Colin Gunckel

Colin Gunckel is a historian of Latinx media and art, Latin American cinema, and popular culture between the US and Mexico. His first book, Mexico on Main Street: Transnational Film Culture in Los Angeles before World War II (Rutgers University Press, 2015) examines the relationship of Mexican audiences to the birth of Hollywood, the rise of Mexican cinema, and the transformation of Los Angeles into an urban metropolis. The book mobilizes approaches from exhibition and reception studies, situating cinema within a vibrant cultural milieu that included the Spanish-language press, exhibition practice, theater publicity, variety theater, music, literature, star personas, and competing conceptions of urban space. Opening his analysis to this diverse range of texts, he proposes a methodology that can be used to shed new light upon the history of Latinx (self) representation and participation in the culture industries of the early 20th century.

His research and scholarship on Chicanx art and culture include work on cultural center Self Help Graphics and Art, the artist collective Asco, photographer Oscar Castillo, social movement print culture and photography, and early punk from East L.A. In every case, Gunckel engages archival materials, primary sources, and oral histories to rethink prevalent assumptions about Chicanx cultural production, challenging entrenched historical accounts of art, music, and media in the United States.

Gunckel’s current book project is a multi-sited study of Mexican popular cinema in the 1950s and 1960s, a body of work often blamed for the national industry’s “decline.” Pushing against the critical and scholarly neglect of these films, the book adopts an industry studies lens to examine their cultural, social, and economic significance to audiences, critics, and industry workers throughout Latin America and the Spanish-speaking United States. From industrial structure and censorship controversies to the pivotal place of Mexican cinema in U.S. Latinx cultural networks, Gunckel proposes that we have much to learn from training our focus on the routine production and transnational circulation of low-budget cinema.

Gunckel’s essays have appeared in the journals American Quarterly, Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies, Film History, Journal of Popular Music Studies, Social Justice, Studies in Spanish and Latin American Cinemas, and Velvet Light Trap. He has also edited multiple anthologies and exhibition catalogs, including the award-winning LA RAZA (UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center, 2020). He has contributed to curatorial projects and exhibition catalogs at the Autry Museum of the American West, the Claremont Museum of Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, ONE Archives, the UCLA Film and Television Archive, and the Vincent Price Art Museum. He currently serves as Associate Editor of the A Ver: Revisioning Art History monograph series on individual Latinx artists, published by the UCLA CSRC. 

Affiliations:

Core Faculty: the Program in Latina/o Studies (LS)

Professor Gunckel holds a joint appointment in the Departments of American Culture (AC) and Film, Television and Media (FTVM)