Film at the border: Memories of cinemagoing in Laredo,Texas

Culture, identity and memory in the border town

The US–Mexico border, spanning over 3,145km, separates two countries with profound cultural, linguistic and religious differences between and within them. This separation, however, is not easily mapped onto a single visible border. Cities on the US side of the border have large volumes of inhabitants of Mexican descent as well as many recent legal and undocumented residents from Mexico. Elements of Mexican culture are ubiquitous: restaurants, Spanish-language radio and television stations, newspapers with Spanish-language sections, stores in which all the staff are bilingual and tend to greet customers in Spanish, and so on. At the same time, the Mexican-American population is heavily socialized into mainstream US society via the school and health systems; the widely available English-language media, and the federal, state and local rules and regulations in place.

This unique confluence of cultures, identities and economic/ideological systems in a porous and dynamic space has led many scholars to conclude that this interaction has produced a hybrid culture where identities and loyalties are not Mexican or American anymore, but something else. For example, Kearney (1991) argues that ‘peoples that span national borders are ambiguous in that they in some ways partake of both nations and in other ways partake of neither’, adding that the boundary between the United States and Mexico is being eroded by transnational developments ‘causing the structure of the nation-states to become problematic’ (p. 52). Others, like García Canclini (1990), talk about the ‘hybridization’ and ‘deterritorialization’ of culture when discussing the Mexican border with the United States.

A significantly different position is taken by Giménez (2009), who asserts that the US–Mexico border, far from being a place where both Mexican culture and American culture have been diluted and replaced by a hybrid or a ‘third’ culture, is a place where social actors, carrying cultures of distinct origin, co-exist and interact not in terms of ‘deterritoriality’ but rather of ‘multiterritoriality’:

(Border areas) are in effect transnational spaces, but only in a descriptive and cultural sense, not implying loss of hegemony on the supposedly threatened native culture’s part nor an incapacity or retreat of the Nation-State. They are also a space of interaction between unequal cultures in permanent conflict with adaptive transcultural effects that usually do not alter their hard core. (Giménez, 2009: 24)

According to this view, border culture is not hybrid but embodies a messy multiculturalism with multiple contacts between individuals from different cultures and backgrounds: Anglos, Mexican-Americans, Mexicans, Afro-Americans, some residing in the area, some just passing through. However, this contact creates few modifications of the pre-existing substantive identities of different actors. If this is indeed the case, the Laredo inhabitants of Mexican descent who were born or have lived on the US side of the border for long periods of time may have kept many identity traits from their original culture, as well as memories of their origins: ‘the foundations of their ethnicity and sense of belonging to a particular culture’ (Giménez, 2009: 28).

According to Acuña (2009), memories are a cultural construction where experiences are lived both subjectively and as part of a larger collective culture: ‘memories are an updated reconstruction of the past acting as strategies helpful to define ourselves before the world’ (p. 3). And among many other vehicles eliciting memories, he cites cultural products like music, television programmes and films. For authors like Kilbourn (2010), what we identify as memory is always already mediated, whether by ‘physically external, prosthetic technologies of inscription or storage’ or by ‘internalized, naturalized technologies of memory’ (p. 2). Looking at the memories of the 28 Laredo respondents between the ages of 64 and 95 about films, actors and cinema venues in their childhood and adolescence, this article explores precisely how these ‘naturalized technologies of memory’ provide insight into the relationship between cinemagoing, the viewing experience and memory. It centres its attention particularly on the recollections of US, Mexican and foreign films from the 1930s to the 1960s when informants were children, teenagers or young adults.

Referring to the concept of ‘viewing experience’, Barker (2006) poses a conundrum: ‘When, for all practical purposes does the experience end?’ And he adds, ‘All experiences continue to resonate in one way or another through the life-time of a person’ (p. 135). When asking respondents today about their memories and emotional attachment to films seen by them many years ago, we are embracing Barker’s assertion in a very empirical way. Examining the memories and recollections of movies seen by informants 50 to 70 years previously is clearly a challenging task. As their exposure to the films happened decades ago, this original perception might be distorted in the interviews that took place only recently. At the same time, this time lapse might equally serve as a filter for long-lasting memories, and hence personal and collective significance, of certain films and cinemas.

The 18 male and 10 female informants were selected from within the social circle of acquaintances of the interviewers (undergraduate students taking a research methods class in a state university in the city). All participants were Laredo, Texas natives who had lived in the town as children and teenagers. It was difficult to assess the social class of each of the respondents due to the experience of upward or downward mobility during their lifetimes. But the interviews do provide glimpses of a variety of socio-economic statuses when considering the schools attended as children, their parents’ occupation at that time and their choice of cinemas. Out of the 28 interviews, 21 were conducted in English and 7 in Spanish. As is the case in most qualitative research, statistical representativeness was not an objective of the study. Rather, we sought as much variation as possible in terms of class, gender and political stance in order to elicit a wide variety of memories and recollections. Interviews were conducted in 2013 in respondents’ homes. They were semi-structured: interviewers used a thematic questionnaire to keep the interviews focused while leaving a large degree of space for respondents’ own reflections and spontaneous memories. The length varied depending on the storytelling capacities of our informants, with an average length of around 1 hour. ¹

Laredo, Texas has a unique history. Founded in 1755 by a small group of Spanish settlers, the town was first part of the Spanish colony of New Spain (1755–1820), then of Mexico (1821–1848) and finally of Texas and the United States after the triumph of the United States over Mexico in 1848. Its distance from major US cities – the closest, San Antonio, is 251 km away while Nuevo Laredo, Mexico is just across the Rio Grande river – made Laredo, Texas the American border city – and also the Texas city – with the largest population of Mexican descent (95.6% in 2010 according to the US Census). The majority of the city’s population has kept Spanish as its main language.

Although it originally depended economically on the livestock trade, the economy started to change in the 1880s, when the railroad arrived, linking the city to the rest of the United States as well as some years later to Mexico City. This new transportation route created fresh business and economic opportunities. By 1900, thousands of Anglo-Americans had come to work and live in Laredo, increasing their proportion in the population during the first two decades of the twentieth century to 25% of the total number of inhabitants (Texas State Historical Association, 2015). The discovery of oil and gas in the surrounding region during the first quarter of that century promoted even more economic and demographic growth. However, with a major influx of immigrants from the nearby Mexican North Eastern region during these same decades (Arreola, 1993), the percentage of the population of Mexican descent already represented more than 90% of the 32,618 inhabitants by 1930 (Laredo Times, 1929). By 1940, Laredo had reached 39,000 inhabitants, and, by 1960 this figure had almost doubled to 60,000.

Memories of cinemagoing and Mexican and US films

The period from the 1930s to the 1960s, in which our informants were either children or teenagers, was characterized by heavy exhibition of Hollywood films in the local cinemas, combined with a steady percentage–12% to 30% of screenings in the city–of Spanish-language and Mexican films (Lozano et al., 2016), especially during the so-called Golden Age of Mexican cinema spanning the period from the late 1930s to the mid/late 1940s (Fein, 1996). ² This programming landscape confirms the complex multiculturalism experienced in the border city. An exhaustive revision for movie listings for all Saturdays of 1942 in the local newspaper The Laredo Times reveals that 12% of total screenings in the six Laredo theatres (Figure 1) were devoted to Spanish-language films. By 1952, coinciding with the apex of Mexican film exhibition in the United States (Agrasanchez, 2006: 127–130), that proportion had risen to 30% and would persist for 10 years and then start to decline (to 24%) in the early 1970s. ³ Of course, during all those years, Hollywood films were shown uninterruptedly in the handful of cinema venues owned for most of the period, starting in the mid-1920s, by the Robb and Rowley circuit, a Dallas-based entertainment conglomerate.

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Figure 1.

Map of Laredo, Texas with cinemas 1930s–1940s.

The memories of our Laredo respondents strongly reflect this complex coexistence of US and Mexican films and cultural features during their childhood and youth and the multi-layered character of social, ethnic and intergenerational factors. Of a total of 207 films mentioned by the interviewees, 178 were from the United States, 27 from Mexico and only 2 from other countries. This list also included non-specific references to ‘American movies’ (38) and ‘Mexican movies’ (24). The vast majority of specific film titles, however, were mentioned by no more than two people, with the notable exception of Gone with the Wind (Victor Fleming, US, 1939), cited by four female and four male participants. These results suggest a tendency among viewers to forget specific titles in favour of the social experience related to cinemagoing or their preferred film stars. When it comes to naming stars, we get a very detailed picture. Informants mentioned the specific names of 155 artists (115 from Hollywood, 89 from Mexican films). Some of these stars were frequently cited, like Pedro Infante (14), ‘Cantinflas’ (9) and Jorge Negrete (9) on the Mexican side, or Elvis Presley (12), John Wayne (11) and Roy Rogers (9) on the Hollywood one.

Cinema as a form of entertainment was clearly central in the informants’ experience of growing up in a border city. Cinema, in their memories, served as a vehicle for social interaction, first with family members and later, in adolescence, with peers. In a small town far from the cultural infrastructure of large cities like San Antonio in the North or Monterrey in the South, going to the cinema was the main distraction, the best way to get acquainted with lifestyles and events outside their own small world and the best excuse to develop and strengthen bonds with friends, relatives and loved ones. In their mental map of the city, particular cinemas were central points to reconstruct their daily routines and to talk about other significant places in their social interaction. Memories of cinemagoing are mostly collective rather than individual (Kuhn, 2011), as is illustrated by the use of the first person plural when informants refer to their recollections of going to the cinema or hanging out afterwards in nearby cafeterias.

The origin of informants’ preferred films clearly differed according to their gender. Men remembered having overwhelmingly preferred US films, in particular, Western and adventure serials like Roy Rogers (William Witney, 1939–1952), The Lone Ranger (William Witney and John English, 1938), The Lone Ranger Rides Again (William Witney and John English, 1939), Gene Autry (William Morgan, John English and others, 1934–1953), Flash Gordon (Frederick Stephani and Ray Taylor, 1936), Flash Gordon’s Trip to Mars (Ford Beebe, Robert F. Hill and Frederick Stephani, 1938), Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe (Ford Beebe and Ray Taylor, 1940) and Tarzan (Richard Thorpe and others, 1932–1948). Women, in contrast, were more prone to remember Mexican films in their childhood, and both Mexican and US films when in their teens. These findings are consistent with many other empirical studies on Mexican and US television preferences that conclude that Mexican, and Mexican-American border women tend to be significantly more interested in Mexican content than their male counterparts (Lozano, 1992). While the reasons for these differences have not been clearly explained in the literature, they seem to originate in the contrasting socialization patterns of boys and girls in Mexican culture, with established values and traditions reinforced more in female than in male children (Díaz Guerrero, 2014).

Some interviewees stated that seeing Mexican films was the only choice for older relatives, due to their lack of knowledge of the English language. These relatives were Spanish-language monolinguals and would therefore only be interested in Mexican entertainment like the one provided by Spanish-language screenings in the city’s cinemas; and this despite living in Laredo and having children who were born in Laredo or moved to the city at a very young age. Several of the respondents, children or teenagers during the 1940s and 1950s, made reference to their grandparents exclusively attending screenings of Mexican films, usually in the more modest theatres, like the Azteca and the Mexico. Their recollections of parents’ and grandparents’ preference for Spanish-language films illustrate the complex cultural transition experienced by Mexican-Americans already fluent in English and socialized into the US mainstream culture via the educational system. In our informants’ memories, there is a clear sense of the cultural difference, around that period in their lives, between their older relatives and themselves, a ‘them’ versus ‘us’ distinction. This distinction shows how Hollywood films, in combination with the school system and other US institutions, were already creating or reinforcing in our informants’ minds a distinct outlook and a sense of belonging to a (US) culture significantly different from that of their parents.

Luisa (b. 1945), explaining that she never liked attending theatres screening Mexican films, said that in contrast, her grandmother would always go to the Mexico Theatre with an aunt. Andres (b. 1948), referring to the Royal Theatre of the 1950s and 1960s as a venue showing only Spanish-language films, shared that his grandfather would go there every single afternoon, sleeping until the screening ended: ‘the usher would come to his seat to wake him up saying to him “You need to go Don José” … he was a regular of that cinema’. Lorenzo (b. 1948), on the other hand, reported that his first recollections of going to the cinema were seeing Pedro Infante and ‘Cantinflas’ films ⁴ in the Royal or the Tivoli, but clarified that his parents were the ones who liked Mexican productions while he liked the US ones: ‘In contrast, we would rather go to The Plaza and The Rialto, movie houses showing exclusively English-language films’ (Figures 2 and 3).

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Figure 2.

Postcard of the Royal Theatre on Hidalgo street. Photograph courtesy of the Webb County Heritage Foundation.

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Figure 3.

The Plaza Theatre, 2016. Reproduced with permission. Photograph by Miriam Gonzalez.

Some respondents made reference to the cinemas in Nuevo Laredo, the Mexican twin city of Laredo across the river, sharing memories also associated with their older relatives. José Luis (b. 1939), for example, remembered visiting his grandmother and going with her to a neighbourhood cinema without a roof. Interestingly, he described those living on the Mexican side of the river as a different kind of people, reflecting a different sense of identity despite the geographical and cultural proximity of the two towns:

It was a lot of fun too (going to the cinema on the Mexican side), but … now we are talking about a different kind of people. Now we are talking (about) really Spanish-speaking people. All of us were bilingual (but) our spoken Spanish was different than theirs. But they were nice. We never had any problems. (José Luis, b. 1939)

José Luis’s reference to his own relatives being ‘real Spanish-speaking people’ suggests that he felt as if he belonged to a different cultural group due to his different command of the Spanish language and his mastery of the English language. This is a fascinating take on the complexities of identity formation and the significant forces along the US–Mexican border shaping it. Despite his origin and background in the same ethnic and cultural group based on the Mexican side, living and growing up just across the river made José Luis perceive himself as belonging to a completely different group.

These perceived differences from older relatives’ film preferences, however, did not imply a complete loss of interest in consumption of Spanish-language films. As in the case of José Luis, most informants were aware of espousing a new cultural identity based on their bilingualism and intense relation with US culture and institutions, without losing contact with their core Mexican cultural background. In fact, for many of them, Mexican films were an important part of their cherished memories of cinema and cinemagoing as children or teenagers.

As Martin Barker explains, the concept of making sense of films goes beyond cognitive comprehension, also including the

sensuous (the impact of films in our bodies through sound, light, and so on), aesthetic (all the forms in which we experience films as beautiful or horrible), emotional (the dimensions of caring, and so on), and imaginative (the ways in which audiences build larger worlds beyond the cues provided). (Barker, 2006: 134)

This seemed to be the case for the group of female informants liking mostly Mexican films in their childhood or adolescence. Mexican films and actors were remembered in very emotional terms, with excitement and multiple references to the romantic qualities and the attractiveness of male stars like the popular and beloved Mexican actors Pedro Infante and Jorge Negrete. In consonance with the ‘imaginative’ dimension proposed by Barker, Mexican films for our informants represented a strong cultural link with an idealized country of origin characterized by picturesque ranches and little idyllic villages, where romance was the most prominent feature of life. Brianna (b. 1946) excitedly said about Mexican films of the 1950s: ‘I loved romantic ones! I always looked up to them and thought that was the only way romance should be … so dreamy!’ Candy (b. 1944) remembered the first time she went to the cinema as a child to see a Mexican film starring Pedro Infante: ‘After that, I fell in love with all those Mexican charros [cowboys] because Luis Aguilar and … I would love going to the Mexican movies. That’s where I would go first’. The passionate way in which informants remembered and talked about these pictures seems to confirm that the experience of seeing them in their childhood (and perhaps many more times in later years on Mexican television channels available in Laredo) continues to resonate in their lives many years later (Barker, 2006).

Some informants, especially women, were clear about liking Mexican films when they were children, but changing their preferences to US films as teenagers, a sign of the increasing influence of US culture via the educational system and the substitution of English for Spanish as the dominant language. Candy (b. 1944), who loved Mexican charro films as a child, explained that in her adolescence she fell in love with US films like The Sound Of Music (Robert Wise, 1965). How she explains this change in preference highlights the impact of the US educational system on the language preferences of the Mexican-American Laredo residents at that time: ‘When you learn how to speak English, you tend to just go to the English-language movies, so we went to the Plaza’. By then, she would not go to the cinemas screening Mexican films in Laredo because they were in Spanish. Instead, she preferred US musicals with Fabian Forte and Elvis Presley and Hollywood blockbusters like Gone With the Wind. Guadalupe (b. 1933) was the only female respondent declaring she liked Hollywood Western serials as a child, providing a complex account of her adolescent film preferences. Her favourite films as a teenager were Little Women (Mervyn LeRoy, 1949), Gone With the Wind, Giant (George Stevens, 1956) and Sorry, Wrong Number (Anatole Litvak, 1948). However, her favourite film stars as a teenager did include Mexican ones: ‘From Mexican movies it was Pedro Infante. Oh, I just loved him! … And of course, there was still Elizabeth Taylor and …’. Maria (b. 1946) liked Mexican films starring her male idols Pedro Infante and Jorge Negrete, because they showed picturesque locations and were incredibly romantic. However, she also liked US cartoons and Westerns. Brianna (b. 1942), in a similar vein, was excited when reporting that she liked romantic films and Pedro Infante the most, but she reported having seen many more American than Mexican films.

On the male informants’ side, there were just a few who acknowledged having liked Mexican as well as American films as children and later as teenagers, and it was clear that their preference for Hollywood films was much greater. José Luis (b. 1939), who had mentioned Pedro Infante, Jorge Negrete and the comedian nicknamed ‘El Piporro’ as his favourite film stars when he was a child, asserted he replaced them as a teenager with American stars like James Dean, Frank Sinatra, Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin. He referred explicitly to his attending high school on the American side of the border as a reason for his change of preferences, again providing evidence of the impact of the US school system on Mexican-American culture and language:

We started staying away from the Spanish-speaking movies because [local cinemas] were showing more English-speaking movies. So we learned more when we went to school, when they wanted us to make reports … about what you did on the weekend, and we wrote down that we went to the movies to watch this or that. (José Luis, b. 1939)

Only two other male respondents mentioned having seen Mexican films as children or teenagers: Ernest (b. 1934) and Eleazar (b. 1942). However, the only Mexican films they would go and see were the ones starring ‘Cantinflas’. Apart from ‘Cantinflas’ films, also extremely popular throughout Latin America and Spain, these respondents liked only Hollywood films during their childhood and adolescence. Eliseo (b. 1934), Alfredo (b. 1934), Eleazar (b. 1942), Ernest (b. 1934) and José Luis (b. 1939) explicitly mentioned attending the serials of Roy Rogers, Gene Autry and/or The Lone Ranger in the Royal and the Rialto during the 1940s and 1950s, still cherishing vivid memories of them. Singing cowboy movies were the favourites of José Luis,

because of the livestock, the ranches. And the songs, the serenades they gave. And it was very, to me, it was something out of this world, seeing a cowboy ranch, a hacienda and … a lot of horses. And we enjoyed it. Nice serials … they were like telenovelas. We enjoyed them. (José Luis, b. 1939)

All Laredo informants were born or raised in the city. This allowed us to observe the fundamental changes in a generation making the transition from a cohesive embrace of Mexican culture and the Spanish language to a broader, more diverse, bilingual culture. Cinema, as one of the few entertainment options in the city, was undoubtedly a relevant socializing influence into US culture via Hollywood films – but it was also a source of contact with their original culture via Mexican and Spanish-language pictures. Our informants contrasted in their memories the dual and flexible bilingual preferences of English and Spanish-language films (especially in the case of women) with the almost exclusive preferences for Mexican or Spanish-language films among their older relatives (parents and grandparents). This again shows the socializing force of the US education system (among other local influences). Thus, memories of films to a large extent reflect the changing cultural conditions in the city when first- and second-generation Mexican-Americans gradually incorporated the language and popular culture of their new country into their upbringing, next to the culture of their immigrant parents. ⁵ Some of the informants, for example, referred explicitly to the role of Hollywood films in making them more aware of what was going on in the rest of the country, as well as developing in them a sense of belonging to the United States. So, how important was cinemagoing in that part of their life? According to Alfredo (b. 1934),

I’d say it was very important because I got to learn a lot about the country, because we are so far [away] from the rest of the United States. Yeah. We learned a lot from the movies. And they used to show a lot of patriotic movies. There was a lot of patriotism back then like in WWII that gave us a feeling of belonging to the United States and making us proud and all that.

Eleazar (b. 1942) raised a similar sentiment when recalling the lasting impression that the film To Hell And Back (Jesse Hibbs, 1955), about the most decorated soldier in World War II, Audie Murphy, made on him: ‘I liked the movie a lot, and it really moved me because of the way he portrayed himself, what he did for our [with emphasis] country, and for his fellow comrades’.

Cinemagoing and daily life

The memories of our respondents were not only about Hollywood and Mexican or Spanish-language films. They were also about the more widespread social processes, repeatedly found in other locations, about cinemagoing being an integral part of daily life, as a pretext to hang out with parents, siblings or friends or as a way of meeting boys or girls afterwards in the cafeteria of the drug store adjacent to the cinema palace. In the typology of ‘modes of cinema memory’ advanced by Kuhn (2011), these types of recollections fall into the ‘Memories of Cinemagoing’ category (p. 93). As in the case of Kuhn’s respondents, in the memories of our Laredo senior informants the essential social act of ‘going to the cinema’ seemed to be much more important than ‘the cultural activity’ of seeing films. Our transcripts provide rich and vivid memories about the social and emotional meanings going to the cinema had for them as children or teenagers–from spending quality time with their parents (‘It was the only time I had my mom all to myself’ (Brianna, b. 1942)) to being an excuse to take a break from daily chores (‘It was a treat to get out of the house, not being in the house all the time where we were told what to see, what to hear, what to do and what not to do’ (Esperanza, b. 1944)) to being the perfect excuse to be able to go afterwards to the drug store and hang out with friends or meet a date (Candy b. 1944). Diana (b. 1947) describes the typical routine:

Okay, well, we used to go in groups now ’cause we were friends, boyfriends, girlfriends, you know, and we would basically meet at the drug store, and then we’d all go to them movies, you know, everybody would take different buses home. But that’s basically what we used to do. Other than that, you know, there was nothing else.

These descriptions of hanging out with friends before or after the film are very similar to those reported by informants in other Mexican cities, such as Monterrey (Lozano et al., 2016), Leon and Guanajuato (Gómez, 2004a: 888–889).

However, going to the cinema was also remembered as almost the only entertainment option in a small town that lacked sophisticated infrastructure and was far away from major cities. In the memories of their childhood or adolescence, informants recalled few entertainment alternatives to cinema: going to Lake Casa Blanca for barbecues, an ice skating ring in a tent, the parade and carnival of the Washington Birthday Celebration in February and the occasional circus coming to town. In the words of one respondent, going to the cinema in Laredo was ‘the only thing you could really do, that you knew you could do next day or the following day, because the movies were always there’ (Guadalupe, b. 1933). In their recollection of the Laredo of the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, cinemagoing was clearly the main cultural avenue for entertainment as well as for interaction with family members and peers. And, as in other studies on cinemagoing, our informants tended to idealize the times and the films of their childhood and adolescence, constantly referring to ‘really peaceful, quiet and trustful times’, when they could walk freely all over town leaving the doors of their homes unlocked and when cinemas would only screen ‘clean’ movies with ‘better plots’, free of the violence, gore and sex of later periods.

Further reflecting central findings of Kuhn’s (2002, 2011) study of 1930s cinemagoers, our informants tended to implicate themselves in the events recollected, using the first person plural and not the singular. The repetitiveness of this trope in the transcripts confirms a persistent sense of shared and collective experience, suggesting that informants associated cinemagoing with social interaction and membership of a particular cultural group. Candy’s account of what she would do before or after going to the cinema illustrates this well:

… as we became teenagers, we would walk around downtown and go to Guajardo’s Pharmacy, and they had stools and a bar where they would sell ice cream, and Fritos with chili and vanilla cokes, and so we would go over there to meet other friends that had gone to other movies. … And then they would pick us up. Or we would ride the bus back home! After that, we started riding the bus, too … We rode the bus to the movies and then rode the bus back home, so that’s why we had time to walk around downtown because our parents weren’t there to pick us up, and we knew the bus schedule, so we gave ourselves a chance to go buy something at the store or go to the Guajardo’s drug store to meet other people, other kids. (Candy, b. 1944)

The testimonies of our cinemagoers reinforce Maltby’s (2011) discussion about the need to make a counter-proposition to the assumption that ‘what matters in the study of the audience experience should be restricted to … what happens in the moment in which audiences are primarily focused on the screen’ (p. 9). On the contrary, he continues, oral histories with cinemagoers show that the experience of cinema attendance, in addition to being place-specific, is shaped ‘by the continuities of life in the family, the workplace, the neighbourhood and community’ (p. 9).

Conclusion

Memories of films and cinemagoing among senior residents of Laredo offer an interesting and distinct case study, adding to the growing literature on the essential role of memory in understanding the experience of film and attendance at the cinema. The cultural and geographical peculiarities of a US city located on the border with Mexico, and with a population of mainly Mexican descent, bilingual or Spanish-language monolingual, allows for the exploration of new angles and perspectives on the role played by cinema in the complex and dynamic processes of identity formation.

The memories of Laredo respondents lack references to Anglo discrimination and segregation against Mexicans taking place in cinemas in other parts of the United States from the 1920s to the 1960s (Garcia, 2010) – including Texan cities like Austin and Dallas, and even El Paso, another town located on the US border with Mexico (Serna, 2009). This is quite logical, as more than 90% of the Laredo population was of Mexican descent during those years, making it impossible for cinema venues, even when owned by powerful Anglo entertainment groups from out of town to establish and enforce segregation policies against Mexican-Americans.

It is tempting to equate the informants’ consumption of Mexican or Spanish-language films with the preservation of Mexican cultural identity and their preferences for Hollywood films with an embrace of US values and ideology and an abandonment of the native Mexican culture. However, film preferences and cinemagoing patterns in the past belong to the realm of memories based on subjectively lived and culturally shared experiences, ‘updated reconstructions of the past acting as strategies helpful to define ourselves before the world’ (Acuña, 2009: 3). The consolidation of bilingualism in the second and subsequent generations of Laredoans, and the simultaneous coexistence in them of a sense of identification and familiarity with US values and institutions alongside a clear and marked Mexican cultural heritage, relates to the dynamic reshaping of identities in liminal spaces, where multiple layers of cultures, ideologies and values converge. Cherished memories of both Mexican and Hollywood films and actors do more than signal a dilution of an assumed pristine Mexican-only cultural identity. Rather, they are indicators of negotiations with and adaptations to new rules and institutional systems, apparently without substantial modification of core identities and cultural values. On another level, however, consumption of and fascination with Hollywood films among our Mexican-American respondents may not have been that different from the consumption of and fascination with the same US films among Mexicans living in Mexico City, Guadalajara, Monterrey or any other major city of their home country at that time (Gómez, 2004a, 2004b; Rosas Mantecón, 1988; Serna, 2006). Hollywood films, as in the case of their Mexican counterparts, may have eased the process of modernisation and urbanisation for recent immigrants arriving in Laredo from small towns in North Eastern Mexico. As Noble (2006) explains, for Mexican audiences, Hollywood cinema was the place ‘where one went to learn how to be modern’, with the films representing a new form of entertainment displaying ‘certain, limited, democratising tendencies that were unprecedented in the sphere of Mexican cultural consumption which, prior to the advent of the moving image, was organised along starkly classist lines’ (p. 509). If this was the case in Mexico, and particularly in the capital city, it may well have been the same for Mexican migrants crossing to the US side of the border.

If surveys and interviews about the present are always mediated and filtered by the informants’ subjective assessments, memories about film preferences and cinemagoing routines and practices so many years ago should of course not be seen as referring to objective facts. Our purpose in this article has not been an attempt to objectively reconstruct the past based on the recollections of our respondents, but rather to look at the meanings they attach today to their memories, the subjective and personal recreation of their readings from the context and their relationship to the present. Memories about the past are what Kuhn (2004) calls ‘lived time’, a time lived collectively as much as individually, a time somewhat incongruent with the linear temporality of historical time (p. 106). We should not lose sight of this when interpreting the cinemagoing memories of our Laredo respondents. And as such, they allow us to get closer to a full understanding of the central role played by cinema in their lives.