Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Filming My New Novel, Vexed; Rich and Poor Latinos

2009; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 32; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/cal.0.0374

1080-6512

Marco Portales,

Media, Journalism, and Communication History

Filming My New Novel, Vexed; Rich and Poor Latinos Marco Portales (bio) How difficult can it be to play a role in a home-made film aspiring to the big or the little screen, I said to myself, especially if the script we prepared allows actors the latitude to construct characters as we interpret the roles? But, having recently undertaken portraying a character I invented myself in Vexed , my own first novel, I will now say I have a hardy respect for people who act in non-Hollywood films, too. Too, because I have seen films for roughly fifty years, mainly Hollywood products, though, while growing up, I saw many films produced toward the end of the Golden Age of the Mexican Cinema. Indeed, I remember scenes from a whole slew of 1950s and early 1960s Mexican films, when mom and dad, respectively natives of Costa Rica and Mexico, used to take my brother Eddie and me, nearly every Sunday afternoon, partly to reward us for attending 6:00 a.m. morning Mass, to see a Mexican film in neighboring McAllen when we lived in South Texas, in Edinburg, in the Rio Grande Valley. In a boyhood that largely consisted of playing and attending Sacred Heart School in Edinburg, going to the movies was one of the great, regular events of life. I mention this past because everything one lives through contributes to one’s total make-up and I suspect the Mexican films I then saw have shaped Vexed , the novel I am now finding some difficulty in publishing here in the U.S. But as Latinos continue to grow in numbers and influence, I suspect that a novel about how the next Latino who runs for Texas governor fares will find a ready audience one of these days when some smart publisher looks up and notices that the world has changed and is changing. What, hasn’t Barack Obama recently been elected U.S. President? Who could have written that script as a novel and convinced a publisher to put it out? The Mexican male movie stars of the period were Jorge Negrete, Pedro Infante, Luis Aguilar, Pedro Armendáriz, Arturo de Córdova, Tito Guízar, Carlos Lopez Moctezuma, Cantinflas, Wolf Ruvinskis, Domingo Soler, and Tin Tan, among others. The women stars were María Félix, Elsa Aguirre, Libertad Lamarque, Marga Lopez, María Elena Marqués, Carmen Montejo, Sarita Montiel, Evita Muñoz, Andrea Palma, Silvia Pinal, Lilia Prado, Rosita Quintana, Dolores del Rio, Martha Roth, Maria Victoria Fernández, Sara García, and a host of supporting actresses unknown to U.S. audiences. I have, by the way, seventeen characters in Vexed , all the sort of characters that publishers have rarely, if ever, seen in the fiction they are used to publishing. Our parents took us to these largely melodramatic films because leaving us elsewhere was not an option they practiced. The Mexican films we saw, of course, were not risqué, though they were not made for children. My good Catholic parents did avoid the ones where the previews featured a [End Page 190] salacious shoulder or showed too much of a well-formed woman’s leg. Most of the films we were taken to turned out to be about relationships in the Mexican communities, urban and rural, very much what my own novel features, that is, current day relationships in the Mexican American/Latino world. My novel is about 58-year old Alejo Serna. He is a wealthy Mexican American, and, following in the footsteps of Obama’s creative win, he devises a new way of attracting voters. Alejo has been invited by the Democratic Party to run for Texas governor. It is a good story, and I say so because people who have read it have urged me to publish it. So I am waiting for a literary agent or a publisher, whoever shows up first, to put it out. As in the Mexican movies I used to enjoy as a youngster, men and women are falling in love and the characters encounter obstacles—parents, social practices and traditions, illness, and bad luck. The restraints, social and otherwise, impede unions and adjustments...