The community is fighting to save the 73-year-old cinema and venue, which was denied federal funding.
If you ask people who work at McAllen’s Cine El Rey what they do for a living, they’ll tell you that they “make dreams come true.” For the last 73 years, dreamers have walked up to the theater and found themselves transfixed by its glamorous marquee, perhaps imagining their name up there one day. Family elders bear countless stories of giving it their all during talent shows at the theater, or meeting up with friends there to catch the latest pictures (or “vistas,” as my late cinephile grandfather would refer to them) from treasured legends of Mexican cinema such as Pedro Infante, Germán “Tin-Tan” Valdés, and Mario “Cantinflas” Moreno—stars who sometimes visited the theater on the opening nights of their films.
Much of this history has not been well documented, which means that these moments largely survive in the memories of people who were there. Velia Rangel, a McAllen native who worked the box office as a teenager in the early years, describes Cine El Rey as “the center of the Valley”; it hosted up to 1,200 guests on one of its busiest nights, a premiere for the 1952 film El Derecho de Nacer (“The Right to be Born”), which was a box-office hit in Mexico. If you were to play these scenes like a film on the theater’s own silver screen, you would never be able to guess that such joy could be found during a time of racial segregation in the Rio Grande Valley.
The theater, once the only place in town where Mexican residents could comfortably sit and watch a movie, eventually removed its permanent seating in order to host a greater diversity of events—a decision that remains controversial for some. Regardless, Cine El Rey has always risen to meet the needs of its community. After years of fighting for its people, the theater now faces its greatest foe yet: the coronavirus. Unwilling to lose yet another cultural institution to history, the local community the theater has served for seven-plus decades has begun mobilizing to help keep it alive.
Read more:https://www.texasmonthly.com/the-culture/cine-el-rey-mcallen-coronavirus/