Cantinfladas of the PRI: (Mis) Representations of Mexican Society in the Films of Mario Moreno

Abstract

In The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Marx wrote that all great, world-historical facts and personages occur twice, the first time as tragedy; the second as farce. Confronted by the tumultuousness of Mexico's extended revolution, he might have added a third occurrence in the form of carnival. The world that Lázaro Cárdenas turned upside down, between 1934 and 1940, became a tragedy during the presidential administration of Miguel Alemán, from 1946 to 1952. The populist Partido Revolucionario Mexicano (PRM), intended to consolidate the working-class gains of the Cárdenas era, was co-opted by Alemán to the service of trickle-down development policies under that oxymoron of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI).1 The farce of revolutionary legitimacy became unmistakable in the line of rulers following the Tlatelolco massacre of 1968, most notoriously Jose López Portillo (1976-1982). This historical progression was mirrored by the films of Mexico's most enduring popular star, Mario Moreno " Cantinflas," who began his career in the 19305 as a symbol of revolutionary liberation, evolved over the 1940s into a representative of authoritarian capitalism, and ended in the 1970s as a grotesque caricature of Mexican society