Cine e identidades populares urbanas (Cali, Colombia, décadas de 1940 y 1950)

Abstract

ABSTRACT: From oral interviews and journalistic printed material, this article analyzes film tastes and reception practices from popular classes’ film audiences in Cali, Colombia, in the 1940s and 1950s. The article shows how film fostered new urban identities that transformed the traditional roles assigned to popular classes in Cali’s social structure, echoing the conflictive accommodation of immigrants in the midst of contradictory social forces. The focus of the analysis is to show how these new urban, popular identities were strengthened by the representation of two intertwined elements that movies from the period, especially the Mexican ones, offered. Firstly, it was their representation of characters from the urban, popular classes, framed by codes from melodrama genre, far from the classic, naturalistic aesthetics. Second, there were the musical trends from Afro-Cuban origins, the dancing styles mixing Cuban, Mexican and American styles, and the zoot-suiter dressing style that these movies showed. In both cases, it is considered how these elements connected with the traditional practices of cultural consumption, at the same time that they reinforced new urban and modern cultural practices and identities, which were proudly positive and international. The ways in which popular classes related to film not only defied the imaginaries that the upper classes had about poor people’ culture, but also made it clear the conflictive ways of assuming and living modernity in multiple peripheral conditions, as social class, race, gender and nation.