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Copyright by Diana Ruth Norton 2018 The Dissertation Committee for Diana Ruth Norton Certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: Writing Foreign Stardom under Autarchy: Affect, Nationalism and the Americas in Early Franquista Spanish Culture Committee: Jason Borge, Supervisor Jill Robbins, Co-Supervisor Jorge Pérez Michael Harney Charles Ramirez Berg Writing Foreign Stardom under Autarchy: Affect, Nationalism and the Americas in Early Franquista Spanish Culture by Diana Ruth Norton Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin May 2018 Dedication I dedicate this dissertation to the women throughout my life who taught me to defy convention, whether they intended to or not. To Karen Kinney Norton, Diana Kinney, Katie Kinney, Teri Caswell, Jerri Kinney, Ruth Kinney, Ruth Norton, Nelly Graves, Barbara Norton, Susie Norton, Melinda Morgan Norton and Kim Setty. Acknowledgements I am grateful to the Truman Library, the Graduate School of the University of Texas and the Fulbright Program for the financial support that made this dissertation possible. I would like to extend a special thanks to all the archivists at the Truman Library, Hemeroteca Municipal, Filmoteca Nacional, Biblioteca Nacional, and the Archivo General de la Administración, for pointing me in the right direction and answering any queries I had regarding their holdings. To Jill Robbins, Jason Borge, Jorge Pérez for all of your insights on drafts and support of this profoundly strange dissertation project. To Ángel Loureiro for giving me the best undergraduate thesis idea and the basis for every bit of scholarship I’ve done over the last ten years. To Anjouli Janzen and Jon Snyder for letting me explore similar themes in my master’s thesis. To Mary Beltrán and Charles Ramirez Berg for providing excellent comments on this project from a film and celebrity studies perspective. To Lorenzo Delgado for guiding my research in Madrid, and Pablo León Aguinaga for providing a historian’s perspective on US-Spanish relations under the Franco regime. To María Rosón for her amazing work on private photographs and for pointing me towards archives I did not even know I needed. To Susana, Rosa, Raquel, Beatriz, José Ramón for commenting on various chapters/presentations and for suggesting essential primary sources. Thanks to Mom and Dad, to Jackie Serigos and Tia Butler, my writing partners, and to Daniel, mi amor. v Writing Foreign Stardom under Autarchy: Affect, Nationalism and the Americas in Early Franquista Spanish Culture Diana Ruth Norton, PhD The University of Texas at Austin, 2018 Supervisors: Jason Borge and Jill Robbins This dissertation questions the assumption that foreign films solely provided modes of escapism or opportunities to subvert societal norms under the early Franco regime. In essence, I show how complex political operations underlay the reception and marketing in Spain of foreign films and transnational star images. Using archival research, I examine the way that the Spanish press wrote about Hollywood and Latin American film actresses between 1945 and 1953, taking as case studies the star discourses of Joan Crawford, Dolores del Río, María Félix, Rita Hayworth, Carmen Miranda and Ava Gardner in Spain. In effect, the symbols of Spanish nationalism fostered by the Franco regime—including an imperialist notion of Hispanism—came to circulate in writings about these women, affectively associating the bodies of foreign actresses with the propaganda of the Franco regime. Drawing on the concept of ‘sticky associations’ developed by Sara Ahmed, I argue that these Francoist symbols came to adhere to the representations of American stars in state- controlled discourse, subtly reflecting the regime’s growing alignment with the US over the period in question. In this way, they allowed for the idea of the West as advanced by US postwar cultural imperialism to gain traction in Spain, despite the oft-cited critique of American morality. My project builds on important work in Spanish Cultural Studies, using affect theory to unite film, celebrity, transnational, and gender studies with history and international relations. vi Table of Contents Introduction .................................................................................................................. 1 Spain under Franco ............................................................................................ 2 Hispanidad .......................................................................................................... 6 Love of Others, Love of Nation: A genealogy of Affect Theory .................. 19 The Affective Potential of Transnational Female Stars ................................. 25 Part Summaries ................................................................................................. 35 PART 1 ........................................................................................................................ 38 QUEERING DOMESTICITY AND MOTHERHOOD IN DOLORES DEL RÍO AND JOAN CRAWFORD’S STAR TEXTS ............................................................................... 38 Chapter 1: Dolores del Río, or “Lolita” Returns ..................................................... 54 Chapter 2: Joan Crawford, “Madre modelo” and “Censora ejemplar” .................. 75 All-American Girl vs. True Catholic Woman ................................................ 77 Queering Motherhood in Mildred Pierce ........................................................ 86 Vamos a ver a Joan Crawford en Madrid: ...................................................... 94 Part Conclusions ........................................................................................................ 98 PART 2 ...................................................................................................................... 100 ALMOST BRETHREN: RACE AND ETHNICITY IN THE STAR IMAGES OF MARÍA FÉLIX AND RITA HAYWORTH .................................................................................. 100 Chapter 3: Race and Nationalism in the Transnational Celebrity of María Félix110 Chapter 4: The Affective Shimmers of Heritage in the Star Discourse of Rita Hayworth in Spain .......................................................................................... 133 The Spanish Heritage of Margarita Carmen Cansino Hayworth ................ 138 The Affective Power of Gilda in Spain......................................................... 141 Whiteness in Hayworth, Whiteness in Hispanidad ...................................... 152 vii Part Conclusions ...................................................................................................... 163 PART 3 ....................................................................................................................... 165 COSTUME AND CONSUMPTION IN THE STAR DISCOURSES OF CARMEN MIRANDA AND AVA GARDNER IN SPAIN ................................................................................. 165 Chapter 5: Carmen Miranda, nombre y apellido españolísimo ............................ 174 Chapter 6: Ava Gardner: “Una americana a la española” ..................................... 197 Part Conclusions ...................................................................................................... 221 Conclusion: The Affective Practices of Historical Memory ................................. 223 Bibliography............................................................................................................. 234 viii Introduction This dissertation—titled Writing Foreign Stardom under Autarchy: Affect, Nationalism and the Americas in Early-Franquista Spanish Film Culture—emphasizes the written text as the locus of transnational celebrity image formation and maintenance under the Franco regime. However, it will also analyze visual texts such as film, and photography, as well as non-written texts, such as rumors, gossip and oral history, to illustrate how the discourse of Spanish nationalism propagated by the Franco regime drove Spain’s cultural relationship with both Latin America and the United States during Spain’s autarkic period of the 1940s and early 1950s. By specifically targeting an era of international isolation for Spain, this project explores how nationalist discourse influences understandings of foreign popular culture. One aspect of this research focuses on how the Franco government used and/or controlled nationalistic discourse in censored versions of American films and in popular media representations of both US and Latin American actresses of the 1940s; however, it also traces how symbols of the particular brand of Spanish nationalism promoted by the regime—termed Hispanidad—tracked across transnational star discourses, invoking different meanings and manipulating star images in different ways with each usage. This study takes a cultural studies approach to questions of film and transnational stardom in Franco Spain, analyzing the texts that comprised the star discourses of foreign actresses in Spain and questioning the representations of womanhood and national identity that appear therein. Specifically, it analyzes how Joan Crawford, Dolores del Río, María Félix, Rita Hayworth, Carmen Miranda and Ava Gardner were represented in the Spanish press between 1945 and 1953 and how their celebrity images were alternately manipulated,