The riddle of Cantinflas
Subtitle: essays on Hispanic popular culture
By: Ilan Stavans.
Edition: 1st ed.
Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
Published: 1998
Place of publication: Albuquerque, N.M
Language: eng
Number of pages: 157
Subjects: Cantinflas, -- 1911-; Popular culture -- Latin America.; Kitsch -- Latin America.
Description: From one of our foremost cultural critics comes a provocative collection of essays on politics and popular culture in Mexico and the Hispanic community in the United States. Ilan Stavans examines the delightful if torturous relationship between a Europeanized elite and the hybrid masses in a continent he sees as imprisoned in the labyrinth of identity. In "Santa Selena," for example, Stavans explores the beatification of the martyred Tejana singer in the context of American pop iconography.

Similarly, Stavans's portraits of Jose Guadalupe Posada, Tina Modotti, Frida Kahlo, Sandra Cisneros, Cantinflas, and Carlos Fuentes are less about these luminaries than about what people have turned them into. His search is not for the idol but for the idolater, and for ways in which technology and the media refurbish reality.

This theme is nowhere more tangible than in the essay on Subcomandante Marcos as a postmodern incarnation of Che Guevara and Abimael Guzman, a mythical guerrillero whose best weapons were not the bayonet and hand grenade but the fax machine and e-mail.
Notes: Includes index.