LAUSR

If between 1940 and 1980 upward social mobility in Mexico City is owed to expanding opportunities for education and employment, the mass media also played a role. This essay focuses on the experiences with cinema of two men, Jose Zuniga Heredia (1914-1985), a tailor who migrated from Oaxaca to Mexico City in 1939, and his son Pepe (b. 1937) who became a student, later a professor and director (1991-1993) of the Escuela de Pintura, Escultura, y Grabado La Esmeralda. I examine the role of Hollywood and Mexican film in the formation of their sensibilities, desires, aspirations, and notions of rights and dignity, and argue that cinema had an important role in the formation of a spirit of rebellion and a new masculine sensibility among male youth who entered higher education at the end of the 1950s.