Victims of Sin: Dancing in the Dark

Fernández is considered one of the most influential players in Mexican film history, a prolific director who made many golden-age classics, notably Wild Flower (1943) and María Candelaria (1944), as well as an actor in Mexico and Hollywood. Victims of Sin was his third prostitute melodrama and a major production, filmed at Estudios Churubusco and at various locations around Mexico City. For the project, he reunited with two key collaborators—cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa and screenwriter Mauricio Magdaleno—and also brought together a cast of some of the biggest names in Latin American music, including Cuban actor, pianist, and singer Rita Montaner and bandleader Dámaso Pérez Prado, and Mexican tenor-crooner Pedro Vargas. Most prominent of all, however, was Ninón Sevilla.

Sevilla was born in Havana in 1921 and relocated to Mexico City in the forties to pursue a dancing career, performing first in the illustrious Teatro Lírico before signing a contract with film producer Pedro Calderón. She was soon starring in cabareteras such as the Gout-directed Aventurera (1950), fast becoming one of the leading rumberas of the industry, and enjoying almost complete control over her cinematic collaborations, including, it is a fair assumption, working with Fernández on Victims of Sin.

The film introduced a scintillating, seductive, and shocking interpretation of the cabaretera. The story follows Sevilla’s Violeta, an enthusiastic and assertive rumbera at Mexico City’s Club Changoo, a position negotiated by her godmother, Rita (Montaner). Violeta loves her job, but she soon becomes a victim of violence, sexism, and greed at the hands of the pimp pachuco Rodolfo (Rodolfo Acosta). She adopts the baby boy of a fellow worker, Rosa (Margarita Ceballos), who was forced to abandon the child by Rodolfo, the father. Violeta is persecuted by Rodolfo and eventually fired from her job at Club Changoo when she tries to bring the baby to work. She takes on sex work to make ends meet before relocating to another club, La Máquina Loca. In this cabaret, situated near a railroad station and catering to a more working-class clientele, she once again becomes a popular rumbera and is able to raise her son under the protection and guidance of Don Santiago (Tito Junco). But matters turn violent when Rodolfo resurfaces.

Adopting the aesthetics of film noir, with smoky spaces, chiaroscuro, and low-angle lighting, the film interweaves scenes of Mexico’s crime world with dance numbers in the two main locales: the elaborately and exotically decorated Club Changoo and the shadowy La Máquina Loca. Both spaces are captured evocatively by Figueroa, and one of the important subjects he frames is Violeta while she dances. Music is used strategically in the narrative, with the performances serving as essential pauses in the action to help establish Violeta’s power and agency. Fernández and Figueroa contrast Club Changoo’s tropical facade and middle-class patrons with La Máquina Loca, which uses the railroad as its symbol and is the leisure destination for railway workers. Since the turn of the twentieth century, the railroad had been a marker of industrialization and modernization, a sign of progress. Victims of Sin, however, captures the consequences of that modernization: an urban deterioration polluted with smoke and a dark, murky atmosphere. Violeta’s movement from one space to another not only highlights the popularity of the cabarets in Mexico City but also their social and economic divisions.

At Club Changoo, both Rita and Violeta are introduced in a dance number referencing the club’s name, “Changó,” based on the Santeria orisha patron of thunder, war, music, drumming, and dancing. This performance is a collaboration of on-screen talents: Sevilla dances while Montaner sings an interpretation of the batá chant oba eré in Lucumi (the ritual language of Santeria), accompanied by Pérez Prado and His Orchestra. Known for popularizing the mambo and performing in Mexican and Hollywood films, Pérez Prado became a common musical presence in cabareteras. Here, the performance of “Changó” presents a variety of elements designed to enhance the exotic nature of the cabaret, including batá drumming, which reinforces the Afro-Cuban atmosphere, and dancers with bows in their hair reminiscent of Changó’s crown. Figueroa captures the intimate enclosure of the cabaret and the complex, ritualistic atmosphere by centering on Violeta, moving between medium and long shots while she is dancing. His gaze, oscillating between these shots, matches the rhythm of the music, creating an intimate relationship among music, movement, and moving image.

Violeta’s identity changes when she becomes a mother and has to juggle that role with being a rumbera. The tension between these two aspects of her life plays out in the scenes surrounding her performance of the mambo “La cocaleca,” accompanied by Pérez Prado and His Orchestra, at Club Changoo. Just before the dance, Violeta returns to the club with the baby and struggles to care for the child while the owner is demanding her presence onstage. Reluctantly, she entrusts the baby to a friend and seamlessly transitions to the spotlight, exuding joy and energy as she sings and dances this escapist mambo, set against the backdrop of a beach. Her adeptness at shifting from nurturer to entertainer highlights the challenges women encounter as they negotiate professional and family life, and reflects new perceptions of women and motherhood in Mexican society.

Violeta’s life changes once again when she moves to La Máquina Loca. It is a change not only of scenery but also of soundscape. The cabaret does not feature a huge orchestra with headlining performers, as does Club Changoo, but a small band that plays danzones and, more centrally, a drum circle devoted to the rumba, a form of music and dance heavily grounded in the working class. Here, Violeta dances a guaguancó, a subgenre of the rumba that focuses on what ethnomusicologist Robin D. Moore has labeled the “ritualized enactment of sexual conquest.” In this dance, a man actively attempts to grab at or kick toward a woman’s pelvic region while the woman thwarts his actions by moving her body away from him. In Victims of Sin, Sevilla performs the dance with the uncredited bongocero Chimi Monterrey. The couple dance the guaguancó with performative flair, but, intriguingly, the roles are flipped, with Violeta articulating the typically male movements. Film scholar Dolores Tierney has also noted that these scenes are unique because a white woman is dancing with a Black man, an uncommon occurrence within Mexican cinema of the time that challenges the “racial ideology of Mexican cultural nationalism,” which has ignored Black identities. This sequence is one of the most remarkable in the film, showcasing the improvisatory collaboration between two dancers and a reinterpretation of a dance that subverts both gender and racial conventions.

But perhaps the most extraordinary thing in this cabaretera is the relatively optimistic ending. Violeta is incarcerated for killing Rodolfo but is soon released for good behavior. By focusing on a woman who survives the patriarchy, violence, and poverty, Victims of Sin doesn’t just reflect the changing social dynamics of the time but also demonstrates new possibilities for women. So much of the power and fascination of the film lies in Sevilla, who becomes a compelling model of female agency. She would go on to star in other important examples of the cabaretera genre, such as Sensualidad (1951) and Aventura en Río (1953), and to receive international acclaim for these roles. Fernández directed more films that would become part of the Mexican film canon, including Las islas Marías (1951) and El rapto (1954). But it is the pair’s collaboration on Victims of Sin that has really stood the test of time. With its fusion of film noir and spectacular music and dance sequences, and its unusual representation of the rumbera archetype as a mother, it is an exceptional example of the cabaretera, proclaiming what Mexican cinema could do and leaving an indelible mark on Mexican popular culture.