Vedettes Were the It Girls of Latin American Entertainment. Then the Industry Dumped Them

Rossy Mendoza did it all. Onstage at the cabaret clubs where she performed in Mexico City, starting in the 1960s, she danced several rhythms and styles, she acted, and she sang. Like all the showgirls before and after her, Mendoza was multiply talented, using her energy and artistic vision to deliver awe-inspiring performances for her audience. At the height of Mendoza’s career, she performed in cabaret, theater, film, and television, working tirelessly to entertain and showcase her irresistible charm, often embezzled with feathers and crystals that left most of her body on show.

When Mendoza’s talent reached the big screen, she became famous for her sexy performances, which set her apart from other vedettes. Responding to criticism about how she used her body, Mendoza said: “The body, what’s wrong with it? My favorite painters, Rubens and Michelangelo, have built a large part of their work on the female nude. Why is it okay for a man to say that a naked woman is art, but when I decide for myself it is wrong?”

Mendoza is one of many vedettes — a word borrowed from French that can be translated to “showgirls” but that took on specific cultural meaning as vedette culture emerged across the continent — that enchanted Latin American audiences throughout the 20th century, across artistic genres and performance categories.

Performing in cinema, theater, cabaret, television, and music, vedettes excelled in many modalities, including (but not limited to) revue, music hall, cabaret, vaudeville, burlesque, mambo, belly dancing, and even circus. Adorned with over-the-top feathers and crystals that didn’t leave much to the imagination, vedettes were the entertainment of the time, essentially defined by how their talents transcended the stage and admired by audiences across the continent for their versatility. Helped by the birth of cinema in the 1940s and 1950s, vedettes earned even more attention and fame through the big screen as their performances started reaching places where there were no clubs or cabaret venues. Up to the mid-1980s, vedettes were the girls everyone aspired to be, figures that embodied local cultures and invented their own spaces in entertainment. 

But in 2024, vedettes are simply a relic of the past in Latin America. They no longer hold the attention and admiration of the public, and the cabaret performance spaces that were responsible for catapulting many of these stars to fame are few and far between. Despite the longevity of vedette culture in Latin America in the 20th-century, nowadays it would be hard to find acts comparable to Mendoza today. What happened?

The answer isn’t a simple one. Experts who study and preserve the legacy vedettes left behind can only offer theories for their decline. In a space where young girls found their way out of poverty because of their raw talent — like Chinese-Mexican vedette Lyn May, who didn’t originally aspire to fame and used dance to pull her out of Acapulco as she fought to support two kids — there is now only a few projects across the continent that draw on this kind of artistry. According to Arturo Rico, an archivist at Ficheraz, a digital archive dedicated to preserving the legacy of vintage showgirls from Latin America, Caribbean, diaspora, and beyond, it’s difficult to really know why the vedettes’ cultural moment has passed, but some historians blame the shift on the proliferation of pornography in the early 1980s. 

“While [pornography and vedettes] are not directly comparable, there is a notable shift in public taste during this period,” Rico tells Refinery Somos. “Vedettes, who once graced the covers of men's magazines with their suggestive poses and revealing attire, gradually lost their place to publications featuring explicit sexual content. The film industry underwent a similar transformation: where audiences once flocked to cinemas to see their favorite vedettes in erotic comedies, by the 1980s, the rise of home-video formats like VHS allowed viewers to consume hardcore content in the privacy of their homes, diminishing the allure of traditional performances.”

This theory is fascinating precisely because so many vedettes say they reclaimed their bodies and lives through the success of their performances. As Mendoza said, vedettes make their bodies into art, but their agency over what they do with their bodies, how much they showed the public, and how they performed seemed to be a problem.

Mass distributed pornography viewed in private did not bring up questions about agency and control over a woman’s own body. Lyn May, who started as a go-go dancer in an Acapulco nightclub before moving to Mexico City in the late 1960s, specifically started performing to improve her circumstances as a teen mom and survivor of child sexual abuse. "We were all escaping something," she said in an interview archived by Ficheraz. "And the desire to avoid returning to those difficult beginnings is what drove us forward. It was never about becoming the richest or the most famous; it was about not going back to the scarcity we once knew." If female agency was as marketable as their dispossession, perhaps vedettes like May and Medoza would have continued to grace the screens with their talent.

For Argentine trailblazer trans vedette Vanessa Show, who performed in Paris and was known as a “sex terrorist” to Argentine police, it was the HIV/AIDS crisis that shifted the attention of the public. According to Show, who was a connoisseur of theatrical and cabaret history, the pandemic radically shifted the mood in Paris’ cabaret scene. “Though this does not directly equate vedettes with sex work, Show used to argue that the overall mood and energy of nightlife changed dramatically as the pandemic spread across the globe,” Rico says. 

But there might be simpler explanations for the decline in this art form depending on location, Rico notes. “In Mexico, for instance, the devastating earthquake of 1985 leveled much of the capital, including iconic hotels and nightclubs that were never rebuilt but rather replaced with other kinds of businesses,” he says. For Rico, it was an amalgam of elements that distanced the vedettes from their adoring audience, making their image misaligned with what resonates with the public in Latin America currently. “These factors — economic shifts, the evolution of media consumption, and the impact of global health crises — combined to alter the course of a once-celebrated cultural phenomenon, leaving behind a legacy of glamor, allure, and resilience.”

Still, the vedettes of Latin America have left a legacy behind for those of us who look for it. Rico explains that there has been a change in demographics since vedettes shifted from the mainstream entertainment stage. “Fortunately, some of these legendary performers continue to captivate audiences today, albeit with a shift in focus toward new demographics, particularly the LGBTQ+ community and female audiences,” he says. 

“Pioneers such as Mexico’s Lyn May, Argentina’s Moria Casán, and Puerto Rico’s Iris Chacón are still gracing the stage nearly six decades after their debuts. Across Latin America, young artists and projects sporadically emerge with the aim of reviving this vibrant scene, often drawing from drag culture or reimagining it through a burlesque lens.”

In Brazil, for example, the vedette aesthetic has found a home in samba school performances during every Carnival, where passistas and drum queens dance samba to hype up the percussion and the crowd in Rio de Janeiro. The crystals and the feathers are familiar, as is the blend of autonomy and dancing skillfully, with little left to the imagination of the audience, building on a history of glamor and sensuality that is worth keeping alive.  

Despite showgirls being shamed and discarded for decades, the vedette aesthetic will never be truly gone, as admirers who keep their history alive through current cultural expressions will always exist.