| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Caribbean and Latin America

Jeffrey M. Pilcher. Cantinflas and the Chaos of Mexican Modernity. (Latin American Silhouettes.) Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources. 2001. Pp. xxvi, 247. Cloth $55.00, paper $19.95.

As scholars escape from studying what we see as "high culture," the lore of what we assumed to be the opposite, popular culture, is prized as the "real" identity of people and nations. Thus we have turned our attention to enigmatic characters, such as Mario Moreno, also known as Cantinflas (1911–1993), twentieth-century Mexico's most popular comedian. Ilan Stavans's The Riddle of Cantinflas: Essays on Hispanic Popular Culture (1998) was one of the first academic treatments of Cantinflas in English. Stavans saw the comedian as the epitome of genuine popular culture whom Mexico's hegemonic bourgeois culture rejected. Jeffrey M. Pilcher's book is another installment in the intellectualization of Cantinflas, the popular character who rose from the poor barrios of booming 1910s Mexico City to gain the appreciation of Hollywood and the entire Spanish-speaking world. He became both a cultural stereotype and the embodiment of a uniquely Mexican rendition of the humorous capabilities of Spanish verbosity. 1

In fact, cantinflear is a verb in Mexican Spanish: the act of using as many words as possible, with the gaudy intention of sounding highbrow, in order to say precisely nothing. This is indeed a strenuous art, and as such a tempting subject for historians of popular culture. But it is not an easy subject to deal with. . . .

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