Struggles for Recognition traces the emergence of melodrama in Latin American silent film and silent film culture. Juan Sebastián Ospina León draws on extensive archival research to reveal how melodrama visualized and shaped the social arena of urban modernity in early twentieth-century Latin America. Analyzing sociocultural contexts through film, this book demonstrates the ways in which melodrama was mobilized for both liberal and illiberal ends, revealing or concealing social inequities from Buenos Aires to Bogotá to Los Angeles. Ospina León critically engages Euro-American and Latin American scholarship seldom put into dialogue, offering an innovative theorization of melodrama relevant to scholars working within and across different national contexts.

About the Author

Juan Sebastián Ospina León is an Independent Scholar.

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments

Introduction: Melodrama and Visibility
1. "Filmdom" before and during the Great War
2. Buenos Aires Shadows: Urban Space, Fallen Women, and Destitute Men
3. Bogotá and Medellín: A Tale of Two Cities and Conservative Progress
4. Orizaba, Veracruz: Yesterday's Melodrama Today
5. South to North: Latin American Modernities
Conclusion: Struggles for Recognition

List of Abbreviations
Notes
Works Cited
Index

Reviews

"Struggles for Recognition, given its subject, scope, and method, will be of interest to melodrama scholars; film scholars, particularly historians; and scholars of Latin American cultural studies."
— Film Quarterly

"A solid and enlightening piece of scholarship that makes an important contribution to film studies and the history of twentieth-century Latin America more broadly."
— Hispanic American Historical Review

"Ospina’s book will become essential reading for scholars of silent cinema, melodrama, and Latin America."
— Nineteenth Century Theater and Film

"A remarkable book that is poised to become required reading in film and media studies, Latin American studies, and urban studies—it's quite possibly the most innovative study of Latin American melodrama that I have read in recent memory."—Colin Gunckel, author of Mexico on Main Street: Transnational Film Culture in Los Angeles before World War II

"Struggles for Recognition is unique in reassessing Argentine, Colombian, and Mexican modernities by analyzing the effects of the conventions of melodrama on public participation and political subjectivity."—Cynthia M. Tompkins, author of Affectual Erasure: Representations of Indigenous Peoples in Argentine Cinema

"Breaks new ground by bringing together recent critiques of Eurocentric conceptions of modernity with new framings of melodrama. Understanding the form as a highly adaptable site for mediating experiences of social change, Ospina León offers an illuminating analysis of melodrama's diverse manifestations in early Latin-American cinemas. Historically illuminating and conceptually astute."—Christine Gledhill, coeditor of Melodrama Unbound: Across History, Media, and National Cultures

About the Book

About the Author

Table of Contents

Reviews