Romancing “Yesenia” : How a Mexican Melodrama Shaped Global Popular Culture

Abstract

This book follows the production, transnational circulation, and reception of the highest grossing film in the history of Soviet exhibition, the 1971 Mexican romance Yesenia. The film adaptation of a telenovela based on a wildly popular graphic novel set during the Second Franco-Mexican War became a surprise hit in the USSR, selling more than ninety million tickets in the first year of its Soviet release alone. Drawing on years of archival research, renowned film scholar Masha Salazkina takes Yesenia’s unprecedented popularity as an entry point into a wide-ranging exploration of the cultures of Mexico and the Soviet Union in the 1970s and of the ways in which popular culture circulated globally. Paying particular attention to the shifting landscape of sexual politics, Romancing “Yesenia” argues for the enduring importance and ideological ambiguities of melodramatic forms in global popular media. “No other scholar in the field could pull off this international tour de force. Masha Salazkina tells us that we should have known that the contemporary ‘global-popular’ is not new, setting the bar high for another generation of multilingual world culture critics.” — Jane M. Gaines, author of Pink-Slipped: What Happened to Women in the Silent Film Industry? “What does film history look like when we bypass the Global North? This is the historiographic provocation at the heart of Romancing ‘Yesenia,’ a book that will serve as a model for transnational film histories to come. Offering an account of a transnational affective space, Salazkina challenges both the national allegorical readings of non-Western texts as well as the European literary and Hollywood film canon of melodrama studies.” — Nilo Couret, author of Mock Classicism: Latin American Film Comedy, 1930–1960