Rumberas film

The rumberas film (in Spanish cine de rumberas) was a film genre that flourished in Mexico, in the so-called Golden Age of Mexican cinema in the 1940s and 1950s. These movies starred rumberas, dancers who performed to popular Afro-Caribbean rhythms. With roots in various film styles, the genre is one of the most fascinating hybrids of international cinema. Today, thanks to their unique characteristics, they are considered cult films. The rumberas and the luchador films were two of Mexico's contributions to international cinema. The rumberas film represented a social view of the world, focused on "women of the night" in the 1940s and 1950s, which confronted the moral and social conventions of their time, exhibiting a more realistic look at Mexican society. These were melodramas about the lives of these women, redeemed through exotic dance.

The rumberas were the dancers and actresses that swayed to Afro-Caribbean rhythms in Mexican Cinema's Golden Age of the 1940s and 1950s. The term rumbera comes from the so-called Cuban rumba that was popular in Mexico and Latin America from the late 19th century to the early 1950s. Eventually new tropical rhythms such as the mambo and the cha-cha-chá displaced the Cuban rumba as the most popular Latin music genre; the rumberas adopted these new rhythms and used them in their films.

The rumberas films have their roots in various film genres: The film noir, very popular in Hollywood and other film industries in the 1930s and 1940s, can be considered their cornerstone, given the urban environment of the genre. Film noir was characterized by having among its protagonists the femme fatales, the cabaret women who aroused the passions of men and were often the source of conflict in the plot. Clear examples were Marlene Dietrich's films with Josef von Sternberg. In Blonde Venus (1932), the heroine suffers, but with great dignity, always remaining radiant. Later, Gloria Grahame and Rita Hayworth created film noir images of women who enjoy singing cabaret and simultaneously make men suffer. Their other base was the Hollywood musical of the 1930s, epitomized by Busby Berkeley and his famous colorful and extravagant musical numbers endowed with a deep aesthetic expression, classics of the B-film series of RKO Pictures and Columbia Pictures. Although not in such stylized form (due to limited budgets), rumberas films tried to imitate in their musical numbers the guidelines of the genre. Finally, the film genre was enriched by the Urban social cinema or melodramatic films, whose principal artisan in Mexico was the director Alejandro Galindo. In the Hollywood melodramas Marlene Dietrich could suffer without harming her cinematographic myth, while Gloria Grahame or Lauren Bacall openly enjoyed their femme fatale status. In the rumberas, however, the heroines usually suffered through most of the film, the plot allowing them only a few moments of pleasure in the movie. Invariably the "sinner woman" had to find her punishment. The rumbera stars became objects of worship, but also of criticism and contempt of the double standards of the Mexican audience in the style of the melodramas of Galindo or the "night woman" shown by Emilio Fernández in the film Salón Mexico (1949). All this mix of elements and genres can be considered the basis of rumberas film.

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