Black Angels

José Carlos is a well-known singer. He falls in love with Ana Luisa, the assistant head of a girls' school, and they marry. Ana Luisa is blonde, beautiful, and openly contemptuous of dark-skinned people. When the couple have a black daughter, she blames her husband for it and treats her own child with the same contempt. Mercé, the nanny in the house, watches all of it without saying anything. Joselito Rodríguez's Mexican film took its inspiration from the poem Angelitos Negros by the Venezuelan poet Andrés Eloy Blanco, with Pedro Infante in the lead. Taking racism on directly in 1948, and from inside a popular melodrama, gives it a place of its own in Mexican cinema.