María Félix (1914–2002) was larger than life. When she was alive she possessed an energy, dynamism, and intentionality that is evident in the films she starred in and the self she shared with her audiences. She transgressed norms for women of her time, making her the biggest Mexican film star at a time when the industry was at its peak of production. In her personal life, she refused to conform to sexual mores and so too did many of her characters. She performed a diva self in public, and on screen she stepped into multiple different roles enacting the fantasies of what a woman could be and do. She worked on Mexican, European, and Argentine projects challenging a prevalent conservative idea of women's place in society. In the 1970s, when film projects no longer satisfied her, she stepped away from acting and moved into an elite world of artistic patronage, privilege, and consumption.

Her influence on top brands and inspiration for a range of creative works is marked and significant. Songs, plays, and novels have been written, art has been made, jewels have been crafted, and careers have been built thanks to her. In her last decades, she reinvented herself and used television to take charge of her story and speak to audiences old and new. Across these different worlds that celebrate glamour and exceptionalism, through her personal relationships and a style of her own, Félix has left a significant legacy that continues right up to the present. She had a big impact in life and has an ever-evolving afterlife. This book looks across this life and work and examines what has made her compelling to so many and explores her enduring appeal. It considers what we can learn from a life lived large and against the grain.

Félix's refusal to conform merits close examination because, unlike those who fit in to ensure a long-lasting career, she was prepared to speak openly about working conditions, inhabited the space she required on set and on screen, and refused to be defined by what others thought about her work, taste, and style. This book will consider what contributed to this iconic status and how it was constructed by her with the help of collaborators and friends throughout her lifetime.

María Félix was often called upon to play characters who had sexual pasts or used their sexuality in ways that fell outside the rigid norms of the time. These characters have been variously labelled as mujer sin alma, femme fatale, and la devoradora. As I will discuss, the literal and se-mantic meaning of each of these archetypes is freighted with judgements that were intended to control women's public and private behaviour. Therefore, none of them is entirely satisfactory to reproduce nor uphold. Nonetheless, I am choosing one, mujer sin alma, to examine and extend because it not only works as a placeholder and point of reference. Félix herself used it to describe some of her roles inscribing it with subversive potential.

As shorthand, this label risks being dismissive of her work. But, as I discussed in Chapter 2, Félix made it clear that thanks to her performances the mujer sin alma she played was, ‘atractiva, talentosa, triunfadora y se divierte mucho en la vida’ [attractive, talented, successful, and she really enjoys life]. The flamboyance in such assertions in Félix's memoir and interviews is consistent with a form of camp as a resistant ‘aesthetic strategy […] achieved through stylistic exaggeration, excessive theatricality, or other forms of overarticulation’ which are intended to challenge ‘normative notions of gender and sexuality’. Through her theatrical self-evaluations, Félix is enacting a layered discursive game. She is literally upholding her own skills in ways that are so overt that refuse contrary opinion, but they are also nods to a camp style that speaks to a queer community that recognises her achievements as powerful and against the odds. Félix was a woman in a male dominated working environment which means that her place in it was a series of negotiations, well-chosen alliances, and artful reframing of the details of these experiences. In this way, she can be read as a camp queer icon. Thus, when she asserts that her mujer sin alma characters are appealing, have agency, and, by implication, are aspirational, she is not only speaking of her achievements, but she is also addressing and recuperating the under-appreciated and poorly understood mujer sin alma as representative of marginalised communities with whom others can identify.

Félix Moves a lot. There are few pauses in her performance style. The moves are not involuntary or twitchy, but are deliberate and often fluid indicating intentionality. In addition to her body in motion, there are also a lot of cuts in the edits of her films. This is most likely a conse-quence of filmmaking practices in Mexico during the Golden Age. Shooting times were short, there were few re-takes, and set ups were quick and efficient. The rapid turnover and streamlined approach to filmmaking at this time are a fundamental reason why the Golden Age is often referred to as ‘cine industrial’ [industrial cinema]. This required the performers to respond to these conditions. They had to be able to find their mark promptly, collaborate well with co-stars, crew, and directors, and step into new roles with little preparation. Félix had an ability to work in these conditions, respond to her co-stars’ performance styles, and still managed to imbue her characters with a sense of agency that challenged gender norms. This chapter will consider Félix's performative style by focusing on her movements including her expansive and signature gestures and her micro-gestures that are indicative of the constraints of the industry but also of an approach to acting that is under-theorised and, consequently, under-appreciated.

Gender, Camp, and Performance

Félix did not conform to conventional ideas about womanhood in Mexico. Just as her roles ranged across a spectrum so too did her gender performances. Underpinning my analysis is queer theory's challenges to fixed ideas about the link between biological sex and how a body should be read or behave, and supposes that gender is learnt, culturally determined, and performed. Sometimes, Félix's performances venture into the terrain of drag. She drew on a rich repertoire of gendered movement and attire that were opportunities to challenge prescribed ways of being a woman in what was a conservative period of Mexican history. Her use of conventional ‘male’ and ‘female’ gestures and movements ‘disrupt gender categories’ and serve as examples of how the ‘performance of gender mocks the fixed expectations of the male/female binary’.

María Félix Lives on through a rich ecosystem of fandom, transformations, and remediations. Some of the creatives who have contributed to this legacy are professional performers and writers and others are part of a dynamic and evolving online community who are inspired by her work, looks, life, and afterlife. This chapter will consider a selection of these across a range of media, many of which thrive online. As with all analysis of media sources, especially digital content, this is a snapshot that constitutes a history of the present in what are continuously changing spaces and platforms. Many of these respond to significant anniversaries and news of projects about her life, but others simply engage with someone who is meaningful to them, and they use her persona, taste, or text to articulate something about themselves, or the society and moment they are living through. Félix's life and work has not become sanctified nor stagnant through these interpretations. Instead, an important part of Félix's legacy is a vital and dialogic afterlife. This chapter will take a sample of this work starting with the play by Carlos Fuentes, Orquídeas a la luz de la luna (1982)/Orchids in the Moonlight (2017), a work of fandom about fandom, then trace the link through to the performer Darío T. Pie and his artful and popular character, La Roña. Both Fuentes’ play and La Roña as persona provide a glimpse into how Félix has become a means of interrogating femininity, performance, and stardom. Through their work, Félix has an afterlife that exceeds the limitations of a single lifetime and provides new and contested readings of the star. Picking up from La Roña's unique approach, I then examine transformation make-up videos that add to these readings by focalising attention on Félix's features, expression, and stylisation. Varying from the personifications by the star, Thalia, to other transformations by less well-known vloggers, these close replications identify details that can inform readings of Félix's work not only because they act as tributes to her continued importance, but also because they are interpretive acts worthy of serious analysis. In contrast to these, I finish with a YouTube channel that seeks to archive Félix and establish foundational truths about her story.

María Félix was a star with a distinct performance style on screen and off. In interviews she was full of extravagant assertions that suggested intimacy, yet she was deeply private about many aspects of her life. She lived a life of creativity, display, and acquisition informed by a sense of professionalism in her work and flamboyance in her public appearances. For these reasons she was perceived to be a diva. As I explore in the Introduction, Félix, the popular press, her contemporaries, and her fans have all contributed to the mythology surrounding her. Stars who attain notoriety that exceeds any status attributed to their work are particularly prone to such mythification and the subsequent iconic status associated with it. Over the course of her life, she was as much a star as a celebrity. This chapter will explore theoretical concepts related to stardom and celebrity as they apply to Félix. In order to understand her as a star, it will take as a case study the adaptation, Doña Bárbara (Fernando de Fuentes, 1943), a film so tied to her iconic persona that it resulted in a lifelong nickname, ‘La Doña’. Not only was it a ‘memorably iconic performance as a woman capable of paradoxically fusing feminine beauty and masculine power’, it was also one that had clear racial dynamics that reflected the prejudices of the author, Rómulo Gallegos, and the prevailing attitudes of the Mexican film industry and wider culture. I will explore how Félix challenges fixed ideas about gender through a close look at her performance and wardrobe and examine how her whiteness is an overlooked marker of race that simultaneously complicates and undermines some of the racist intent of the source text and reinforces the racial stratification of the film.

Given its valence and significance over Félix's lifetime, it is worth pausing on the nickname ‘La Doña’. It can literally be translated as ‘Mrs’, it is also a deferential term that denotes authority and one that is usually given to an older woman. Félix was only twenty-nine when she took on this role. Her performance as Doña Bárbara, as well as her subsequent roles, combined with her off-screen persona meant that she imbued the word ‘la Doña’ with an embodied intelligence and strength of personality that rendered the word uniquely hers.

María Félix's Brief animated appearances in the Disney-Pixar film, Coco (Lee Unkrich, 2017) synthesises her wardrobe, star persona, and performance style and, significantly, is a nod to her legacy. Hers is not a speaking part but demonstrates some of the nuances cultural consultants brought to the film. When the protagonist, Miguel, sneaks into a VIP ball to find his famous father in the land of the dead, indicating the stature of those in attendance a glamorous skeletal Félix walks up the red carpet, pausing only for the waiting photographers. She is dressed in a floor-length sequined purple gown with a slit up to her thigh, a cinched waist, and a sweetheart sleeveless bodice. Recognisable from her distinct eyebrows, long hair, graceful movement, her wardrobe emphasises her height, wide shoulders, and narrow waist. She is the epitome of stardom, both recognisable as Félix and an invention of the filmmakers. Like the versions of her found by other makers and creatives, what we see in Coco is a figure that does not adhere to fixed parameters. They have invented their version of Félix. She was excessive in life and often hard to pin down to precise details and hard facts, which results in extended and expanded interpretations of what is possible for Félix in this imagined afterlife.

Her companion in this scene is the masked wrestler, El Santo (Rodolfo Guzmán Huerta, 1917–1984), and is an example of the potential to place Félix alongside someone with whom she did not socialise in life and for this not to require a total suspension of disbelief. Her persona was such that she invited projections of the widest sense of what it is to be a woman on screen and in public life. Their pairing is possible because she moved in wide circles that crossed class and artistic output. El Santo is a character who appeared in numerous low-budget films between 1961 and 1983 as a folk hero saving people from monsters such as, demons, vampires, wolfmen, evil wrestlers, and multiple iterations of exploitative capitalists. With low production values and cartoon-like performances, El Santo was in films that were distinct from the melodramas, thrillers, dramas, and comedies starring Félix. In life too they moved in different orbits.

Félix Made Clear assertions about her style and taste. She was certain about her agency in her acquisitions as someone who had a large and carefully curated collection. She commissioned jewellery by luxury brands and works of art by a variety of artists. With customary lack of modesty, in her biography Félix declares, ‘Hay en mí una especie de imán, no sólo para reconocer el talento, sino para atraerlo. Quizá por eso me han honrado con su amistad muchas grandes figuras del arte universal, tanto en mi país como en el extranjero’ [I am like a magnet for talent, not just recognising it, but attracting it too. That might be why so many great figures of universal art have honoured me with their friendships]. She goes on to assert that her applied knowledge of art was acquired through having visited many art galleries and museums in the Americas and Europe. Thus, she evidences her cultural capital and demonstrates the learning required to select thoughtfully as well as the ability to form her own opinions independent of rigid ideas of taste. This chapter explores how Félix expressed her taste through the original works and objects she surrounded and adorned herself with over the course of her life. Her taste and the judgements associated with her and other ostentatious stars like her provide an opportunity to consider women's agency in the rarefied world of luxury goods as well as the contemporary art scene in which she was involved through friendships and as a patron.

Félix worked in an industry that privileged narrow ideas of gender. In her book exploring femininity and what it means to look and be looked at as a star, Jackie Stacey states that, ‘Hollywood cinema has been a key source of idealised images of femininity in this culture. The cinema combines the exchange of looks with the display of commodities, and as such, has been of interest to feminists challenging conventional definitions of femininity’. Similar comments could be made in the Mexican and European contexts in which Félix worked. A star becomes commodified in this look, but she can also have agency in this act of being looked at and in how she looks, as Félix demonstrated.

Distance from valuable archives can be frustrating when studying stars whose primary output is at a considerable geographic remove, and where there is little distribution, sharing or coverage of materials beyond a specific location. Lacking the resources to travel annually to Mexico, I frequently find myself unable to source material that is physically stored in libraries and archives or, sometimes, readily available on corner street stalls in Mexico City, but impossible to access where I am. Early twenty-first- century technology has brought about some changes to this in ways that go beyond the conventional means of research and allow for a new and, at times, dialogic understanding of the star text. YouTube has become an unexpected resource and functions as an informal and chaotic digital archive and (re)creator of star texts in ways that deserve more sustained attention.

Heretofore, the study of digital archives has largely focused on how institutions catalogue and share material in a sustainable fashion. For example, in the Fall 2014 issue of the Cinema Journal Rielle Navitski details some of the online resources made available by Latin American institutions and the many complicating factors surrounding access, the dissemination of materials, selectivity of the process, and uneven approaches to digital archiving (122–3). Researching YouTube content shares some of the ‘tensions inherent to archiving [that] are foregrounded by digital obsolescence and the imperative of access’ (Navitski 2014: 122). Where there are limitations to institutional management of archives, the apparently ad hoc manner of material uploaded, the evolving regulatory framework, and the amateur nature of much star-related content makes YouTube a dynamic, sometimes frustrating, yet invaluable resource for researchers that is often overlooked in these surveys. Through an analysis of three Mexican stars, Pedro Infante, Jorge Negrete and Emilio Fernandez, this chapter will focus on their YouTube star texts, and draw out what these mean for the nascent field of online remeditated star studies. It will also consider the ways in which a star's gender determines how fans produce an online star text and how YouTube can be understood to function as a precarious archive.

Mexican cinema has long borrowed from literary sources – so much so that Emilio García Riera, in his survey of Mexican film, decried this tendency as a lamentable phenomenon that bespoke lack of originality and creative inspiration. This chapter will reconsider his judgment, looking to these adaptations as lively sources for critical analysis and part of a creative dialogue between filmmakers and authors. A small number of the novels adapted were written before the invention of cinema, which means that the authors wrote without recourse to any of its audiovisual tropes, but most were written after its inception. This creative flow takes many forms, and the source novel can have multiple resonances for the filmmakers, producers, or viewers; it can bring with it literary respectability and commercial success but also have political resonances that complicate readings. This chapter will have Mexican creative production at its center and consider the interrelationship between literature and film, the borrowings and influences that one has had on the other. Although mostly circumscribed by what has been created within Mexican national boundaries, the conversation will nonetheless draw on the literary output of non-Mexican authors whose works have been adapted by filmmakers in Mexico.

I draw on recent research into adaptation studies, which is “[a]lways a ‘hybrid’ subject, … too literary for film studies and too film-based for literary studies, and has tended to occupy an uneasy place between the two” (Cartmell and Whelehan, 2007: 1). It has generally come from English or literary studies departments and has found itself in an interstitial place between or even outside of disciplines, where film scholars often ignore it. Up to the 2000s, the tendency was to focus on mapping out a value-laden taxonomy in which faithfulness to the literary source text as an indicator of merit and hierarchy bedeviled the field. This penchant can still be found in some theoretical analyses (see, for example, Desmond and Hawkes, 2006), but the more fruitful approach is to move the focus from “literary texts not as primary sources but as ‘intertexts,’ one (albeit dominant) of a multiplicity of perspectives, thereby freeing adaptation from unprofitable ‘eye for an eye’ comparisons” (Cartmell and Whelehan, 2007: 3).

The Internet is frequently heralded as a positive alternative space for the exploration of new identities, allowing the imaginative creation of a new self – or selves – that may or may not be carried through into everyday life (Laurel 2001: 110). The artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña invites Net-users to project themselves imaginatively onto others' lives, to explore alternative life narratives and purge their demons through his different projects. Through his work as a multimedia artist working both on- and off-line, he aims to make others aware of issues such as race, class, gender, and national allegiances, using multiple – often ludic – methods, in order to achieve radical social change. In this chapter, I shall examine some of the games, identities, and techniques used by Gómez-Peña as an online performer and consider his stated aims.

Techno-Razcuache Border Artist

Gómez-Peña was born in Mexico City and moved to the USA in 1978 where he works as a performance artist and writer. In terms of his artistic practice, he describes himself as a ‘migrant performance artist’ (Gómez-Peña 1994: 211) and ‘an interdisciplinary intellectual’ (Gómez-Peña 2005: xviii), and, with respect to his relationship to new technologies, as a ‘webback’ (Gómez-Peña 2005: viii), an unwilling ‘cyber-vato’ and an ‘information superhighway bandido’ (Gómez-Peña 2001: 281). In general terms, he tackles issues of the locatedness of cultures and the significance of borderlands, through an interrogation of the concept of a fixed nation space and an exploration of identity issues associated with such a conceptualisation of space.