Atmosphere: Mexican Extras and the Production of Race in Silent Hollywood

abstract: This essay focuses on Mexican extras in silent era Hollywood. Rather than attempting to write an authoritative history of their work, I use accounts of Mexican extra work to explore how silent era Hollywood's production practices made race. Mexican extras, I explain, were perceived as another amenity offered by the industry's new home in Southern California, important for producing certain types of narratives but materially and discursively relegated to the margins of the industry. Their presence, on-screen and in the trade press, however, was central to the production of racial difference in on-screen narratives and in social life.