Mexicans in American Cinema as Craven Synechdoches for Sexuality in General and Sex in Particular

Tex[t]-Mex: Seductive Hallucination of the "Mexican" in America has "seductive" in the title in order to play up one of its major theses--that Mexicans, and Latinas/os in general, have, in the 20th and 21st century, evolved into a movie shorthand, aka, a trope, for the sexual. Amazon.com has this great feature where you can upload and tag your own images and I have taken advantage of this to make the thesis above more clear in living color (and, perhaps, to move a couple more books off the shelf)--click the image above and roll over the images to find the embedded commentary.

In any event, here's a scene of Salma Hayek, from the Tonight Show, that makes the sexual/Mexican trope proposition even more clear:



nota bene: this clip has been featured earlier on the galleryblog, here; it appears here again with a slightly different commentary. deja vu city!