Since the earliest days of feature-length narrative film production, cinema in Mexico has drawn inspiration from various forms of print culture ranging from European novels to local newspapers. This panel examines the relationship between the printed page and film in Mexico, beginning with the dawn of sound cinema in the country, through the twentieth century’s supposed “decline” of the local industry, and just prior to the emergence of “New Mexican Cinema” in the late 1990s. Collectively, the scholars assembled here, who vary across rank, types of home institutions, geographical locations and specializations, consider how a range of widely-consumed original texts including novels, plays, and comic books, left an indelible mark on Mexican film history as local producers at various points were drawn to material whose recognizability encouraged a confidence in the potential for commercial viability. Moreover, each intervention within the panel interrogates how through adaptation and intermediality, each film negotiated the complexities of Mexico’s modern postrevolutionary sociocultural landscape across gender, racial, and/or political lines to produce varied commentaries on the Mexican nation and its identity through both domestic and internationally oriented perspectives.

Proceeding in chronological order, Ana Almeyda-Cohen opens the conversation with her analysis of how the Celestina archetype – an elderly woman who brokers young women’s romantic and/or sexual involvement with men – surfaces in Mexican representations of the madame before, during, and after the ban on prostitution in the country in 1940. Specifically, Almeyda-Cohen considers the presence of the archetype within Federico Gamboa’s 1903 novel Santa as well as the archetype’s mediation within the first feature-length sound film adaption of the novel in 1932, directed by Antonio Moreno. Examined alongside contemporary sensational newspapers debating sex work as a problem of Mexico’s urban modernization, Almeyda-Cohen illuminates how cultural producers employ the malleable older female archetype to present madams as local-yet-foreign subversive go-betweens.

Moving forward to the decade of the 1960s, Mónica García Blizzard’s intervention similarly considers the intermedial representation of female characters navigating Mexican modernity. This paper analyzes one of the most popular publications produced by a main player in the Mexican comic book industry, Editorial Vid, founded by Yolanda Vargas Dulché and her husband, Guillermo de la Parra. The mass appeal of the 1964 comic book series, María Isabel, penned by Dulché herself and featuring a stereotyped Indigenous protagonist, led to its adaptation into the first Mexican telenovela as well as into two feature-length films. Here, García Blizzard considers how the transition from the serial format of the comic book to a non-serial film duology, which necessarily curbed seriality’s key features of proliferation, repetition, and open-endedness, impacted the film duology’s mediation of María Isabel’s key themes of gender and mestizaje in mid-twentieth century Mexico.

Also considering the relationship between popular comic books and the Mexican screen, Daniel Chávez Landeros studies a more complex instantiation process of transposition in the 1970s. His paper examines how the 1974 production, Calzonzin Inspector, directed by Alfonso Arau and also featuring a stereotyped Indigenous protagonist, operates as a doubly intermedial adaptation. One the one hand, the film adapted the comic books Supermachos and Los agachados by artist, Eduardo del Río “Ruis,” and on the other, Calzonzin Inspector drew inspiration from Nicolai Gogol’s 1842 satirical play, The Inspector General. Chávez Landeros’s analysis illustrates how Arau’s film employs various techniques of recodification and transmedial recombination to produce a biting critique of Mexico’s post-1968 political reality.

Enrique García’s contribution echoes the themes of race, sexuality, and mestizaje in intermedial adaption that the previous papers raise, while concluding the panel’s historical arc in the later 20^th century. His paper discusses the popular 1973 comic book, Rarotonga, written by Guillermo de la Parra and published by Editorial Vid. García considers the text’s relation to both the 1958 rumbera musical film, Zonga, el ángel diabólico, which de la Parra had co-written, as well as the cult-classic adaptations of the comic book series, Rarotonga (1978) and La isla de Rarotonga (1982). García considers the presence of an intertextual Orientalism in these cultural products that incorporates Mexican notions of Hispanic-centric mestizaje into its construction of Black and Pacific Islander Otherness, while casting Mexico as a distinct space vis-à-vis the U.S. and Europe and contending with the international events of decolonization and female empowerment.