—Now that you're here what are you going to do? Sell us tickets to the policeman's ball?
—We're with the border patrol ma'am, we don't have any balls.
—Flashpoint (1984)
On January 26, 2006 the United States Border Patrol, working with agents from the Drug Enforcement Agency, discovered what many claim was the largest and most sophisticated cross-border tunnel to date. Information about this tunnel quickly hit the headlines with news flashes engineered to elicit fears about the hydra of villainy: drug traffickers, "illegal" immigrants, and terrorists. The 2,400-foot tunnel grabbed attention for its infrastructure and amenities; fortified with concrete, it boasted electric lights, a ventilation system, groundwater pumping, and was fully equipped with a pulley system for the rapid transit of "drugs and other contraband." The tunnel was described by many news sources as having a south-to-north trajectory that originated in Tijuana and terminated in an industrial warehouse in San Diego. The two tons of marijuana found in the tunnel were a clue to its main function, but the discovery sparked fears: "These tunnels are known to be used for smuggling drugs and illegal aliens. They also could be used (and almost certainly are being used) to smuggle terrorists—along with weapons and explosives—into the United States." The tunnel quickly became the clearinghouse for North American fears about underground traffic into the United States and about the spawning of illegal activity with roots in Mexico that pointed to conspiracies against national security. The whole scenario read like the ongoing plot of the popular television show 24 (Fox), in which terrorists find covert and illegal ways of entering the United States. No similar media ploy exists for the north-to-south traffic into major border cities like Tijuana or Ciudad Juárez where visitors from the United States go in search of illicit activities, or for unauthorized north-to-south traffic in merchandise. Instead, mainstream U.S. media depict the border as a necessary barrier to unwanted traffic while the borderlands are often represented as a repository of all things illegal. Recently, news items about such tunnels have appeared more frequently, causing some to claim that underground entry into the United States obviates the need to erect a wall against invaders from the south. These stories deny the realities of economic and political interdependence between Mexico and the United States and act as symbolic blockades to cross-border dialogue.
Since the inception of cinema, the Hollywood motion picture industry has commandeered the borderlands to tell a story about U.S. dominance in the American hemisphere. Hollywood has often exploited the trope of the southern border between the United States and Mexico to capture a range of "American" ideals and values—integrity, moral clarity, industriousness, rugged survivalism, confidence, and self-sufficiency, among others. The border is also a vital repository of threatening ideas—homosexuality, prostitution, globalization, economic liberalization, drug trafficking and abuse, sexual promiscuity, effeminacy, and terrorism—and undesirable or inassimilable people such as Mexicans, Native Americans, racially mixed characters, immigrants, war veterans, terrorists, and dominant and domineering women. Moreover, many of the lost battles of history—the Alamo and Vietnam in particular—are replayed on the border to conclusions that restore confidence in the "American way." I argue that Hollywood border films do important social work: they offer a cinematic space through which viewers can manage traumatic and undesirable histories and ultimately reaffirm core "American" values. At the same time, these border narratives shape "proper" identification with a singular and exceptional moral hero who might register anywhere from maverick to vigilante. These stories delineate opposing values and ideas—for instance, the proper from the improper and the citizen from the unwanted guest or "alien." Latino border films offer a critical vantage from which to consider these topics; they challenge the presumptions of U.S. nationalism and subsequent cultural attitudes about immigrants and immigration and often critically reconstruct their Hollywood kin.
The southern frontier is one of the most emotionally charged zones of the United States, second only to its historical predecessor and partner, the western frontier. The border has become the symbol of a strong and fortified nation that is protected on all sides from invasion and infiltration of harmful or unwanted people, ideas, and things. Though spanning many different genres, border films share a preoccupation with mobility, border patrol, immigration restrictions, and the control of various kinds of traffic into the country; they trace policy mood swings and shape cultural agenda. Many of the films that take place on or near the borderlands express "American" anxieties, messianic prophecies, and fears about porous boundaries and the integration of the hemisphere through political intervention, economic globalization, and transnational migration.
Hollywood and major independent films are not alone in the fascination and fixation on the border region, but the U.S. film industry is the most pervasive image machine of the border region for a global audience. The Mexican film industry has as long a history of depicting the border region to similarly nationalist ends, yet Hollywood rarely has taken notice. In her analysis of the rich genealogy of Mexican border cinema, Norma Iglesias notes that the border did not appear as an actual place in Mexican cinema until the 1960s, prior to which it was merely a verbal construction—something characters talked about as a point of reference in the development of the plot. By the 1960s, during the boom of the Mexican Western, the border emerged as a geographic location and space of action. Some notable films of this era are El terror de la frontera (1963) and Pistoleros de la frontera (1967), both of which are set in small border towns that harbor thieves in hiding. As in U.S. Westerns, the border is depicted as a place of escape at the far reaches of the nation that is often beyond the limits of the law.
Alex Saragoza has argued that the border in Mexican film tends to represent "self-absorption, introspection, and distrust of the outside" in a manner not unexpected from an embattled nation after suffering years of colonialism and U.S. interventions. By the 1980s, Mexican border films deal with the various sociocultural and familial effects of northern migration: for example, the migration and subsequent estrangement of members of families, the figuring of the United States or el norte, the north, as a source of economic and political freedom, or the fantasy about success in the U.S. entertainment industries. For example, Mamá solita (1980) and Mojado de nacimiento (1981) depict sons longing to reunite with their exiled fathers in the United States.
María Herrera-Sobek describes a subgenre of the Mexican border film that derives from the Spanish picaresque tradition; these films are comedies of misadventure that feature a protagonist who emanates "from the working class, possesses wit, ingenuity, humor, and an uncanny skill for survival" and who often outwits and escapes his or her captors and antagonists. The titles of these films foreground their parodic and comedic premises: El milusos llegó de mojado (n.d.), El remojado (1984), Ni de aquí ni de allá (1988), and Mojado Power (1979). There is also a slate of Mexican films that offer cautionary tales about the dangers of the trans-border journey and often end in tragedy, such as the film El vagón de la muerte (1987). Herrera-Sobek notes that many Mexican films about undocumented immigration use corridos, Mexican ballads, as source material. The corrido acts as "hypertext" or as an intertextual source of information that introduces themes and historical events and frames narrative meaning.
Iglesias describes another border formation that emerged during the 1980s where the border is not just a film set but establishes a whole set of industrial conditions as the site of production of a flourishing film industry. Mirroring the generic efficiency of the Hollywood studio system, filmmakers often used border sets multiple times for similar narratives. Many famous producers used their own properties for filming various types of border narratives, from immigration genre dramas to action and border narcotraficante films. The latter border subgenre became an industry commonplace, leading to the well-known "crossover" film, El Mariachi (1992), the production of which followed the industrial patterns of Mexican border filmmaking, including using sets belonging to friends and family members.
There are a number of border films that fall outside of the established generic patterns of the border film industry, but that use the border as a sign of future promise. For example, Mujeres insumisas (1995) narrates the story of a group of Mexican women who escape to Los Angeles in search of liberation from gender oppression. Similarly, Sin dejar huella (2000) is about two women who meet on the road and become friends as they unite trying to evade the law en route to Cancún. The documentary Al otro lado (2005) deals with immigrants' dreams of success in the U.S.-based entertainment industry into which many Mexican performers have migrated.
There is a major difference in perspective and narrative topoi between Mexican and Hollywood films about northern migration. Though both fall into the category David Maciel and María Rosa García-Acevedo describe as "immigration genre films," Mexican border films are strongly nationalist, discouraging northerly migration and debunking the myth of the "American Dream." They thematize the entanglements of cultural contact and the experience of displacement and economic exile, whereas Hollywood border films tend to focus on the heroic mission of the Texas Rangers, border guards, DEA agents, or other police personnel. This difference leads the more critical Mexican border stories away from their border provenance and into U.S. cities where conflicts of dislocation take place. Norma Iglesias notes that this displacement from the border had become more prevalent by the 1980s, so that the genre engaged the "problems of being Mexican in the United States," and "the problems of confrontation between Mexican and American culture," rather than life on the border or the difficulties of crossing over. Some Mexican border films are part of what Herrera-Sobek calls "border aesthetics," the activist aesthetics devoted to politically transformative depictions of the border region, representations that depart from and critically reconstruct the normative and phobic images of the borderlands and border crossers in the northern imaginary.
Bandits and Bad Men
Hollywood has perpetrated the image of banditry along the border through misuse of history, misrepresentation of socioeconomic conditions, neutralization of poliatical tensions, and other such sleights of hand that create and perpetuate a false mythology of the borderlands and its inhabitants. The bandit is not only one of the most abiding stereotypes of Mexicans in Hollywood history, but also the symbolic center and cardinal icon of the borderland narrative.
The bandit has roots in nineteenth-century dime novels and early silent greaser films or films with plots structured around Mexican villains such as Tony the Greaser (1914), Broncho Billy and the Greaser (1914), The Greaser's Revenge (1914), and the very last film to contain the term "greaser" in its title, Guns and Greasers (1918). The greaser film played on the association of Latinos and criminality, often portraying a roving Mexican outlaw whose main occupations consisted of every vice imaginable: lust, greed, thievery, treachery, rapaciousness, deceit, gambling, and murder. After the end of World War I, the term "greaser" was eliminated in films, partly due to the demand for Hollywood films in the Latin American market where commercial viability foreclosed on overtly derogatory depictions of Latinos and partly due to a shift in villainry to "the Kaiser and the Hun." The bandit, however, would not be so graciously put to rest.
The denigrating term "greaser" was popular just after the U.S. war with Mexico (1846-1848), when international and interracial tensions ran high and the borders of national identity were in flux. It originates from Anglo perceptions that the Mexicans' skin color was either the result of applying grease to the skin or was deemed similar to the color of grease. The former meaning derived from a practice whereby Mexican laborers in the Southwest applied grease to their backs to facilitate the transport of hides and cargo. In both instances, greaser indicates a dark-skinned outlaw or bandit who is unhygienic, filthy, and unsavory, with a marked proclivity for violence and criminality. These attitudes were reflected in anti-Hispano legislation; for instance, California's 1855 anti-vagrancy act was also called the "Greaser Act" and was designed to target "all persons who are commonly known as 'Greasers' or the issue of Spanish and Indian blood . . . and who go armed and are not peaceable and quiet persons." These laws were open to loose interpretations to facilitate the detainment and incarceration of anyone with dark skin or who spoke Spanish, characteristics which were associated with criminality.
Charles Ramírez Berg describes the Hollywood bandit as the outgrowth of the earlier silent-era greaser character. Like the greaser, the bandit represents the darker urges repressed in civilized society and is perceived as a psychopath who lacks a moral compass or an empathic connection to others. His bad behavior is evident in his physical composition—the aesthetic counterpart to his irrational violence, dishonesty, and illegal dealings is an unkempt appearance marked by greasy hair and missing teeth. The bandit demands moral retribution from the Anglo characters; he is a "demented, despicable creature who must be punished for his brutal behavior." The bandit's female equivalent is a sexually promiscuous and loose woman, typically a prostitute. According to Rosa Linda Fregoso, the border was inscribed across these women's bodies; that is, native Mexicanas, Tejanas, and Californias were coded as foreign and degenerate against depictions of civilized Anglo-American women. The natives of the Southwest were depicted as inferior and as harlots and bandits, often to justify colonial expansion and the expropriation of their land and property through war and theft.
The greaser and the bandit emerged after the tremendous loss of land and rights for natives of the Southwest following the Mexican-American War. Indeed, there was a rise in banditry among the displaced who took up arms against Anglo aggressors. This scenario recalls Eric Hobsbawm's distinction between the bandit and the social bandit; the latter emerges from the underclass or peasantry and engages the tactics of banditry as social rebellion.
In hegemonic U.S. histories and popular culture, the Mexican bandit is invariably an outlaw. However, Mike Davis exposes a different angle to the official story about the Mexican bandit along the California-Mexico border. He draws a lineage of violence along the border into California from the wars of conquest of 1846-1847 and Anglo gangs of the 1850s to contemporary U.S. border vigilantism. He refers specifically to Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy's unrelentingly macabre account of the violence of Glanton and his gang, an account that offers a realist depiction of racially motivated violence in the Anglo conquest of California. The violence perpetrated by Native Americans and Mexican "bandits" was often misrepresented as unprovoked, malicious, and excessive, rather than what Davis describes as acts of defense of land and property, self-protection, and sometimes retaliation. Infamous bandits like Tiburcio Vásquez, Pio Lunares, Juan Flores, and Joaquin Murieta were relegated to history as "desperados" rather than as "social bandits" or "guerilla chieftains" engaged in ongoing conflict with Anglo vigilantes and conquistadores. After the turn of the nineteenth century, perhaps the most infamous Mexican bandit and screen legend is Francisco "Pancho" Villa, a historical character framed either as a villain or a hero of the Mexican revolution.
The diverse uses of the title "Border Bandits" reveal the tensions and contradictions along the border region regarding the meaning and attribution of banditry. For example, Border Bandits is the title of a B-grade Western from 1946 about a group of outlaws who escape to the "other" side of the border and the marshal who must bring them back into the domain of law and order in the North. Border Bandits is also the title of an acclaimed documentary by writer-producer Kirby Warnock about a group of Texas Rangers who committed mass murder of Tejanos based on their own lawless sense of justice. As mentioned earlier, Mexican natives of Texas were often mislabeled "bandits" by Anglo civilians and Texas Rangers to justify stealing the Mexicans' land. Without the use of the racially stigmatizing bandit label, it would have been much harder for Anglos to obtain Texas land titles and wrest control of the state. More recently, Joseph Nevins used the term "border bandit" to refer to those who attack and rob undocumented immigrants as they make the journey across the border; Nevins notes that these bandits are part of the violent repercussions of the Clinton administration's attempt to crack down on the border with Operation Gatekeeper. In an atmosphere of increased policing, migrants become more vulnerable targets of crime since they are viewed as having no legal recourse against their perpetrators.
The Mexican bandit continues to live on in Hollywood through various incarnations and across multiple genres, many of which intersect with the border film, including Westerns, drug trafficking films, urban gang films, and immigrant genre films. The bandit rarely remains unpunished or unchallenged by his antagonist, the character who represents the law—most typically the Texas Ranger, border patrol agent, or DEA (Drug Enforcement Agency) agent.
Indian Warrior, Mexican Vaquero, and Texas Ranger
The 1920 play by Porter Emerson Browne, The Bad Man, transferred to the screen in 1923, told the story of a Mexican bandit; the film was remade in 1930, but this time the bandit was brought to justice by his antithesis, the Texas Ranger. The Texas Rangers are considered the moral saviors of Texas when in reality they were often driven by racially and ethnically phobic motivations and the desire to secure more land for Anglo Texans. In his infamous history of the Texas Rangers, Walter Prescott Webb lionizes the Rangers as a natural response to the "conflict of civilizations," referring to the Rangers' position against the renegade Anglo, Indian, and Mexican bandit. The foreword to the 1965 edition of the Texas Rangers (originally published in 1935), written during the escalation of the Vietnam War by then president and fellow Texan Lyndon B. Johnson, is a testament to the nationalist purpose of the tome. Later, Hollywood would unify the three types of villains described by Webb—renegade Anglos, Indians, and Mexican bandits—into the arms- and contraband-peddling "comancheros" in the Western, The Comancheros (1961), set in the 1860s Texas borderlands. John Wayne sets things straight as the morally crusading Texas Ranger battling against this tripartite threat in a manner that justifies the role and purpose of the Rangers for contemporary audiences. For Webb, the Ranger's moral position is clear: he is "a man standing alone between society and its enemies" and "it has been his duty to meet the outlaw breed of three races, the Indian warrior, Mexican bandit, and American desperado, on the enemy's ground and deliver each safely within the jail door or the cemetery gate." However, there are varying accounts of the manner in which the Rangers interpreted and enacted their "duty." For historians like Webb, Eugene C. Barker, Rupert Richardson, and others, Anglo violence in Texas and along the border was justified as part of the process of nation-building.
Américo Paredes is perhaps the most renowned critic of the Webb-inspired mythology of the Texas Rangers. He examines border ballads or corridos as oral histories that unearth the repressed history of the experience of the Anglo invasion of the Southwest. In his book he offers the "official history" of the Rangers as a counterpoint to the subjugated histories of the natives on the frontier:
The Rangers have been pictured as a fearless, almost superhuman breed of men, capable of incredible feats. It may take a company of militia to quell a riot, but one Ranger was said to be enough for one mob. Evildoers, especially the Mexican ones, were said to quail at the mere mention of the name. To the Ranger is given the credit for ending lawlessness and disorder along the Rio Grande.
Paredes contradicts this characterization and attributes the intensification of border violence and unrest to the lawlessness propagated by the Rangers, which deepened the racial divide in the borderlands. The Rangers inspired Mexican distrust of the United States while enabling the consolidation of border communities and the creation of more spirited social bandits.
The Ranger was called a rinche in Spanish, which quickly became an umbrella term for all "Americans armed and mounted and looking for Mexicans to kill." Paredes compiled a list of Mexican "sayings and anecdotes" about the Rangers, a list that may or may not accrue to historical veracity, but that certainly provides the basis for an alternate mythology. He claims, contrary to purported Ranger heroism, that the Ranger always carries an extra gun so that when he kills an unarmed Mexican he can deposit it with the body, that the Ranger prefers to kill armed Mexicans when they are sleeping or have their backs to him, that the Ranger prefers to hide behind U.S. soldiers, and that he engages in retaliatory killings and murder by proxy—a practice described by an ex-Ranger in the documentary cited earlier, Border Bandits. Paredes gives credence to only one part of the Ranger mythos, the Ranger dictum to "shoot first, ask questions later," which confirms the existence of the rampant injustice of indiscriminate murder through racial profiling.
Like Paredes, John Weaver charges Ranger historian Webb with confusing fact with myth in his account of the Texas Rangers. Julian Samora, Joe Bernal, and Albert Peña further note that this mingling of fact and myth is partly a consequence of the self-promotional work of the Texas Rangers as evident in the many memoirs and autobiographies of these men. These official histories often remain uncontested as the only extant records of the period since many Tejano and Native American records were destroyed or delegitimated.
Greater Mexico
María Herrera-Sobek invokes a hidden history of Mexican involvement in the making of the culture of the Southwest and of the United States. She cites an example that has become the major foundation of the Western and of national identity: the origin of the cowboy. Herrera-Sobek notes the irony that the cowboy, "that archetypal embodiment of what has been imprinted in the popular mind as quintessentially American," is actually an outgrowth of the Mexican vaquero who brought the skills of generations of ranch and cow work to the southwestern United States.
However, Charles Zurhorst, in his work The First Cowboys and Those Who Followed, notes that the cowboy has been described in opposition to Mexicans, citing Mirabeau Buonaparte Lamar, second president of the Texas Republic in the late 1830s, as defining cowboys, in Zurhorst's words, as "rustlers of longhorns who hate all things Mexican." Zurhorst cites many different texts that claim to have located the origin of the cowboy, including one that describes the cowboy as an outgrowth of the contact between Anglos and Mexicans in Texas. But in the end, he denies this history, finding the roots of the "American" cowboy in bands of men who struggled for the rights of tenants in the anti-rent rebellion of 1766 in New York: "And so, in 1766, the American cowboy, or cow-boy, was born. It is interesting to note that the first cowboy was (like his present day image) a rugged outdoorsman, dedicated to justice, and a rebel at heart." These men were called "cow-boys" because they would raid farms of livestock, including cows, to fund their mission; men like these brought this practice to Texas, where they took possession of wild cattle and stole cattle that belonged to Mexicans, an account that coincides with Américo Paredes' description of the violent origins of the Texas ranch empire. Zurhorst goes on to assert that "contrary to the belief of some, the first Texas cowboy was not an offshoot of the Mexican vaquero," using as slim evidence Lamar's claims, cited above, that cowboys hated Mexicans. However, Arnold Rojas notes some undeniable similarities between the Anglo cattle-handling buckaroo and its precursor, the Mexican vaquero. The vaquero, a staple of the Mexican hacienda in central and northern Mexico, migrated north of the Rio Grande to disseminate vaquero culture, skills, and tradition to accommodating Anglos. Zurhorst's outright denial of the vaquero in the diverse genealogy of the cowboy is part of the official history of the United States, which is itself premised on the erasure of the Mexican history of the Southwest.
Thanks to crimes from the outright theft of Mexican livestock, property, and land to the systematic extermination of native populations of the Southwest, the history of the contributions of native peoples—Californios, Mexicanos, Tejanos, and various Native American tribes—to the formation of the nation has been rendered invisible to dominant popular narratives. Like Paredes, Herrera-Sobek explores this hidden history through the oral tradition of the corrido, which documents the events surrounding the introduction of vaquero culture in what is now the Southwest of the United States.
The obliteration of the Mexican genesis of southwestern culture persisted late into the twentieth century in cinematic constructions not just of the cowboy but also more generally of the borderlands. Recent work by critical filmmakers in the border genre has brought to light much that has hitherto been repressed, rendered invisible, or marginalized; for instance, the "other" history of the Alamo in Lone Star (1996), the depiction of the Mexican vaquero in The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (2005), or the experience of crossing the border in Babel (2006).
Hollywood Border Cinema
Much of border cinema derives from its precursors, the silent greaser film and its offshoot the Western, particularly the latter for its persistence into the present. Although Westerns take place in the Southwest, a smaller subcategory of these take place on or near the border or explicitly traverse the border as part of the story. Many more Westerns are set in small isolated frontier towns or depict expansive vistas traversed by gunslinging outlaws and marauding Indians. Hollywood border cinema offers a vision of the United States at its defining limits, and its popularity roughly corresponds to the crises and mood swings of national immigration and border policies. The border acts as a political symbol of national order and control, namely, the control of the national labor market and immigration from the south. Though each border film is unique in the specificities of narrative, a discussion of genre is useful for charting the changing currents of its social and cultural significance. The assertion of genre is ambitious; it implies cohesion among individual texts whose meanings often extend beyond a single genre. And border cinema designates texts linked more by a common geographical or symbolic referent than a shared ideology or textual meaning.
In an attempt to excavate the history of genre, Rick Altman distills two millennia of literary theory, reading for its usefulness to film theory in terms of its major theoretical pitfalls. Most notably, he finds that the assessment of genre as an independent entity bespeaks a lack of attention to the role of the reader and critic. The migration of genre theory to film analysis immediately heightened the institutional and industrial horizons of aesthetic production. Thomas Schatz describes the genre film of the classical era of the big studio factories, from the 1930s to the 1960s, as one that "involves familiar, essentially one-dimensional characters acting out a predictable story pattern within a familiar setting." This pattern was not accidental; it followed industrial capital efficiency by recycling sets and marketing stories and stars who had already garnered success, thus making the films surefire hits.
Film critics often describe the genre film as a commodity designed to maximize studio profits. However, Altman contests this shorthand of genre criticism. He argues that there is at least one case of studio executives attempting to create and define a genre to no avail. The genre film, in his estimation, is not so entirely determined by market forces. Genres are both "static" and "dynamic"; they refer to similar narrative systems, but change according to historical circumstance and subsequent transformations in cultural attitudes and the individual disposition of the reader-critic. Altman likens genre-theorists to city-planners who plan but cannot control the use of the city: "Just as city-planners once thought that people would automatically inhabit their city as designed, so genre-theorists once believed that readers and viewers would automatically follow the lead of textual producers." The individual social and cultural conditions of the spectator or the group dynamics of the audience as well as the actual conditions of viewing—whether in the cinema or on DVD or VHS, alone or with a group—in short, all material circumstances, personal philosophies and psychologies, and contextual factors contribute to the experience of the film and the production of its meaning. Regardless of the shifting and alterable conditions of viewing, film genres are very resilient conductors of meaning. A genre persists because the major cultural conflicts to which it refers remain unresolved.
Gloria Anzaldúa describes the border as a wound caused by the violent encounter of First to Third World; indeed, it is a space that resonates with trauma, a wound that refuses to heal, and so it becomes the object of tremendous cultural work. The border genre, like the Western, emanates from a long literary history that preceded its cinematic incarnation. From dime novels to silent greaser films, popular Westerns, and action films, the border signifies a North American complex and neurosis about self-identity. U.S. popular culture defines national identity against the borderlands and their mythologized inhabitants: an inchoate mass of criminals, sexual deviants, and racialized outsiders. The more independent review of the genre by Chicano/Latino and Native American filmmakers recycles border imagery to a different end, though one that equally impacts the conception of national identity and cultural belonging.
Border films anticipate the critical work of Latina/o American cultural studies by moving beyond the nation and foregrounding contact across the hemisphere, particularly between the United States and Mexico. Border films, though often ideologically retrograde, make this contact a point of departure of the narrative. They are tacitly hemispheric in focus for the many forays from and into Mexico and the international efforts at border patrol and control, as well as the truly distinct globalism of border cultures. Studies of the border inevitably traverse the boundaries separating geographies and fields of interest. Borderland criticism, as Héctor Calderón and José David Saldívar have noted, is thus deeply dialogic and relational.
Pablo Vila challenges the idea that the borderlands are a utopian space of multiculturalism and a globalized ideal of internationalism, multiplicities, and mestizaje. He argues that binational relations produce divisions and intensify identification within difference. He explores how binaries are generated in this region; he finds that it is more a place of conflict and contention than cohesion and confluence. Through extensive interviews taken from 1991 to 1997, Vila documents the various social categories that organize borderlands discourse and contribute to ongoing tensions among ethnic, racial and regional groups. Unique among his findings is the idea that Mexican-Americans view Mexicans as alien "others," which is contrary to the critical view of a historical Anglo-Mexican dichotomy. This nationalist disidentification has roots in the denigration of all things Mexican perpetrated in social and cultural discourses and mass media. Mexican-Americans profess a particularly intense disidentification with Mexican migrants and recent arrivals as a way of consolidating a tenuous sense of place and belonging. On the other hand, Vila finds that Mexicans also view Mexican-Americans as "other," specifically as pochos, "rotten or discolored ones," a denigrating term for those of Mexican origin raised in the United States without a sense of cultural heritage or fully developed Spanish language skills. Recently, some Mexican-Americans have reclaimed the term "pocho," emptying it of its negative connotations, to describe different permutations of language, such as Spanglish, and hybrid Mexican and U.S. cultural identity. This latter resignification puts its meaning closer to that of "Chicano," a politically inflected term of Mexican-American racial and ethnic solidarity and pride.
Many critical Latino border films depict these scenarios, particularly El Norte (1983), Lone Star (1996), and The Gatekeeper (2002). In El Norte, a Mexican-American character calls the Immigration and Naturalization Service on an undocumented worker in order to eliminate competition for a job—this lack of political solidarity is a part of competition for scarce resources in which Chicanos and Mexicans alike are at the bottom of the labor market. A Mexican character describes this same Mexican-American as a pocho. Likewise, in Lone Star, a woman who had herself crossed the border without the proper documents becomes a successful restaurateur who is unsympathetic to the troubles of undocumented immigrants. Finally, in The Gatekeeper, a mixed-race Mexican-American border patrolman identifies with border vigilantes in his internalized phobia of all things Mexican. These films expose these attitudes as unfortunate consequences of internalized Hispanophobia and a lack of a politically inflected sense of solidarity for Latinos facing exclusionary nativism. Many Chicano and Latino activists have worked to create a sense of political community among the various factions and generations of Latinos of the borderlands and beyond. For instance, one of the oldest border organizations, the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), originated in Corpus Christi, Texas in 1929 to fight for the rights of Mexicans, Chicanos, and all Latinos facing discrimination, segregation, and injustice.
In many Hollywood border feature films, the depiction of peaceful interracial and international relations is part of U.S. free trade ideology that denies the political and sociocultural realities of tension across the borderlands. Claire F. Fox examines the culture of the border region during the last three decades of the twentieth century, documenting misrepresentations by U.S. mass media of the border as a place of peaceful relations. She initiated work on border cultures out of her outrage at the 1989 Hollywood movie Old Gringo, which depicts the border as a place of serene and depoliticized transit suggesting a history of tranquil U.S.-Mexico relations. Fox dug deeper into the industrial relations in the production of the film itself and found that the Mexican film studio, Estudios Churubusco, had been commandeered by U.S. producers to maximize profits maquila-style. The film became a model of free trade production in the voracious search for the lowest possible production and labor costs.
Old Gringo is a perfect instantiation of the pervasiveness of a North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) ideological gloss, evident not just in the manner and relations of production but in the context and production of narrative meaning. Fox explores border imagery across various media to trace the persistence of the national in this post-NAFTA and thus post-national era. Her work dovetails with the works of scholars and critics who have examined the role of the border as a major symbol in bi-national politics. For many scholars, the borderlands are both a geographical location and a paradox of the social status and identity of Chicanos and Latinos.
Frontier Narratives
In Border Bandits: Hollywood on the Southern Frontier, I begin the genealogy of Hollywood border films with classical post-World War II Westerns from the late 1940s to the 1970s, followed by the return of the Western hero as the border patrolman in the 1980s, the drug trafficking Hollywood film and television border stories, and finally the critical Latino border films of "Hispanic Hollywood" from the 1980s and onward that shift the border genre to major urban centers. In the final installment of this genealogy, I examine recent revisionist Westerns, including Brokeback Mountain (2005) and The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (2005).
Border films have stock characters—the sultry Latina, the pious female Mexican immigrant, the righteous cowboy/border guard, the job-taking male immigrant, the crooked drug runner—and stock sets and scenery—the open desert, abandoned border towns, the canteen, the whorehouse. Many of these border films belong to other genres or types—the Western, the action film, the drug trafficking film, and Latino film—but they are all Hollywood productions on, near, or about the border region, the roughly 2000-mile line separating and joining the United States to and from Mexico. Hollywood border films are not about the immigrant experience or cultural conflict; rather, they are concerned with fortifying U.S. national identity during times of cultural transition. Border films provide a vital history of the United States through key cinematic moments, from the "birth of the nation" after the American Civil War, the post-World War II era, the civil rights era, the Reaganite 1980s, and the liberal "multicultural" 1990s to the current state of border anxieties relating to fears of drug trafficking and terrorism after September 11, 2001. The heritage of most of these films can be traced back to the original border genre, the Western, some more obliquely than others.
Many Westerns take place on the border region between the United States and Mexico, which accounts for the prevalence of titles like Rio Grande (1950), and Rio Bravo (1959), all referring to the river as a natural demarcation between nations, rather than one that is the result of war. The Western, the most enduring Hollywood genre, has always been associated with U.S.-style masculinity, the battle between civilization and barbarism, and the dramatization of the founding values of the early nation. But Westerns might also be examined for shared provenance, the preoccupation with Native American nation formation and immigration, the relationship to Mexico, and the presence of Mexicans and Mexican-Americans.
Though the "frontier" typically connotes its western incarnation and the uncivilized "Indian" territory beyond it, the southern frontier, Mexico, and the Mexican past of the United States are of equal relevance in the construction of the moral universe of the Western. Mexico carries various meanings: it represents a victorious sign of territorial expansion—since the United States expropriated almost half of its land mass in 1848—but it also represents the possibility of loss, of the need to continually defend the national frontier from hostile invasion or re-annexation. Mexico is the racialized and primitive wilderness where western male heroes go to reinvigorate their masculinity—often with the help of Mexican women—and where mixed race characters and relationships are common, and it often represents the uncivilized past of the United States, the idyllic land that, in post-civil war era stories, replaces the terrain just beyond the western frontier. Border films, and Westerns in particular, dramatize the nation as a lived experience in a local setting; the United States is a nation born after the American Civil War and out of the illusion of the complete resolution of civil disunion, and many border narratives displace the internal conflict between the North and South of the United States onto the north-south continental divide.
In chapter one, I analyze the role of the Western as the foundation of many of the fundamental ideas and tropes of the border genre in a contemporary context. I begin with post-World War II Westerns for several reasons. These films comprise the most popular Westerns, the epitome of the genre, and audiences still watch them with deep nostalgia. They are also the most accessible films of the genre, constantly replayed on commercial and cable television, and they make up a large part of the archive of Westerns available for video and DVD rental and purchase. This era is also known for the dominance of big-budget Westerns with high production values, coinciding with the height of the genre. The nostalgia for the postwar Western also has to do with the affective engagement demanded from the viewer. These films are more complex and psychologically compelling than their predecessors, reflecting the more complex social and cultural conditions following the war. Thomas Schatz notes that the tone of the Western changed dramatically after the war: "As American audiences after World War II became saturated with the classic Western formula and also more hardbitten about sociopolitical realities, the image of the Western community changed accordingly, redefining the hero's motivation and his sense of mission." According to Schatz, the Western had gained a psychological dimension that stemmed from the Western hero's "growing incompatibility with civilization as well as the cumulative weight of society's unreasonable expectations." Moreover, by the late 1940s and early 1950s, Westerns were the primary media vehicle for analyzing U.S. national identity in terms of its global position, as exemplified in Fred Zinnemann's High Noon (1952), which uses individual rights and community responsibilities as an allegory for the U.S. role in the cold war. Following Richard Slotkin, Stanley Corkin examines films of this era as major events of the cold war that perpetuate and animate the ideology of U.S. world dominance.
Richard Slotkin notes that the beginning of the cold war inaugurated the "Golden Age of the Western," the twenty-five year period in which the genre peaked in popularity, an era that began with the Korean War and ended with the U.S. intervention in Vietnam. The Western provided a safe generic frame in which to encode and allegorize subjects that were not socially acceptable topics of verbal or visual discourse, topics that included race relations, sexuality, and cold war politics. This deepening of the psychological fabric of the genre also informed the work of critics concerned with the role of the audience and the contextual factors in cultural and individual interpretation of film texts. The postwar films tended to invite spectators deeper into the world of the film with the more complex dynamics of voyeurism and identification. These Westerns tended to question the conventions of the genre, including the social role of the hero, giving these films considerably more impact for viewers in similar social predicaments.
In all of the Westerns of this study, the forays into Mexico are foundational events for the creation of American national identity. The frontier stands in for the expansion of the nation in both actual and symbolic terms. Westerns hearken back to an earlier historical period typically between 1865 and 1910, one that is far enough from the era in which it was produced that it seems to have little or no connection to the present. Yet the genre, in its nostalgia for the past, is both intimately tied to the present and curiously future oriented; it offers a forecast of what is to come if the southern border is not more strictly policed. The United States bears the entire burden of enforcement since the land just north of the Rio Bravo is a relatively recent acquisition. The U.S.-based cowboys and cavalry try their best to break the bad habit of Mexican travel into land that was once part of Mexico; the history of the Mexican identity of the Southwest is one that the film industry has long repressed.
Chon Noriega has written of the "repressed history" of the classical Westerns, most of which were produced from 1930 to 1960 but take place during the border conflict era—from 1848, or the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo after the Mexican-American War, to 1929, also the year of the Wall Street crash that marked the beginning of the Great Depression in the United States, the effects of which resounded through out the hemisphere. During this era, the United States violated the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo many times and consolidated its expansionist grip on the Southwest through various other nefarious means. The Western, however, depicted the hostile takeover of the Southwest by the United States as a benevolent and just endeavor by hardy pioneers. Noriega notes that the years of the consolidation of the classic Western are consistent with the era of mass deportation of almost four million Mexican "immigrants"—many of whom were legal citizens—the internment of Japanese Americans, and the push-pull policies of the Bracero Program (1942-1964), a short-term labor program for unskilled Mexicans.
Most Westerns depict Mexican-Americans in derogatory stereotype or grant them secondary status as citizens—but only if they capitulate to an assimilationist narrative. The borderlands are the symbolic topos of the impossible predicament of Mexican-Americans in what Charles Ramírez Berg has described as the cultural pluralism of assimilation, where ethnic difference represents a means of staving off too much ambition for success in the dominant culture for fear that Latina/o success would cause the displacement of Anglos. Instead, success for the racialized character is determined by his/her willingness to assimilate as a second-class citizen. For instance, in the liberal post-1960s border Western Rio Lobo (1970), the mixed race Mexican protagonist/sidekick Pierre Cordona almost outshines John Wayne with his dazzling good looks and sense of justice, but Wayne silently recovers his place as the undeniable moral center of the story. In the end, Cordona succeeds in accomplishing Wayne's mission, which fixes him squarely in the ancillary position of sidekick.
By the 1980s, the Western had gained a new guise as the border film, in which the cowboy returns as the border patrolman and the sheriff as an agent of the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA). Examples of border films include Borderline (1980) with Charles Bronson, The Border (1982) with Jack Nicholson, and Flashpoint (1984) with Kris Kristofferson. In chapter two I argue that the border patrolman is the new incarnation of U.S. moral values, of a serious and exemplary devotion and duty to the nation and its peoples. The border films of the 1980s share a post-1965 preoccupation with issues of immigration, particularly relating to fears of increased immigration from Mexico. Public opinion framed sojourning Mexicans as the cause of a depressed national mood and mass media followed with portrayals of the 'perils' of the immigrant invader, using tandem signals of danger and economic strain.
According to Leo Chavez, from 1965—the year that national origin quotas were dismantled—to 1999, the cover images from various popular news magazines told a compelling story about an immigrant "invasion" as an economic and political burden. In a study that complements the work of Chavez, Otto Santa Ana reviews the imagistic language of metaphor in popular news stories and finds the language to be typical of warmongering rhetoric; these stories often describe incoming populations as violent forces of invasion and intrusion. Likewise, Kent Ono and John Sloop study the rhetoric of the responses to California's Proposition 187 and find that images and information about this immigration policy are part of a larger social and historical matrix. Proposition 187 evokes centuries of systems of meaning regarding immigration, calling upon the long memory of history of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, of the Immigration Acts of 1891, 1903, 1907, 1940, and so forth. These critics agree that mass media is the place to look for public opinion, the public sentiments that shape policies and enable them to be enacted socially. Popular images and discourses about immigration were oriented toward the creation of new policies and the intensification of those already in place. Border films from the 1980s make good on the implied promise of the border patrol to guard the nation against undocumented immigrants, drug traffickers, and terrorists, while they also draw the viewer into their moral world and its political imperatives. Border cinema often has the benign appearance of a medium that hearkens back to a simpler era of gunslinging outlaws and lawmen, yet the prevalence of figures of renegade moralism or vigilantism personified by actors like John Wayne recall a history of U.S. cultural, political, and economic interventions in the rest of the hemisphere, justified as acts of U.S. beneficence. The Latin American male character is typically some permutation of the bandit that the Anglo moral hero will vanquish to audience delight or he is a sidekick figure who aids in the accomplishment of the Anglo hero's plan. The female equivalent to the bandit occupies an equally marginal position. To Rosa Linda Fregoso, the "Mexicana" faces the paradox of being hyper-visible as an object of "derision" and "desire" who embodies the "moral limits of white womanhood."
Latin/o American Drug Lords
The ruthlessness of Latin/o American drug traffickers has been a favorite theme of Hollywood border films. In Orson Welles' Touch of Evil (1958) the Grandi brothers are depicted as part of the menace of the border as its resident drug users and pushers—though it is unclear whether this vice is associated with a larger market or a larger sphere of distribution. By the late 1980s, a wave of Hollywood border films and television shows about drug trafficking began to appear, most notably: Extreme Prejudice (1987), Deep Cover (1992), Traffic (2000), A Man Apart (2003), and Kingpin (NBC, 2003). Most of these films and shows feature the heroic mission of the DEA, FBI, and undercover cops in the capture of Latin/o American drug traffickers. In chapter three, I discuss how these films locate the responsibility of the "drug menace" in Latin America, either for lack of cooperation in the "war on drugs" or for enabling the production and distribution of contraband headed to a U.S. market.
The Latin American drug trafficker, though a major figure in Hollywood border films, did not really gain popularity until the 1980s, during the era of the collapse of many Latin American economies, the drop in oil prices for Mexico and Venezuela, the depreciation of local currencies, and the subsequent fortification of the U.S. economy, all of which was followed by massive northbound immigration. The prosperity of the 1980s, the overwhelming association of U.S. 1980s culture with rapid wealth, the strong dollar, dizzying investment returns, and all the trappings of affluence are notable across the landscape of U.S. popular culture. These conditions created a new wave of high risk Hollywood film and television border media that are dramatic, fast-paced, and full of glamour. The media fascination with drug war dramas also coincides with contemporary attitudes about border policy fueled by resentment about immigrants grabbing at American affluence—i.e. taking jobs and women from Anglo men. From the 1990s into the present moment, the war on drugs has dovetailed with the low intensity war on the border and, more recently, with the war on terrorism as multiple fronts of the same offensive.
Beginning in the early 1980s, critical Latin/o American border films shift the genre's focus of criticism to major urban centers. A couple of notable exceptions to this trend are the films by director Robert M. Young: Alambrista! (1977) and The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez (1982). Many Latino border films link the national boundary with the separation of neighborhoods in what many consider the largest border city in the United States, Los Angeles. These films explore the literal separation of Latino neighborhoods from the rest of the city and how immigrants face various borders and impasses within the city. Los Angeles-based films like Real Women Have Curves (2002), Bread and Roses (2000), My Family/Mi Familia (1995), El Norte (1983), Star Maps (1997) and Mi vida loca (1993) depict local communities as spaces drawn from the unhappy realities of economic hardship: daily struggles for survival that involve wage reductions, lack of health care, public assistance, gang membership, and working without documents.
In chapter four, I explore urban divisions as a consequence of economic and political disparities across the hemisphere. I examine El Norte, Star Maps, and Bread and Roses for their depictions of border crossing characters who settle in Los Angeles. The experiences of these characters lend insight into the various conditions and dynamics of globalization in the Americas. El Norte exposes the conditions for border crossers in the city in the 1980s and Star Maps examines the "boom" in Latino culture from the perspective of an aspiring actor in Los Angeles. Finally, Bread and Roses engages many of the issues of border films like El Norte and Star Maps, but then takes a very different narrative course. Bread and Roses depicts the city as a place of divisions, but emphasizes the urban political histories of labor activism. Bread and Roses acts as a training film of labor activism for undocumented immigrants; it offers a model of escape from the vicious cycle of poverty and invisibility for Latinos in the city. In the film, Hollywood is not some glossy meta-reality grafted onto urban space, but a real industry whose daily operations involve lawyers and financial institutions that contract out their cleaning services to exploitative firms.
Latino Border Films and Cultural Belonging
After a number of cultural and political changes, most notably NAFTA, the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, and the rise of new technologies of communication, the border imaginary in the city was presented differently by filmmakers. By the late 1990s, the anti-immigrant phobia and hysteria of the 1980s was eclipsed by an uninterrupted history of migration from Mexico and other parts of Latin America, which returned Los Angeles to its Latino and Hispanic heritage. As neighborhoods changed, immigrant settlements dispersed, and communities went cybernetic, the social and economic boundaries of the 1980s manifested differently. Partly as an effect of the rise of the "Hispanic Hollywood" and the success of films like El Norte, Latinos had consolidated what Renato Rosaldo calls "cultural citizenship," or the social and cultural practices that establish place and belonging for marginalized populations. Latino cinema is a vital foundation for new forms of membership both as cultural texts of historical value and as individual film texts that demand affective and transformative modes of engagement. By the 1990s, an era often referred to as "Hispanic Hollywood," a cultural revolution had taken place. Latinos in Hollywood cinema and other forms of media had begun to reap the benefits of their long cultural history to reassert their rightful place at the center of popular culture. Gustavo Leclerc and Michael J. Dear claim that it was not just Latino cultural production but also the sheer force of the surge in the Latino population that revolutionized and reclaimed Los Angeles; everything about the city and the state of California from place names to representatives in city and state governance has the mark of its Latino and Hispanic heritage; the culmination of this heritage is apparent in its current leadership under native Angelino and Chicano Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. In La Vida Latina en L.A., Dear and Leclerc gather various artists and writers who reconstruct the Latino heritage of Los Angeles lost to the "official history" of the city, and many turn to the city itself as a vital archive and archeological record. They document changes in the cultural landscape of Los Angeles apparent in "cultural events on the street; in magazines, art, and television; and in universities, homes, and the workplace."
For the Latino Cultural Studies Working Group, cultural practices, from those of everyday life to linguistic and artistic expression, in the words of William V. Flores and Rina Benmayor, "cross the political realm and contribute to the process of affirming and building an emerging Latino identity and political and social consciousness." They eschew the rigid legal definition of citizenship for a flexible socio-political notion of citizenship that is more inclusive and descriptive of Latino realities; "In this way, immigrants who might not be citizens in the legal sense or who might not even be in this country legally, but who labor and contribute to the economic and cultural wealth of the country, would be recognized as legitimate political subjects claiming rights for themselves and their children, and in that sense, as citizens."
Latino cultural productions constitute claims to membership that express and enact citizenship for all Latinos, from naturalized citizens to undocumented immigrants. Many films of Latino cinema locate their stories in Los Angeles because of its unique position as home to the second largest Mexican population outside of Mexico as well as a sizable population of South Americans and Central Americans. Indeed, almost every film mentioned by Flores and Benmayor as "standard stock in video stores"—Zoot Suit, La Bamba, El Norte, Stand and Deliver, American Me, and Mi Familia—is set in Los Angeles. These films are part of a growing and vital tradition of re-examining global city spaces as the political centers of the nation that dramatize new configurations of North American identities. They are part of larger social processes of contestation of hegemonic political identities as cultural practices that perform and interpret political belonging. Rather than a city doomed to Hollywood film and television representations of social divisions, we might reimagine Los Angeles (and cities like it) as a powerful template for the creation of cultural membership, for civic and political agencies that impact national political sentiments about the definition of citizenship. Los Angeles is a major locus of Latino cultural citizenship, a place that benefits from the special resources of cultural and racial diversity and that profoundly affects national debates about citizenship and belonging for marginalized populations.
Post-World War II Westerns, border immigration films of the 1980s, and post-1980s narco-trafficking films all set the terms for the later production of critical Latino border films that impact the debates on citizenship and immigration in the United States. The new border Westerns are being written by those who were mostly denigrated as bandidos, outlaws, and unwanted immigrants or who were only considered worthy if properly assimilated to the American way. For instance, in King Vidor's Duel in the Sun (1946), part of the story involves Chinese workers laying railroad tracks across McCanles ranch lands; the Anglo Texans consider the railroad an invasion that is represented and intensified by the presence of the Chinese workers. Contemporary border Westerns are reconstructed dramas told from the marginal perspectives of secondary and often maligned characters. At the helm of a contemporary revisionist Western that reexamines its masculine culture is Chinese national Ang Lee, who locates his revolutionary and poetic meditation on gay male desire in the mythic frontier Southwest in Brokeback Mountain. The short story on which the screenplay is based was written by Annie Proulx, who writes the marginal into the center of typically masculinist Western plots. Chris Berry has claimed that the story integrates Western melodrama with the Chinese "family-ethics" film that was popular during Lee's childhood. The story tells of Ennis and Jack, who form a deep emotional and physical intimacy while corralling sheep on Brokeback Mountain in Wyoming. We follow them through the years as they try to repress their mutual desire and live "normal" heterosexual lives. Recalling the brutal gay bashing of Matthew Shepard in Wyoming, Jack is, to Ennis' imagination, fatally gay-bashed, leaving Ennis alone and bereft. Brokeback Mountain questions cowboy masculinity and its exclusion of women and all that is deemed "feminine." By the end, Ennis is isolated and alone in his outcast desires, but he finds a way to reincorporate women, through his daughter, into his world.
Another example of a reconstructed border narrative is The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (2005), which has almost everything that border films have offered over the years. Directed by Tommy Lee Jones but written by screen playwright Guillermo Arriaga—best known for writing Amores Perros and 21 Grams—The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada is a revision of the border Western from the perspective of the South. In The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, the Mexican vaquero, described by Herrera-Sobek as the repressed precursor of the all-American cowboy, returns to the Western as a hero and protagonist and as migrant labor to the United States. The return of the vaquero is complicated; he is a humanized character, but his perspective is effaced by the overwhelming emotional excesses of the main Anglo character. Pete admires and appreciates his friend in a manner that says more about how he feels than how Melquiades reciprocates or experiences this friendship. Melquiades passively reflects the care and concern of Pete whose care only intensifies the sympathetic portrayal of the Anglo hero, a dynamic symptomatic of hierarchical interracial and transborder relations.
***
Though this book is concerned with cross-genre border films, it begins and ends with Westerns, since even Latino border films cannot escape the legacy of the Western. In Westerns, the southern frontier marks the limitation of movement, the outer limit of the nation beyond which there is land that cannot be readily conquered. The border delimits freedoms typically associated with the western frontier; Western heroes "make a run for the border" and escape into Mexico, seeking profit and pleasure and escape from the law or other restrictions of North American culture. In border films, the border is variously a significant backdrop, another character in the story, a symbolic zone, a line between opposing forces and values, a line separating barbarism from civilization, the horizon of modernity, and the outer limit of a nation. Whether the border is one or all of these things in each of the border films of this study, it nonetheless is always a reminder that each film is part of a national narrative, part of the many texts and symbols of the myth of the United States as capital of the Americas.
