La India Mara

La India Maraa humble and stubborn indigenous Mexican womanis one of the most popular characters of the Mexican stage, television, and film. Created and portrayed by Mara Elena Velasco, La India Mara has delighted audiences since the late 1960s with slapstick humor that slyly critiques discrimination and the powerful. At the same time, however, many critics have derided the iconic figure as a racist depiction of a negative stereotype and dismissed the India Mara films as exploitation cinema unworthy of serious attention. By contrast, La India Mara builds a convincing case for Mara Elena Velasco as an artist whose work as a director and producerrare for women in Mexican cinemahas been widely and unjustly overlooked. Drawing on extensive interviews with Velasco, her family, and film industry professionals, as well as on archival research, Seraina Rohrer offers the first full account of Velascos life; her portrayal of La India Mara in vaudeville, television, and sixteen feature film comedies, including Ni de aqu, ni de all [Neither here, nor there]; and her controversial reception in Mexico and the United States. Rohrer traces the films financing, production, and distribution, as well as censorship practices of the period, and compares them to other Mexploitation films produced at the same time. Adding a new chapter to the history of a much-understudied period of Mexican cinema commonly referred to as la crisis, this pioneering research enriches our appreciation of Mexploitation films.