Doing the Samba on Sunset Boulevard

This chapter focuses on Latin American singer and actress Carmen Miranda, who helped create an all-purpose, homogeneous image of Latin Americans, their culture, and especially their music. Hollywood used Miranda as a do-all prop in dramatic settings as diverse as New York, Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, Havana, and Mexico. The resulting conflation of costumes, instruments, musical genres, and languages is highly entertaining on one level but pernicious and (at the time) politically counterproductive on another. The partial coverage by US news media of events in South America left a gap that is “often filled by fictional representations in motion pictures and television shows. Film, in particular, has played a major role in shaping modern America's consciousness of Latin America.”