By JULIA PRESTON

           MEXICO CITY -- Héctor Alejandro Galindo Amezcua, a prolific film director who created
           his own genre of movies set in Mexico's urban underworld, died on Monday. He was 93.

          Galindo, who was known in the Mexican film world as Don Alex, directed or wrote scripts for more
          than 70 films, virtually all of them made in Mexico. He was one of the directors, along with Emilio
          Fernández, who pioneered a booming film industry in Mexico in the 1940's and 50's based on
          movies that portrayed the travails and heartbreak of workaday Mexicans.

          Galindo was the first Mexican director to place his films in the streets, bars and factories of tightly
          knit but tumultuous urban barrios, especially in Mexico City. His characters were down-and-out
          boxers, working-stiff fathers, bus drivers, accountants, prostitutes and small-time gangsters.

          As both scriptwriter and director, he captured the distinctive broad-toned jargon of a new urban
          proletariat. Mexicans in the rapidly growing cities loved to hear their voices echoed in Galindo's films
          and flocked loyally to them for over 30 years.

          "I won't pretend that I dedicated any deep study to it," Galindo said in a recent interview with La
          Jornada, the Mexico City daily. "It was a matter of watching, observing carefully, opening my ears
          and letting the words stick to them."

          "I always made movies about what I knew and saw, nothing else," Galindo said.

          Perhaps his most famous film was the 1945 "Campeón sin Corona," or "Champion Without a
          Crown," the melancholy story of a street kid who rises in the boxing ring only to be defeated by a
          corrupt Mafia controlling the sport. The boxer was played by David Silva, a short, stocky actor on
          whom Galindo frequently relied to portray his perpetually failing heroes.

          In 1948 Galindo directed "Una Familia de Tantas" ("One Family of Many"), a portrait of an urban
          family troubled by poverty and feuds between generations. In 1953 he made "Espaldas Mojadas"
          ("Wetbacks"), an early critique of the exploitation of illegal Mexican workers in the southwestern
          United States.

          Galindo was born in Monterrey, Mexico, in 1906. His sensitivity to urban surroundings came after
          he was uprooted as a teen-ager and moved with his mother to Mexico City.

          He became poisoned, as he put it, by the cinema when he was still an adolescent. To learn the trade
          he entered the United States illegally and became an office boy in Hollywood. In the 1920's he
          worked with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and Columbia Pictures, first writing scripts for silent films and
          later dubbing their talking films into Spanish. The crash of 1929 forced him to take his knowledge
          back to Mexico.

          Galindo won at least eight Ariels, Mexico's equivalent of the Oscar, and in recent years he was
          honored with several national homages in Mexico. But he never received the National Prize for the
          Arts, the country's highest honor. As a result, no wake was held this week for Galindo in the Palacio
          de Bellas Artes, Mexico's most important theater. Galindo's family protested the theater's decision.

          He is survived by his wife, Mariela Flores, and four children, Valentina, Alejandro, Rosa and
          Lourdes.