Filming Pancho: How Hollywood Shaped The Mexican Revolution

On January 3, 1914 Pancho Villa became Hollywood's first Mexican superstar. In signing an exclusive movie contract, Villa agreed to keep other film companies from his battlefield, to fight in daylight wherever possible, and to reconstruct battles if the footage needed reshooting. Filming Pancho is a vivid account of the American movie industry's fascination with the events of the Mexican Revolution. Through memoir and newspaper reports, Margarita De Orellana looks at the documentary film-makers who went down to cover events in Mexico. Feature film-makers in Hollywood portrayed the border as the dividing line between order and chaos, in the process developing a series of stereotypes of the Mexican between 1911 and 1917--the greaser, the bandit, the beautiful se�簣orita, the exotic Aztec. Filming Pancho reveals how Mexico was constructed in the American imagination and how movies reinforced and justified both American expansionism and racial and social prejudice.