Actantial semiotic analysis of the Mexican film Tizoc: Amor indio (1956)

Abstract

Tizoc: Amor Indio, (1956) is a Mexican film by Ismael Rodríguez starring Pedro Infante and María Félix. The performance in Tizoc earned Infante the posthumous award for best actor at the Berlin Film Festival in 1957, and in 1958 Tizoc won the “Golden Globe” for best foreign film. In this analysis we will use Greimas's actantial semiotics as a methodology to show that the representation of indigenous people offered in the film shows contradictory aspects and specific nuances, some of them clearly racist, but others idealizing. The film was criticized for presenting an actant-hero as a naive, even infantilized character, although his cunning is also demonstrated in the sequence of the kidnapping of María Eugenia where it is evident that he is capable of deceiving adult men efficiently and planned