Dolores Del Rio Film Analysis

The exotification of women of color through the introduction of sound technology in films in the 1920s and 1930s drastically influenced Dolores del Rio and her career. Because the sound of a language in films could now be heard on screen, cultural diversity in the English language and its use in the United States was acknowledged through different accents and slang. Cultural diversity in the United States was only allowed if it was through ethnic European accents. The rise of sound films in the 1930s challenged Mexican star Dolores del Rio’s ability to conform to public demands and Hollywood’s expectations through the hypersexualition of Latinx women and her involvement in transnational affairs.
Dolores del Rio was a Mexican-born actress who

During the 1920s and 1930s, it was not uncommon for directors to assign roles that were inconsistent with del Rio’s Latinx identity. Exotic storylines often told the common stories that are reminiscent of the colonization of countries inhabited by people of color. Although these films exemplified her “foreignness” to American culture, none portrayed del Rio as more “exotic” as when she starred in Bird of Paradise, a romantic drama directed by King Vidor (1932), as the “savage princess, Luana” (18). The Bird of Paradise portrays a native princess, Luana, who meets Johnny Baker, a South Seas American man who jumps in a ship and arrives on her island before the two fall in love with each other. Described as having an “alien beauty [that] fits in so effectively with her role” by the New York Herald Tribune, Dolores del Rio is represented as a “foreign” woman who is saved by a white man in the film and is ultimately viewed as the “white [male] hero’s desire” (18). The author of a review on Bird of Paradise, published in the Chillicothe Constitution-Tribune in 1932, asserts that “from the first strange tenderness of love for a gold-like white man, the brown-skinned princess of ‘Bird of Paradise’... falls hopelessly in love with a white man” (“‘Man Called” 2). The white man in the film is depicted as “gold-like,” and highly

The exotification of Dolores del Rio is evident in an article published by a Photoplay issue in 1934, as she is described as possessing “golden skin, smooth as mellowed ivory and her dark, flashing eyes bespoke the lue of those maidenly ‘senoritas’ who peep at life from behind cloistered shutters… When the young man comes to call on a senorita in Mexico… he brings his guitar” (38). Through the exotification of Dolores del Rio, Hollywood found great success in the United States and in Latin America, one of the most profitable film markets in the cinematic industry. As a white-passing Latinx woman, del Rio was “more easily able to move in and out of ethnic roles” (33). Because Dolores del Rio was a Latinx woman that held “upper-class roles” and a Eurocentric standard of beauty while nonetheless, identifying with her Mexican heritage, she not only appealed to the white American public, but to Latin American audiences as well (Hershfield