About

Colin Gunckel is an associate professor in the Department of American Culture at the University of Michigan, with a joint appointment in the Departments of American Culture and Film, Television, and Media. He is a historian specializing in Latinx media and art, Latin American cinema, and popular culture between the United States and Mexico. His research includes a focus on Mexican cinema, Chicanx art and culture, and transnational media practices. Gunckel's first book, Mexico on Main Street: Transnational Film Culture in Los Angeles before World War II, examines the relationship of Mexican audiences to Hollywood's emergence, the rise of Mexican cinema, and the transformation of Los Angeles into an urban metropolis, situating cinema within a vibrant cultural milieu that includes the Spanish-language press, exhibition practices, theater publicity, music, literature, and star personas. His scholarship engages archival materials, primary sources, and oral histories to challenge and rethink assumptions about Latinx cultural production and participation in the early 20th-century culture industries. Currently, he is working on a multi-sited study of Mexican popular cinema from the 1950s and 1960s, analyzing its cultural, social, and economic significance across Latin America and the Spanish-speaking United States through an industry studies lens. Gunckel has contributed to numerous academic journals, edited anthologies, and exhibition catalogs, and has been involved in curatorial projects at various museums and archives. He also serves as Associate Editor of the A Ver: Revisioning Art History monograph series on Latinx artists.

Research topics

• Humanities
• Art
• Chemistry

Selected publications

• In Focus Introduction: Latinx Media Activism

  Journal of cinema and media studies · 2025-06-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
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• In Translation: Gabriel Navarro, Latina/o Film Critic

  Journal of cinema and media studies · 2024

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Humanities
  • Art
  • Humanities

  ABSTRACT: Gabriel Navarro (1894–1950) was critic and entertainment editor for La Prensa (San Antonio) and La Opinión (Los Angeles) during the 1920s and 1930s. In an extensive body of film reviews, columns, and film-related fiction, Navarro considered questions of fandom, stardom, representation, and the racial hierarchies that structured the US film industry. He offered his readers behind-the-scenes accounts of Hollywood, advocated for Mexican immigrant audiences and talent, and argued for culturally sensitive representation. Navarro's work opens new ways of thinking about Latino/a/es in US film history and offers new perspectives on the historical relationships between mainstream media and marginalized audiences.

  PublisherDOI

• Photography

  Latino Studies · 2020-03-25

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  This bibliography reflects the multifaceted relationship between Latina/os and various photographic traditions. As individuals and groups placed in front of the camera lens, Latino/as have often found themselves stigmatized, marginalized, or criminalized. Photographs taken by reformers, the police, and documentarians since the late 19th century, for instance, have often generated harmful or homogenizing visions of the US Latina/o population that frame them as racially different or otherwise problematic. Since the early decades of the 20th century, however, Latino/a photographers have produced bodies of work that challenge these limited visions to craft new images of identity, community, and history. Some of these individuals have harnessed the capacity of photography to fulfill an evidentiary or realist function as either social documentation, a political organizing tool, or a challenge to exclusionary mainstream media coverage. Others have explored the aesthetic and formal potential of photography by engaging in conceptual art practices, crafting speculative reimaginings of history, using it as an extension of performance, integrating it into other media, or mobilizing it as a complex mechanism of community- or self-representation. This bibliography covers the major works of scholarship that have attended to these key photographic tendencies and the places where they overlap, considering works that discuss Latina/os both in front of and behind the lens. Also included here are key exhibition catalogues and photographic essays that provide a representative sampling of visual tendencies or traditions mobilized by practicing Latina/o photographers, with particular attention to regional and ethnic diversity.

  PublisherDOI

• The Permanencia Voluntaria archive and the historical study of Mexican cinema

  Studies in Spanish & Latin-American Cinemas · 2019-09-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  This article provides an overview of the archival materials held at the Permanencia Voluntaria collection in Tepoztlán, Mexico. Focusing on the documents of the production company Cinematográfica Calderón, in operation from the late 1930s to the 1990s, the article makes a case for using such material to construct critical industrial histories of Mexican cinema. Drawing on concepts from media industry studies, the article examines three intertwined aspects of the production company’s operations during the 1950s and 1960s: marketing, censorship negotiations and transnational distribution. Accordingly, it proposes that these factors be placed in conversation with cinematic texts as a way of reconsidering the place of the nation in Mexican film studies, expanding the objects of analysis in this field and re-evaluating a period of film history whose significance has largely remained overlooked.

  PublisherDOI

• Charles and Ray Eames’s Day of the Dead (1957):

  2019-11-15

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
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• Conclusion

  Rutgers University Press eBooks · 2019-12-31

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Mexico on Main Street

  Rutgers University Press eBooks · 2019-10-07 · 9 citations

  book1st authorCorresponding

  In the early decades of the twentieth-century, Main Street was the heart of Los Angeles’s Mexican immigrant community. It was also the hub for an extensive, largely forgotten film culture that thrived in L.A. during the early days of Hollywood. Drawing from rare archives, including the city’s Spanish-language newspapers, Colin Gunckel vividly demonstrates how this immigrant community pioneered a practice of transnational media convergence, consuming films from Hollywood and Mexico, while also producing fan publications, fiction, criticism, music, and live theatrical events. Mexico on Main Street locates this film culture at the center of a series of key debates concerning national identity, ethnicity, class, and the role of Mexicans within Hollywood before World War II. As Gunckel shows, the immigrant community’s cultural elite tried to rally the working-class population toward the cause of Mexican nationalism, while Hollywood sought to position them as part of a lucrative transnational Latin American market. Yet ironically, both Hollywood studios and Mexican American cultural elites used the media to present negative depictions of working-class Mexicans, portraying their behaviors as a threat to middle-class respectability. Rather than simply depicting working-class immigrants as pawns of these power players, however, Gunckel reveals their active participation in the era’s film culture. Gunckel’s innovative approach combines media studies, urban history, and ethnic studies to reconstruct a distinctive, richly layered immigrant film culture. Mexico on Main Street demonstrates how a site-specific study of cultural and ethnic issues challenges our existing conceptions of U.S. film history, Mexican cinema, and the history of Los Angeles.

  PublisherDOI

• Introduction

  Rutgers University Press eBooks · 2019-12-31

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Index

  Rutgers University Press eBooks · 2019-12-31

  paratext1st authorCorresponding
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• Charles and Ray Eames’s<i>Day of the Dead</i>(1957):

  2019-01-01 · 2 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Lisa Jarvinen

  La Salle University

  2 shared

• Harry M. Benshoff

  2 shared

• Jan‐Christopher Horak

  2 shared

• Tania Modleski

  2 shared

• Élise Schaefer

  Université de Strasbourg

  2 shared

• Chuck Kleinhans

  2 shared

• Alstair Tremps

  1 shared

• Jeffrey Sconce

  1 shared

Labs

• U-M LSA American CulturePI