The US-Mexico border in American movies: A political geography perspective

Geopolitics

Volumn 10, Issue 2, 2005, Pages 204-221

  dell'Agnese, Elena ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF MILANO BICOCCA   (Italy)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

GEOPOLITICS; POLITICAL BORDER; POLITICAL RELATIONS;

MEXICO [NORTH AMERICA]; NORTH AMERICA; UNITED STATES; WESTERN HEMISPHERE; WORLD;

EID: 19644387499     PISSN: 14650045     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/14650040590946548     Document Type: Article

References (52)

1. As stated by Daniels, 'national identities are co-ordinated, often largely defined, by "legends and landscapes"; by stories of golden ages, enduring traditions, heroic deeds and dramatic destinies located in ancient and promised home-lands with hallowed sites and scenery. The symbolic activation of time and space, often drawing on religious sentiment, gives shape to the "imagined community" of the nation. Landscapes, whether focusing on single monuments or framing stretches of scenery, provide visible shape; they picture the nation. As exemplars of moral order and aesthetic harmony, particular landscapes achieve the status of national icons'. See S. Daniels, Fields of Vision. Landscape Imagery and National Identity in England & the United States (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 1993) p.5.
2. This is true for landscapes that are the product of the works of painters and designers, which are the focus of Daniels's research, but also for literary and cinematic landscapes. See J.R. Short, Imagined Country, Society, Culture and Environment (London and New York: Routledge 1991).
3. M. Shapiro, Cinematic Political Thought: Narrating Race, Nation and Gender (New York: New York University Press 1999).
4. C.F. Fox, The Fence and the River. Culture and Politics at the U.S.-Mexico Border (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press 1999) p.76.
5. R.L. Fregoso, 'Recycling Colonialist Fantasies on the Texas Borderlands', in H. Naficy (ed.), Home, Exile, Homeland: Film, Media, and the Politics of Place (London and New York: Routledge 1999) pp.169-92.
6. See Fox (note 3) p.76.
7. Postcards also served this purpose, which, as stated by Fox (note 3) p.77, 'satisfied the public's hunger for images of the war, especially for whose who did not have access to movie theatres'. See in this regard P. Vanderwood and F.N. Samponaro, Border Fury. A Picture Postcard Record of Mexico's Revolution and U.S. War Preparedness, 1910-1917 (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press 1988).
8. See in this regard P. Vanderwood and F.N. Samponaro, Border Fury. A Picture Postcard Record of Mexico's Revolution and U.S. War Preparedness, 1910-1917 (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press 1988).
9. See Fox (note 3) p.76.
10. These films depicted the persecution of national and racial stereotypes developed as early as the 1830s, when American popular literature began demonising Mexicans as lazy, stupid and cruel. At the beginning of the twentieth century, silent films also had their input, providing images of Mexicans as bandits attacking white people. See L. Holtzman, Media Messages. What Film, Television, and Popular Music Teach Us About Race, Class, Gender and Sexual Orientation (New York and London: M.E. Sharpe 2000) p.225.
11. In this regard, see D. Maciel, El Norte. The U.S.-Mexican Border in Contemporary Cinema (San Diego, CA: Institute for Regional Studies of the Californias 1990).
12. A. Horton, 'Reel Landscapes: Cinematic Environments Documented and Created', in I. Robertson and P. Richards (eds), Studying Cultural Landscapes (London: Arnold 2003), pp.71-92.
13. A classic contribution on this topic is W. Prescott, Political Frontiers and Boundaries (Chicago, IL: Aldine 1987).
14. See also D. Newman, 'Boundaries', in J. Agnew, K. Mitchell and G. Toal (eds), A Companion to Political Geography (Malden, MA: Blackwell 2003), pp.123-37.
15. In this essay, I will take into account at least three of the four elements outlined by L. Zonn, 'Tusayan, the Traveler and the IMAX Theatre: An Introduction to Place Images in Media', in L. Zonn (ed.), Place Images in Media. Portrayal, Experience, and Meaning (Savage, MD: Rowman and Littlefield 1990) pp.1-5, for analysing the images of places in media: the medium, the place, the collection of individuals who created the image. Discussing audience, the fourth element, is more complex, since common visions associated with a specific place or with a certain landscape either can or cannot be shared by different audiences. From a critical geography perspective, however, we may consider them as the result of a certain geopolitical discourse, locally embedded and historically produced.
16. G. Ó Tuathail, Critical Geopolitics (Mineapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press 1996),
17. and G. Ó Thuatail and S. Dalby (eds), Rethinking Geopolitics (London: Routledge 1998).
18. As stated by J. Burgess and J. Gold in their seminal study Geography, the Media and Popular Culture(London and Sydney: Croom Helm 1985) p.I, 'Raymond Chandler is as valuable a source as Thomas Hardy, and the Daily Mirror has as much to say about the nature of places as the Geographical Journal'.
19. In fact, in those years 'a great number of B Westerns were produced in which cowboys vested with the aura of the Old West did battle with problems and villains from the modern world - gangsters, corrupt political bosses ... Nazi agents', R. Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation, The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press 1998), p.273.
20. Ibid. p.276.
21. Since, as J. Limón, American Encounters: Greater Mexico, the United States, and the Erotics of Culture (Boston, MA: Beacon Press 1998), p.199, rightly points out, 'the western, with its ritual expectation of the "ride to Mexico" for manly adventure, for sex and drink but also for self-aggrandizement, is fundamentally a genre of imperialism'.
22. L. Engel (ed.), The Big Empty. Essay on the Land as Narrative (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press 1994).
23. The Cisco Kid was introduced by O. Henry in a series of short stories that were later collected and published in Heart of the West (1907). His adventures were portrayed in about 30 movies (the first silent, the last shot in 1994) as well as in a television series that ran for 156 episodes from 1950 to 1956.
24. W. Wright, Six Guns and Society. A Structural Study of the Western (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press 1975),
25. and N. Carroll, 'The Professional Western: South of the Border', in E. Buscombe and R.E. Pearson (eds), Back in the Saddle Again. New Essays on the Western (London: British Film Institute 1998) pp.46-62.
26. M. Coyne, The Crowded Prairie: American National Identity in the Hollywood Western (London: I.B. Tauris 1997), p.158.
27. There are also comedies in a similar vein. In Three Amigos (1986), for instance, some American actors posing as western heroes unwittingly come to the aid of some poor Mexicans.
28. Engel (note 18) p. 227.
29. They die fighting, but not without demonstrating their American superiority, since they know how to handle military technology (in the form of a machine gun) much better than the locals.
30. The other two volumes of McCarthy's trilogy are The Crossing and Cities of the Plain.
31. The Mexican cannot be listed among movies about the border, since Jerry goes to Mexico by plane. It is interesting all the same because it reveals a self-consciousness about stereotyped American attitudes towards their southern neighbour, while being a victim of the same stereotypes it is trying to highlight. For example, two of the characters are shown renting a car when they land in Mexico. Both of them ask for a 'Mexican car', instead of accepting the perfectly acceptable American make offered by the rental firm. Also, when in Mexico the Americans are shown speaking in a very stupid and condescending way - 'I no fuck around, entiende?' says one of them to a Mexican. 'Do you have a speech impediment?' is the Mexican's answer. On the other hand, Mexico is portrayed as a crazy country where anything can happen, including dying in a noche de fiesta and people speaking with dogs, all in a lethargic society that is apparently sleeping off its own past.
32. See A. Garcia, 'Casting out the serpent: Eroticised Violence and the Mexicana Body in Hollywood Cinema', Diálogo, No.6, Winter/ Spring 2002.
33. The metaphor of the border as a 'magic curtain' is introduced by T. Torrans, The Magic Curtain: The Mexican-American Border in Fiction, Film, and Song (Texas Christian University Press: Forth Worth 2002).
34. S. Vaquera-Vasquez, 'Wandering in the Borderlands: Mapping an Imaginative Geography of the Border', Latin American Issues, Vol.1, 1998, section VI.
35. After Mexico's participation in the Second World War, it was no longer the time for openly racist, overtly anti-Mexican movies, such as those produced in the years of the Punitive Expedition. In addition, immediately after the end of the war, the United States launched the so called Bracero Program, under which Mexican workers could be legally hired in America. Notwithstanding this bilateral agreement, many Mexicans did not undergo the bureaucracy required to get legal permission and illegal immigration continued to claim its many victims.
36. R. Kitchin and J. Kneale (eds), Lost in Space. Geographies of Science Fiction (London: Continuum 2002).
37. See S. Mains, 'Imagining the Border and Southern Spaces: Cinematic Explorations of Race and Gender', GeoJournal, 2004, pp.253-64.
38. Fregoso (note 4) p.170.
39. See Fox (note 3).
40. Fregoso (note 4) p.178.
41. Among the others, see Clark-Jones, Limón (note 17),
42. Fregoso (note 4),
43. Shapiro (note 2),
44. Mains (note 32);
45. and J. Burton-Carvajal, 'Oedipus Tex/Oedipus Mex: Triangulations of Paternity, Race, and Nation in John Sayles's Lone Star', in E. Shoat and R. Stam (eds), Multiculturalism, Postcoloniality and Transnational Media (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press 2003) pp.129-52,
46. W. Somerson, 'White Men on the Edge. Rewriting the Borderlands in Lone Star', Men and Masculinities 6 (3 January 2004) pp.215-39.
47. See Límon (note 17), 1998,
48. Fregoso (note 4)
49. and Burton-Carvajal (note 36).
50. See Fregoso (note 4) p.183.
51. The notion of 'contact zone' ins introduced by M.L. Pratt, Imperial Eyes. Travel Writing and Transculturation (London & New York: Routledge 1992).
52. See Maciel (note 9).