The complexity of the Latino experience has yet to be adequately explored in film. As in Latino literary texts, most themes and characters in Latino films have emerged from the sensibilities of a community's insertion into the North American reality. From these national experiences, filmmakers have been able to explore issues relevant to the broadly constructed ‘Latino’ community. As film production relies on a collaborative series of complex and symbiotic relationships between scriptwriters, editors, and directors, the cultural and ethnic backgrounds of those who have contributed to the Latino image in film in the United States have shifted over time. Film's dual nature as ‘mass media’ and ‘cultural text’, which emerges out of what Theodor Adorno has called the culture industries, underscores its political and social relevance in the construction of Latino realities.

Introduction

At the beginning of the twentieth century, US films quickly emerged as one of the most important cultural products in influencing the way that North Americans viewed themselves and how they viewed others. Hollywood, the undisputed center of North American film production since the post-World War I era and for most of the twentieth century, not only controlled what films were produced but where and how they were distributed and exhibited. As the preeminent actor in the film culture industry, Hollywood films often reflected North American social values and also played a role in shaping them. Moreover, over the last century, Hollywood production has evolved as it engages with new and emerging social realities, changing ethics, and shifting aesthetic values.

In its representation and construction of minority communities, Hollywood followed and perpetuated widely practiced social conventions from segregation to stereotyping and exploitation of gender roles, violence, and sexuality. But Hollywood also documented early attitudes towards Jews, working classes, and the social change from the 1950s’ civil rights movement, the emergence of Chicano consciousness in the 1960s, and immigrant rights in the 1970s and 1980s.