1946 Mayagüez, Puerto Rico

Gladys Rodriguez Mercado

Born in 1937

Mayagüez, Puerto Rico

Interviewed on January 28 2019*

By Isabel Magraner

One of the first films I ever went to go see was one of Shirley Temple’s. I was between seven and nine years old probably nine, at the Del Carmen Teatro. I can remember it all a bit more now. It was a musical. The main character was a little girl, she wasn’t a very big person at all. She kept growing, and she loved to sing and to dance. It was one of those happy stories about little girls from before.

The theaters, none of them had air conditioning, definitely not. Not in that epoch. It was a theater where it was higher in the back than in the front so the seating was sloped. The place was not very fancy at all. There was another theater we had in Mayagüez, called Teatro Yagüez, that was intended for opera, comedies, and other live performances. That one was pretty because they had a stage. They had balconies; they had two floors. The chairs were cushioned. That theater was grand. But the others, the ones for movies, were more simple. The chairs were really hard and stiff at first, eventually they starting making them softer. But yes, very simple. That’s how the Teatro Riad and the Teatro del Carmen were. In Mayagüez, there were three or so theaters in that time period. Well three movie theaters, what we call cines. And the theater meant the Teatro Yagüez, which was beautiful, for the operas and live works.

I went with my mother. She took me, along with a friend of hers named Teresa. Going to the teatro was a very special thing, but going to the cine was no, not that special. Almost always, the movie theaters were only open on the weekends, not all throughout the week. And when we would go to the cine, you would get your ticket from the people at the windows. At the teatro there would be people to usher you to your seat, but not at the cine. It was not the same like it was in the states. The theater was the theater–for operas, tragedies, comedies, for whatever–but live shows. But the movies, the ones that came from the United States, were in another theater. And you obviously had to wait a long time for them to arrive to Puerto Rico.

*This interview was originally conducted in Spanish and has been translated to English.