La imagen del inmigrante vasco en el cine: ¿Reflejo, construcción o refuerzo de los estereotipos sociales?

Zusammenfassung

After analyzing the image of Basque immigrant in North American cinema, we will try to establish the way in which the historical context of immigration eased or made it difficult the emergence of a socially widely accepted image within the host society. We also include in the analysis an attempt to establish a critical view on the role of American cinema as a source for the creation of ideals and stereotypes based on the cultural roots of the American society as such. In the case of Basque immigrants, as a group whose settlement patterns were very concentrated, we can notice that the cinema was, at the same time, a way for disseminating local stereotypes and to reelaborate them, unifying the local images of Basques into an unique prototype that, after being presented through cinema, can acquire their own life and even get to modulate, in a feed-back process, the previous local stereotypes.