Struggles for Recognition traces the emergence of melodrama in Latin American silent film and silent film culture. Juan Sebastian Ospina Leon draws on extensive archival research to reveal how melodrama visualized and shaped the social arena of urban modernity in early twentieth-century Latin America. Analyzing sociocultural contexts through film, this book demonstrates the ways in which melodrama was mobilized for both liberal and illiberal ends, revealing or concealing social inequities from Buenos Aires to Bogota to Los Angeles. Ospina Leon critically engages Euro-American and Latin American scholarship seldom put into dialogue, offering an innovative theorization of melodrama relevant to scholars working within and across different national contexts.