Lupe Velez

• Born: July 18, 1908
• Birthplace: San Luis Potosí, Mexico
• Died: December 14, 1944
• Place of death: Beverly Hills, California

Mexican-born actor

Velez is best known for her performances as Carmelita Lindsay in The Girl from Mexico (1939) and its sequels, also known as the Mexican Spitfire series. She had a multifaceted career as a singer, dancer, and actor from the silent era into the 1940’s.

Areas of achievement: Acting; dance; music

Early Life

María Guadalupe Velez de Villalobos was born in San Luis Potosí, Mexico, to Josefina Velez, an opera singer and Jacobo Villalobos Reyes, an officer in the military. Velez’s father believed that his daughter’s spirited behavior would harm her chances in life, and at the age of thirteen, she was sent to study at a convent in San Antonio, Texas. Despite all his efforts, Velez’s fiery attitude and willful behavior could not be controlled, causing embarrassment for one of Mexico’s prominent families.

Velez’s father refused to allow her to use her family surname when she told him that she wanted to make a career in the theater, so she adopted her mother’s maiden name as her stage name. She made her debut as a dancer at the age of sixteen at the Teatro Principal in Mexico City in 1925. She embraced the new flapper style with her bobbed hair, love of jazz, consumerism, and overt displays of sexuality. Velez’s actions made her extremely popular but also shocked her family, especially her father. At the age of seventeen, Velez left Mexico for the United States. However, she was denied entry at first because of her age. She returned to Mexico and pleaded with the authorities in Mexico and the United States to let her enter the country; after many rounds of discussions, she was finally allowed into the United States in 1926.

Life’s Work

Velez arrived in Los Angeles with no money but quickly found employment at the Hollywood Music Box Revue, where she was discovered by Hollywood producer Hal Roach, who was impressed with her performance and her beauty. Roach cast her in small roles in his comedy shorts. Her big break came in 1927 when she was cast opposite Douglas Fairbanks in The Gaucho. Her performance in the film and the film itself were well-received by critics and audiences alike.

Velez’s beauty and success led to her being cast as a Greek peasant girl in Stand and Deliver (1928) and as sultry chanteuse in D. W. Griffith’s film Lady of the Pavements (1929). However, it was her performance alongside Gary Cooper as Lola, an upper-class señorita, in The Wolf Song (1929) that made her a star. Velez’s performance embodied the volatile, hot-blooded, sexually promiscuous woman of color, a stock character that was popular with American audiences in the late 1920’s. Hollywood cultivated this image for Velez on screen and off to ensure her popularity but also to marginalize her importance in the industry. She made her first English-language sound film, Tiger Rose, in 1929. However, fears that her voice sounded too ethnic led to Velez being cast in leading parts in the Spanish-language versions of Hollywood films. When she did appear in mainstream films, she was cast as the fiery “other woman” who acted as a foil to the white heroine.

Velez began the first of her many tumultuous public Hollywood romances with costar Gary Cooper during the making of The Wolf Song. Her relationship with Cooper lasted until he married Veronica Cooper, a wealthy heiress who worked as an actor in Hollywood under the name Sandra Shaw. At the height of her popularity and fame, Velez also was linked to Ronald Coleman, John Gilbert, and Ricardo Cortez before marrying Johnny Weismuller, an Olympic athlete and star of the Tarzan films, in 1933. Their marriage was not an easy one. The couple separated three times, and each time, Velez began divorce proceedings on the grounds of physical and mental cruelty. She rescinded the claims each time and remained married to Weismuller.

The conflict in their marriage not only harmed Velez’s private life but also her professional life. In 1934, RKO Studios refused to renew her contract on the grounds that her public fighting with Weismuller was harmful to the company and to her overall image. She tried to sue the company but was not successful. Velez adopted the four-year-old child of her eldest sister in 1935 in an attempt to rehabilitate her image. Still, Velez found it difficult to find work at any of the major or minor studios, so she left the United States to make films in England and France. In 1936, she returned to America to appear in RKO’s Bert Wheeler and Robert Woolsey comedy High Flyers (1937). She then returned to Mexico in 1938 to make her debut in Mexican film, starring in La zandunga.

Velez divorced Weismuller in 1939, and RKO offered her a contract to appear in a series of B-films known as the Mexican Spitfire series. From 1939 to 1943, she made eight films featuring the character Carmelita Lindsay. In 1944, she returned to Mexico to star in Nana, and after completion of the filming, she announced that she was going to star in a play in New York. During this period she began dating an unknown twenty-seven-year-old French actor, Harold Raymond. Velez announced that she and Raymond were engaged in November, 1944, but two weeks later, gossip columnist Louella Parsons reported that the engagement and the relationship were over.

On December 13, two days after hosting a large party in her home for her family and friends, Velez committed suicide by taking an overdose of a prescription drug. She was several months pregnant with Raymond’s child, and according to the notes she left for Raymond and her housekeeper, she could not face the idea of trying to raise a child born out of wedlock.

Significance

Velez’s struggles with her sexuality, ethnicity, and her place within the Hollywood star system illustrate the difficulties faced by Latinas in America as well as women in general at a time when gender norms typically relegated women to subservience and domesticity. Still, her fiery performances and popularity as the embodiment of emergent female sexuality influenced future models of American femininity for Latinas, women in general, and the Hollywood system. Velez’s chaotic and tragic life has provided inspiration to experimental artists such as Andy Warhol and Kenneth Anger, who both used Velez’s struggles as a means to investigate the idea of performance and its effect on the formation of sexual identity.

Bibliography

Beltran, Mary C. Latina/o Stars in U.S. Eyes: The Making and Meanings of Film and TV Stardom. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009. Offers a historical and cultural approach to the question of how Latinos have been depicted in mainstream media culture.

Freguso, Rosa Linda. “Lupe Velez: Queen of the B’s” in From Bananas to Buttocks: The Latina Body in Popular Culture and Film, edited by Myra Mendible. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2007. A collection of essays that examines the cultural, political, social, gendered, and economic uses of the Latina body in American culture and media.

Rodgriguez, Clara E. Heroes, Lovers, and Others: The Story of Latinos in Hollywood. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. This book briefly covers the history of representations of Latinos from the silent era to the 1990’s in Hollywood. Analyzes key performers as well as lesser-known Latinos.