Sara García: icono cinematográfico nacional, abuela y lesbiana

ABSTRACT Mexican Golden Age Cinema materialized the narratives of identity, unity and morality that became the obligated point of reference to understand social stability and mexicaness during the post-revolutionary period. Hence, film stars evolved into cultural icons that embodied the representation of patriarchal order as a synonym for nationalism. However, dissident depictions that challenged carefully tailored heteronormative roles were as much a part of the post-revolutionary reality as was the attempt to manufacture a utopic heterosexual family on screen, that functioned as a metaphor for national reunification under the law of the father/president of the Mexican Republic. Nonetheless, even when an distinguished member of the Mexican star system, Sara García´s queer performativity of her quintessential sainted mother and even more revered grandmother characters highlights fissures in the effort to naturalize sexual passivity and heterosexual motherhood as the core of Mexican women identity. Furthermore, García took advantage of her romanticized butch characters in order to revert lesbian invisibility in movies where she portrait roles that exemplified sapphic households. In most of García's films masculine presence became redundant, hence challenging male privilege. Not very far from her own reality, García's queer women of a certain age, involved in female marriages, contested the post-revolutionary discourse of stability and mexicaness even in the heteronormative realm of Golden Age Filmmaking. Regardless of her queerness, unlike any other transgressive figure, Sara García became a national icon in her time and her image continues to hold relevance in current Mexican popular culture. More than five decades after her death young generations are still familiar with her legacy and her image has evolved into the representation of the nostalgia for tradition and alleged "more simple" times.