Plants on Oil: The Process Story in Petróleo ¡la sangre del mundo! (1936) and the Consumption Model in Los millones de Chaflán (1938) 3

IECS is pleased to co-sponsor a lecture by Emily Hind, Professor of Spanish at the University of Florida, exploring the relationship between plants, oil, film, and consumption in two Mexican works from the 1930s.

How did we come to saturate our plants with myriad forms of oil? Hind approaches this question through two films made in Mexico during the 1930s. The first, Petróleo ¡la sangre del mundo! (1936), is a documentary produced for Mexican audiences by foreign oil companies to promote oil culture and tell a particular story about oil extraction and its relationship to plant life. Hind places this documentary alongside the feature film Los millones de Chaflán (1938), which imagines the incorporation of oil into everyday life through comedy and popular culture.

Reading the two films together, the lecture examines what their stories of extraction and consumption leave out, and how the assumptions they establish about the relationship between plants and oil continue to shape our world today.

About the Speaker: Emily Hind is Professor of Spanish at the University of Florida. She is the author of Dude Lit (2019), translator of Macholiteratura (2025), and author of several books of interviews with writers and editors. She is currently completing Plants on Oil in Mexican Texts, 1936-2021 for Vanderbilt University Press.

This event is sponsored by ISPLAS, the Centre for Comparative Literature, Cinema Studies, and the Institute for Environment, Conservation and Sustainability (IECS).