Keywords
Mexican Cinema, Latino Stereotypes, Film, Disobedience, Film Studies, Film Criticism
Abstract
In the spirit of Guillermo Del Toro, “Disobedience is a virtue” in life and acts as an essential element in the art of cinema, which allows filmmakers to tell stories about their nativism and imagination. With disobedience, it is a theme that allows filmmakers to resist and rebel against traditional methods of film production and storytelling found in mainstream Hollywood films while breaking barriers of the Cultivation Theory in which molds such Latino stereotypes through the way the media paint the landscape of society. American cinema has utilized stereotypical Latino characters portraying Cholos, occasional sex symbols, indolent labor workers, illiterate immigrants, house housekeepers, nannies, and violent criminals. Mexican and Mexican Americans embodied the importance of disobedience in life to obtain opportunities and with that, filmmakers have used film to their advantage in telling both Latino and non-Latino narratives that branch out from Hollywood’s formula and business of cinema. I will examine six Latino filmmakers and a selected film from each filmmaker to analyze their use of disobedience within their narratives and filmmaking practice. By analyzing the films of Luis Valdez, Gregory Nava, Guillermo Del Toro, Alfonso Cuarón, Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu, and Fernando Frías De La Parra, I will explore and define how each filmmaker embodies their version of disobedience in the context of Neufeld’s (2015) aesthetic disobedience concept along with Burgous and Linlott’s (2023) additional categories of artistic (filmmaker) disobedience and art world (story world) disobedience.
Thesis Completion Year
2024
Thesis Completion Semester
Spring
Thesis Chair
Katherine Shults
College
College of Sciences
Department
Nicholson School of Communication & Media
Thesis Discipline
Film
Language
English
Access Status
Open Access
Length of Campus Access
None
Campus Location
Orlando (Main) Campus
STARS Citation
Serrano, Ashley J., "Latino Stereotypes In Hollywood: The Aesthetic, Artistic, And Art World Disobedience Of Mexican Cinema In America" (2024). Honors Undergraduate Theses. 123.
https://stars.library.ucf.edu/hut2024/123
Rights Statement
