program
that was to guide the work of socialist governor Felipe Puerto Carillo, included
a call for “the support and patronage of the fine arts, especially music, singing,
dance, and cinema, as embers of the generous spirit of the masses, which must
be activated.”83 At least in 1923, “instructive films” became a regular part of
weekly cultural programs of the Liga Central de Resistencia of the Partido
Social, the socialist party’s primary league located in Mérida, which sought to
reach the region’s working and rural classes.84 In contrast to the commercial
and nominally reformist definition of cinema that animated Revista del Cin-
ema, the socialist party positioned cinema as a key mode of “defanatización”
(defanaticism) and means of arming the working classes with the knowledge
to counter the ideologies of both church and state that kept them docile. The
league’s theaters would feature “socialist, educational, [and] travel films about
different countries” as a complement to other modes of “doctrinal and social
education” of the party’s members.85 Perhaps not as immediately or obviously
revolutionary as the distribution of land or labor reforms, the expansion of the
region’s cinema culture beyond the commercial model outlined in Revista del
Cinema and reflected in the output of CIRMAR, in the form of the regular exhibi-
tion of educational films in the context of the state’s socialist project of the early
1920s, gestures toward an alternate set of regional, national, and transnational
networks with radical political aims, and a form of “revolutionary cinema” yet
to be explored.86

Notes

1. “Mexico Picture-Wild,” Moving Picture World, September 29, 1917, 1989.

2. On this shift see the introduction to American Cinema’s Transitional Era: Audiences, Institutions,
Practices, ed. Charlie Keil and Shelley Stamp (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004).

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3. “Yucatán,” Cine-Mundial, March 1917, 137.

4. The state’s population in 1921 was reported to be 358,221. Departamento de la estadistica nacional,
Resumen, 193. Laura Isabel Serna discusses the census at length in chap. 2 of Making Cinelandia:
American Films and Mexican Film Culture before the Golden Age (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2014).
5. Pedro Raigosa Reyna, “El cine en Durango (1897–1930),” in Microhistorias del cine mexicano, ed. Edu-
ardo de la Vega Alfaro (Guadalajara, Mexico: Universidad de Guadalajara, Centro Universitario de
Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades, 2000), 126–28; Reyna Ochoa, “Miguel Ruiz y el cine queretano,” in
Microhistorias, ed. De la Vega Alfaro, 203–6; Fernando Osorio Alarcón, “Rescate de películas silentes
en la region Puebla-Tlaxcala,” in Microhistorias, ed. De la Vega Alfaro, 263.
6. See for example, Carl Mora, Mexican Cinema: Reflections of a Society (Berkeley: University of Cali-
fornia Press, 1989), 19; and Ana M. López, “Early Cinema and Modernity in Latin America,” Cinema
Journal 40, no. 1 (2000): 69.
7. Gilbert Joseph, Revolution from Without: Yucatán, Mexico, and the United States, 1880–1924
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1982), 16.
8. Revista del Cinema can be accessed at Biblioteca Virtual de Yucatán, http://www​
.bibliotecavirtualdeyucatan.com.mx.
9. The print culture that emerged with the popularization of cinema in larger cities such as the Federal
District and Guadalajara has been the subject of scholarly study. On the Federal District, see Ángel
Miquel, Por las pantallas de la ciudad de México: Periodistas del cine mudo (Guadalajara, Mexico:
Universidad de Guadalajara, 1995). In regard to Guadalajara, see Patricia Torres San Martin, Crónicas
tapatías del cine mexicano (Guadalajara, Mexico: Universidad de Guadalajara, 1993). There were
a handful of film-specific publications that were published in the capital but very few examples
have been preserved. See Serna, Making Cinelandia, 91. Regional film magazines proliferated in
Brazil where regional production centers thrived; see Rielle Navitski, “Sensational Cinema and the
Popular Press in Mexico and Brazil, 1905–1930” (PhD diss., University of California Berkeley, 2013).
10. The exemplary study in this vein is Zhen Zhang’s An Amorous History of the Silver Screen: Shanghai
Cinema, 1896–1937 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).
11. See Miriam Hansen’s discussion of this aspect of her conceptualization of early classical cinema as
an everyday expression of modernity in, “Fallen Women, Rising Stars, New Horizons: Shanghai Silent
Film as Vernacular Modernism,” Film Quarterly 54, no. 1 (Autumn 2000): 13.
12. Robert Redfield, The Folk Culture of the Yucatan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1941), 2.
13. An excellent overview of the broad contours of this approach can be found in Gilbert Joseph’s
historiographical essay, “From Caste War to Class War: The Historiography of Modern Yucatán
(c. 1750–1940),” Hispanic American Historical Review 65, no. 1 (February 1985): 111–34. Examples
of the exceptionalist approach to the history of the region can be found in Edward H. Moseley and
Edward D. Terry, eds., Yucatan: A World Apart (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1980),
although, as Joseph points out in a footnote in his essay, this collection also “approaches the region
as a ‘cultural and social laboratory, a microcosm of Latin American and Mexican society’ ” (113n5).
14. Allen Wells and Gilbert Joseph, “Modernizing Visions, ‘Chilango’ Blueprints, and Provincial Growing
Pains: Mérida at the Turn of the Century,” Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos 8, no. 2 (Summer
1992): 170. Order and Progress was the motto of the Porfirian regime (1876–1910). For a broad
historiography of this period, see Mauricio Tenorio Trillo and Aurora Gómez Galvarriato, El Porfiriato
(Mexico: Fondo de Cultural Economico, 2006).

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15. On this relationship see Sterling Evans, Bound in Twine: The History and Ecology of the Hene-
quen-Wheat Complex for Mexico and the American and Canadian Plains, 1880–1950 (College Station:
Texas A&M University Press, 2007), esp. chap. 2.
16. A pithy account of this virtual slavery can be found in Evans, Bound in Twine, 53–66. See also
Gilbert Joseph and Allen Wells, “El monocultivo de henequen y sus contradicciones: Estractura de
dominación y formas de resistencia en haciendas yucatecas a fines del Porfiriato,” Siglo XIX 3, no.
6 (July-December 1988): 215–77, as well as Eric Villanueva Mikul, Así tomamos la tierra (Mérida,
Mexico: Maldonado Editories, 1984).
17. Wells and Joseph, “Modernizing Visions,” 188. See also Daniela Spenser, “Workers against Socialism?
Reassessing the Role of Urban Labor in Yucatecan Revolutionary Politics,” in Land, Labor & Capital in
Modern Yucatán: Essays in Regional History and Political Economy, ed. Jeffery T. Brannon and Gilbert
M. Joseph (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1991), 223.
18. On Mérida’s transformation over the course of the Porfiriato and through the revolution, see Joseph
and Wells, “Modernizing Visions,” and Asael T. Hansen and Juan R. Bastarrachea Manzano, Mérida:
Su transformación de capital colonial a naciente metropolí en 1935 (Merida: Instituto Nacional de
Antropologia e Historia, 1984), which is based on Hansen’s research in Mérida in collaboration
with anthropologist Robert Redfield. That book focuses on 1935 but includes information about
the city’s history.
19. See Spenser, “Workers against Socialism?,” 222. The haciendas themselves had over a thousand
kilometers of moveable, small-gauge track that facilitated the movement of the henequen harvest
throughout the year.
20. Wells and Joseph, “Modernizing Visions,” 196.
21. Allen Wells and Gilbert M. Joseph, Summer of Discontent, Seasons of Upheaval: Elite Politics and
Rural Insurgency in Yucatán, 1876–1915 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), 137–40.
22. Joseph, Revolution from Without, 105.
23. Album Yucateco, Tomo 1, 1900, n.p., cited in Gabriel Ramírez, El cine yucateco (Mexico City: Univer-
sidad Autónoma Nacional de México, 1960), 14.
24. Ramírez, El cine yucateco, 24–25. Others date Mérida’s first theater to 1908. See Hansen and
Bastarrache Manzano, Mérida, 75.
25. “Artistas del ‘Circo Treviño,’ ” El Espectador, January 7, 1911.
26. “Ruidos de la calle,” El Espectador, March 30, 1911.
27. “Temporada Cinematografica Cuaresmal,” El Espectador, February 24, 1912, 3. Another example can
be found in “Cines,” El Espectador, March 2, 1912, 3. That the Alva brothers continued to exhibit
films, perhaps to raise funds, even as they filmed the events of the revolution hints at the ways in
which the representational practices of the revolution, which have come to symbolize the origin
point of an autonomous national cinematic tradition, were intertwined, at least economically, with
exhibition practices deeply imbricated in the transnational networks of early twentieth-century
capitalism.
28. “Por los cines,” El Espectador, November 9, 1912, 4.
29. “Por los cines,” El Espectador, November 23, 1912, 3; and “La fiebre cinematográfica,” El Espectador,
January 4, 1913, 3.
30. “Cines,” El Espectador, March 23, 1912, 4.
31. Advertisement, La Voz de la Revolución, November 21, 1915, 6.

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32. In these smaller venues, the type of music featured established distinctions between what were
essentially very similar offerings at similar price points ranging from forty centavos to sixty centavos
for the best seats (again, the Teatro Peon Contreras represented an anomaly in offering its best seats
for seventy-five centavos to one peso).
33. These travels can be traced, in part, via the passenger lists of ships traveling between Yucatán
and New Orleans and New York. See for example, “Modesto Alvarez,” Year: 1906; Arrival: New
York, New York; Microfilm Serial: T715; Microfilm Roll: 704; Line: 29; Page Number: 5; New York,
Passenger Lists, 1820–1957, Ancestry.com; “Manuel Cirerol,” Year: 1924; Arrival: New York, New
York; Microfilm Serial: T715; Microfilm Roll: 3524; Line: 1; Page Number: 204, New York, Passenger
Lists; “Arturo Moguel,” Year: 1917; Arrival: New York, New York; Microfilm Serial: T715; Microfilm
Roll: 2541; Line: 16; Page Number: 96, New York, Passenger Lists; “Artaldo Erosa,” Year: 1915; Arrival:
New York, New York; Microfilm Serial: T715; Microfilm Roll: 2418; Line: 2; Page Number: 12, New
York, Passenger Lists.
34. For two examples of many, see “Cinematografista de viaje,” Revista del Cinema, March 23, 1917, 19;
and “Para Europa,” Revista del Cinema, March 30, 1917, 12.
35. This formulation was used often. See, for example, “Cines,” El Espectador, March 9, 1912, 1.
36. Ad for “Salon ‘Popular,’ ” El Espectador, January 1, 1914, 7.
37. See, for example, ad for Allis Chambers Mfg. Co., Revista del Cinema, November 10, 1916, 3.
38. “Noticias locales: Atenta carta,” Revista del Cinema, April 13, 1917, 12; and “Noticias locales,” Revista
del Cinema, April 27, 1917, 15. See also ad for various Italian publications, Revista del Cinema, May 4,
1917, 18. Notices regarding regional entrepreneurs looking to purchase new or used films hint that
distributors in Yucatán subscribed to US-based publications such as Cine-Mundial. See, for example,
“Inquiries from Abroad,” Moving Picture World, July 13, 1918, 194.
39. Revista del Cinema is mentioned, along with Semana Cinematografica (Mexico City), as one way that
Goldwyn Picture Corporation would publicize its star players. “Goldwyn’s World Wide Publicity,”
Moving Picture World, March 24, 1917, 1937.
40. “Soborno,” Revista del Cinema, February 9, 1917, 12.
41. Eileen Bowser, The Transformation of Cinema, 1907–1915 (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1990), 103–5.
42. Ibid., 105–19.
43. Yuri Tsivian, “Pre-Revolutionary Russia,” in Oxford History of World Cinema, ed. Geoffrey Nowell-
Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 159.
44. “En los cines,” Revista del Cinema, November 22, 1916, 8. This formulaic language is repeated in
virtually every issue.
45. “En el Interior,” Revista del Cinema, December 1, 1916, 9.
46. On the celebration of theater owners as economic actors whose activity contributed to the nation’s
well-being and prestige, see Serna, Making Cinelandia, 58, 61–67.
47. Ross Melnick makes a similar claim about showman Samuel “Roxy” Rothafel’s authorship of what
Melnick calls the “unitary text” of the theater program. See Melnick, American Showman: Samuel
“Roxy” Rothafel and the Birth of the Entertainment Industry, 1908–1935 (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2012), esp. 8–23.
48. For example, “Defensor del cinematógrafo,” Revista del Cinema, May 4, 1917, 14; and “Defensor
del Cinema,” Revista del Cinema, January 26, 1917, 9. The magazine went so far as to announce a
contest to decide which theater in Mérida had the best projection. The winner would receive a

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Powers Number 6 B projector that would be donated by local businesses. Though the contest had
to be postponed because there were “theaters that are not closed so that moonlight enters them,”
this was attributed to a lack of modern facilities rather than a lack of competent technicians. “Un
concurso,” Revista del Cinema, January 18, 1917; “Proximo concurso,” Revista del Cinema, January
26, 1917, 21; and “Resultado de un concurso de aparato de cine,” Revista del Cinema, February
23, 1917, 12.
49. “En pro del cine,” Revista del Cinema, November 15, 1916, 22.
50. “La rutina en los cines: Los manipuladores,” January 20, 1917, 7.
51. “En pro del cine,” Revista del Cinema, November 17, 1916, 22.
52. It is not clear, based on available evidence, how much the organization of cinema workers in Mexico
City influenced the projectionists. On that movement, see Aurelio de los Reyes, Cine y sociedad
en México: Bajo el cielo de México (1920–1924) (Mexico City: Universidad Autónoma Nacional de
México, 1996), 343–73. Gilbert M. Joseph discusses the organization of urban labor as a key element
of the “principle of retroactive revolution” whereby Alvarado sought to raise the revolutionary
consciousness of rural, but primarily urban, workers after the revolution’s eruption. See Joseph,
Revolution from Without, 109.
53. El Espectador followed organizing among shop clerks particularly closely. See, for example, “El
dependiente y su condición social,” El Espectador, March 2, 1912, 1.
54. The emergence of new political groups—primarily workers groups whether influenced by anar-
chist philosophy or the tenets of Catholic social activism—in the late Porfiriato is traced in Franco
Savarino Roggero, Pueblos y nacionalism, del regimen oligárquico a la sociedad de masas en Yucatán,
1894–1925 (Mexico, DF: Instituto Nacional de Estudios Históricos de la Revolución Mexicana, 1997).
He mentions the formation of the Centro de Dependientes on p. 256. On urban labor in Yucatán,
see also Spenser, “Workers against Socialism?,” esp. 222–27.
55. Editorial, Revista del Cinema, March 9, 1917, 7.
56. Quoted in Carlos Martinez de Arredondo, “Yucatan, precursor del cine nacional,” Enciclopedia yuca-
tanense, vol. 5, ed. Ernesto Novelo Torres and Carlos A. Echánove Trujillo (Mexico City: Gobierno
de Yucatán, 1946), 318.
57. Ramírez, El cine yucateco, 27–28; “Esperanza,” 1905, Arrival New York, New York, Microfilm Serial
T715, Roll 640, Line 2, Page 60, Passenger Lists of Vessels Arriving at New York, New York, 1820–1897,
National Archives Microfilm Publication M237, 675 rolls, Records of the U.S. Customs Service,
Record Group 36, National Archives, Washington, DC. Cirerol Sansores also appeared to have
traveled frequently to both New Orleans and New York, listing his occupation as “Merchant.”
58. This description is drawn from Ramírez, El cine yucateco, 34, who is quoting “Progresos de la cine-
matografía en Yucatán,” La Voz de la Revolución, May 21, 1918, n.p.; and Lara C. Joaquin, “Evolución
del cine en Yucatán,” Diario del Sureste, August 31, 1947.
59. “Progreso de cinematografía en Yucatán,” La Voz de la Revolución, May 21, 1918, quoted in Ramirez,
El cine yucateco, 34.
60. Ibid.
61. Valeriano Ibañez,“La producción nacional,” Revista del Cinema, November 17, 1916, 5.
62. Advertisement, La Voz de la Revolución, October 16, 1915, 2.
63. Ana M. Lopez, “Early Cinema and Modernity in Latin America,” 69.
64. “Amor que huye en pelicula,” Revista del Cinema, January 5, 1917, 19.

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65. “El amor que triunfa,” El Espectador, April 20, 1917.

66. For a concise account of tiples (female sopranos) who crossed over onto the screen, see Miguel
Ángel Morales, “Las tiples y el cine mudo,” El Nacional, October 1, 1992, 20. On Derba’s career, see
Ángel Miquel, Mimí Derba (Mexico: Archivo Fílmico Agrasánchez, Universidad Nacional Autonoma
de México, Dirección General de Actividades Cinematográficas, Filmoteca de la UNAM, 2000);
and Irene Garcia, “Mimí Derba and Azteca Films: The Rise of Nationalism and the First Mexican
Woman Filmmaker,” in Women, Ethnicity, and Nationalism in Latin America, ed. Natividad Gutierrez
(Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2007), 99–112. Aurelio de los Reyes explains the movement
of theater types to cinema production in the late teens as a by-product of the reaction of theater
owners to labor agitation on the part of actors and writers who began demanding better wages
and other guarantees. See Aurelio de los Reyes, Cine y sociedad en México: 1896–1930, vol. 1, Vivir
de suenos, 1896–1920 (Mexico: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Instituto de Investiga-
ciones Estéticas, 1993), 204, 215.
67. “Desde México,” Revista del Cinema, March 16, 1917, 11.
68. See ad for “Teatro Peon Contreras,” Revista del Cinema, April 6, 1917, 14.
69. “Producción nacional,” Revista del Cinema, April 20, 1917, 7.
70. “La industria de la película en Yucatán,” La Voz de la Revolución, April 16, 1917, cited in Gabriel
Ramírez, El cine en Yucatán (Mexico: Universidad Autónoma Nacional de México, 1980), 40.
71. Ibid.
72. “Amor que triunfa,” El Espectador, April 20, 1917.
73. “Amor que triunfa,” Revista del Cinema, May 4, 1917, 14.
74. Gabriel Ramírez, Crónica del cine mudo mexicano (Mexico: Cineteca Nacional, 1989), 56.
75. “Temporada cinematografica cuaresmal,” El Espectador, February 24, 1912, 4.
76. “20 de noviembre 1910,” Revista del Cinema, November 17, 1916, 13.
77. See, for example, “Los Domingos de la penitenciaria,” Tierra, June 24, 1923, 28. On the Juarez Peni-
tentiary as portrayed in Universal Screen Magazine, no. 52, see “Prison Reform in Mexico,” Moving
Picture World, December 29, 1917, 1938.
78. “Cinematografo en las haciendas,” El Espectador, May 31, 1913, 2.
79. “Incendio de un película,” Revista del Cinema, May 4, 1917, 14. Five years later the mayordomo of
the Hacienda Tixencal Quintero, Ramón Rivera, reported that he operated a “cinematographic
apparatus” specifically for the “recreation of the workers.” “Cuestionario,” 616, vol. 641, exp. 5, folio
104, AGN, Trabajo.
80. Ibid.
81. Ibid.
82. Daniela Spenser makes this point about baseball in the prerevolutionary period which scholars have
argued demonstrates a “patron-client relationship between urban workers and their employers.”
“Workers against Socialism?,” 225.
83. The congress’s fourteen-point agenda is described and transcribed in Alma M. Reed’s memoir,
Peregrina: Love and Death in Mexico (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2007), 256.
84. See, for example, “Liga Central de Resistencia: Departamento Cultural,” Tierra, July 8, 1923, 27; “La
velada del lunes en la liga central,” Tierra, September 2, 1923, 8; and “Liga Central de Resistencia:
Departamento Cultural,” Tierra, November 4, 1923, 13.

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85. “Conferencias de desfanatización por medios,” Los Lunes Rojos (Boletín), January 22, 1923, 56.
86. On the history of educational film in the United States, see Devon Orgeron, Marsha Orgeron, and
Dan Streible, “Introduction,” in Learning with the Lights Off: Educational Films in the United States
(London: Oxford University Press, 2012). As the authors indicate regarding the parameters of their
study, the United States, the history of educational film in other parts of the world largely remains
to be written.

Laura Isabel Serna is associate professor of cinema and media studies in the
School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California. She is the
author of Making Cinelandia: American Films and Mexican Film Culture before
the Golden Age (Duke University Press, 2014), an examination of the cultural
reception of American films in Mexico during the long 1920s. Her published
work can be found in Feminist Media Histories, Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Stud-
ies, and The Americas as well as a number of edited collections. This essay is the
product of early research for her second monograph, which will contextualize
the distribution of silent film in the Spanish-speaking Caribbean in the early
twentieth-century commercial culture of the Americas. She is also working on a
series of essays on sponsored films made about, for, and by Mexican Americans
from the 1940s to the 1970s. She is grateful to Film History’s anonymous peer
reviewers for their insightful comments and suggestions.

L AURA ISABEL SERNA  |  REVISTA DEL CINEMA: SILENT CINEM A IN YUCATÁN