Yet Another Posting on Rita Hayworth aka Margarita Carmen Dolores Cansino

It has been awhile since I posted here--it's just so much easier, for some reason, to post on the Textmex Facebook page. Still, I shouldn't ignore the site that made many of my career successes possible!

So, today, yet another Rita Hayworth posting, fueled by semiotic wonders gleaned from Dr. Macro's utterly wonderful celebrity photography page. Click any of the images for a high-rez version of the photograph.

For more on Rita, see my early essay on Hayworth, free and online here: https://eyegiene.sdsu.edu/nericcio/hayworthDERRIDA/ or, the final, extended essay meditation on Rita in Textmex available (with free #mextasy posters!) here: http://eyegiene.tictail.com/product/text-mex-seductive-hallucinations-of-the-mexican-in-america

Rita Hayworth, Charles Vidor, Gilda | When Electrolysis Proxies for the Existential

updated

ORIGINALLY POSTED 2/20/07


Tex[t]-Mex's oldest chapter, the one that started it all in a way, features a mouthful of a moniker that goes by the name of "When Electrolysis Proxies for the Existential: A Somewhat Sordid Meditation on What Might Occur if Frantz Fanon, Rosario Castellanos, Jacques Derrida, Gayatri Spivak, and Sandra Cisneros Asked Rita Hayworth Her Name at the Tex[t]-Mex Beauty Parlor."

If I had the chapter to write over again, I think I would have spent many more pages teasing out the allegories implicit in the Charles Vidor 1946 Rita-vehicle Gilda. Seen here, in an image whisked away from Dr. Macro's inimitable site, is the face (or is it 'faces'), that launched an existential and follicular crisis in the history of Latina figuration. The electrolysis-assisted odyssey that lead "Mexican" Margarita Carmen Dolores Cansino to Hollywood bombshell Rita Hayworth, is one for the ages.

Additionally, in a clip here from via TCM that I wished I could have embedded in my book, I have also included the infamous "Mame" sequence from Gilda.


Don't think for a second that Rita (aka Margarita Carmen Dolores Cansino) and Vidor, the director, are not aware of the irony of the song's lyrics.

Here, in a picture from last year, your Tex[t]-Mex Galleryblogger reveals his affections for Margarita Dolores Cansino!

Wow--Stage 6 Studio

I stumbled across an amazing new site for websurfing cinema buffs--theorists, cineastes, and film-geeks alike; it is called Stage 6 and it features high resolution clips and trailers.

nota bene: you may have to download and install divx software to see these clips! warning: some of these files are huge and will take ages to load if you are not on a decent broadband server.

Here's a scene from Gilda starring Rita Hayworth, aka Margarita Carmen Cansino--it's the pivotal scene from the film where Gilda's erotic theatrics un-nerve Glenn Ford, pushing his confused character, Johnny Farrell, a bi-sexual grifter, to the breaking point!

Margarita Carmen Dolores Cansino!

While spelunking the internet I stumbled upon this low-resolution print of a period 8 x 10 publicity glossy, post-electrolysis!, of the one and only Rita Hayworth--aka Margarita Carmen Dolores Cansino. I ran it through the alchemy of photoshop and was able, via filters and philtres, to render this decent print archived here for research and presentation purposes.

Margarita Carmen Dolores Cansino, aka Rita Hayworth, Mistress of Electrolysis

I remember writing the first draft of "When Electrolysis Proxies for the Existential" on a plane on my way out to Purdue for their then annual Romance Languages conference. I was reading a biography of Rita Hayworth at the time (guilty pleasures that double as scholarly research) and had run across amazing revelations regarding Hayworth (née Cansino) and her father (incest!) and Hayworth and her "barber" (electrolysis to lift her hairline), both dispatches couriered to my eyes courtesy of Barbara Leaming--Time reviewed the book back in 1989.

Latina bombshell? Spanish femme fatale? The mysteries of Margarita metamorphosis take up the better part of 40 pages in Tex[t]-Mex in a chapter entitled "When Electrolysis Proxies for the Existential: A Somewhat Sordid Meditation on What Might Occur if Frantz Fanon, Rosario Castellanos, Jacques Derrida, Gayatri Spivak, and Sandra Cisneros Asked Rita Hayworth Her Name at the Tex[t]-Mex Beauty Parlor."

Here's a snippet of Cansino/Hayworth in living color from Blood and Sand (dir. R. Mamoulian; 1941). Count the number of fused "Spanish"/"Latina" tropes in the clip--here's a hint: can you say "bullfighting"?


Lovely Rita! What a curious clip--shades of Almodovar's Matador.

A last note on Rita-archeology: I recently ran across a book-length work focused wholly on Hayworth/Cansino published by Adrienne L. Mclean for Rutgers University Press--a scan of it off Amazon reveals a more than decent take on the Alzheimer-felled star.

postscript

Let me state here in public and for the record that the only reason Tex[t]-Mex EVER appeared in print, aside from nagging, utterly welcome, periodic chingasos from Davíd Carrasco, was the support and encouragement of Arturo J. Aldama, killer of many trees for all the books he has published in the fields of ethnic studies and cultural studies, and editor, in particular, of Violence and the Body, where the existentialism/electrolysis piece finally got published the way I had imagined it in the first place--snapshot to your right. While the Rita chapter in Tex[t]-Mex is extensively revised and features many new Hayworth pictures, it has to be said that without the Arturo Aldama, my UT Press opus would never have seen the light of day. Gracias con un abrazo fuerte a Profe Aldama!