Border Bandits: Hollywood on the Southern Frontier

Chapter 4 Urban Frontiers; Border Cinema and the Global City

four urban frontiers border cinema and the global city “ . . . every state is a border state, and almost every city is a border city.” —speaker of the house j. dennis hastert in a press conference about the pervasiveness of the need for increased border and immigration control as an imperative of national security (october 2006) 145 I n March 2006, Angelinos staged the largest demonstration in the history of the city against a bill that wouldfurtherdemonizeundocumentedimmigrants and those who granted them employment, and build a fortress-like wall along the border. The whole nation focused its gaze upon the city as various news programs turned their attention to the issue of immigration and the borderlands . Los Angeles became the epicenter of the immigration debate not only for its large Latino population and its employment in the shadow of the Hollywood media industry, but for its proximity to another mythological construction, the border between the United States and Mexico. Many critics have described Los Angeles as a border city that harbors the border as part of the experience of its topography.1 The idea of Los Angeles as a border city is not meant to diminish the trauma of border crossing or the disorienting experience of entering a new territory or a new nationstate , but rather to explore the various real and symbolic effects of the arbitrary designation of borders and boundaries. The border emerges in the city as a symbolic boundary and a complex of operations, especially in the technologies of surveillance that reach northward and link up to the policing agencies within the city. Border policies target areas of the city that have their own economies and mythoi of sovereignty; abandoned by the city proper, they become tantamount to separate national entities. 146 c h a p t e r f o u r Luis J. Rodriguez nicely captures this urban respatialization in his collection of short stories, appropriately entitled The Republic of East L.A. Many critical Latino films based in Los Angeles link the national borderline with divisions across the city— El Norte (1983), Born in East L.A. (1987), Stand and Deliver (1988), American Me (1992), Mi vida loca (1993), My Family/Mi Familia (1995), Star Maps (1997), Bread and Roses (2000), and Real Women Have Curves (2002)—crystallizing the association of the divided city with border and immigration policies built on typologies of inclusion and exclusion and other schizoid dyads of colonialism: citizen and alien, “legal” and “illegal,” white and “of color,” developed and underdeveloped, First and Third World, and civilization and barbarism. These films challenge the polarization of Los Angeles and expose the exclusion and denigration of Latinos, Chicanos, and Latin American immigrants in the largest border city of the Southwest . The perceived boundaries among neighborhoods become national boundaries. Often those living in these neighborhood republics are represented as objects of police and INS surveillance and control, while middle-class Anglos are objects of police protection. Several of these films explore the literal separation of Latino neighborhoods from the rest of the city. For instance, in El Norte, Rosa, upon her acclimation to Los Angeles, is mystified by the absence of Anglos until her friend informs her that they can be found sequestered in their own neighborhoods . The Chicano residents of east L.A. or Echo Park are subject to discriminatory surveillance by the police, e.g., in Mi vida loca and American Me, or recent immigrants live in constant fear of the INS, e.g., in El Norte. These films deploy stories of identity formation and cultural conflict within narratives critical of the disparities and divisions rendered by uneven disbursements of public funds and the fracturing economies of globalization. One of the primary ideological aims of Latino cinema has been to expose inequities, which supports and enables the different though tandem purpose of imagining different urban dynamics. I examine several critical Latino films that draw characters across the border and into Los Angeles to trace the effect of international political agendas on local circumstances. While these films explore the various divisions and borderlining experiences of the city, they also defy the mythos of the split city and expose the dynamics of power in globalization . I begin with two films that explore the journey into Los Angeles from Mexico from different periods in recent history: El Norte (1983) Urban Frontiers 147 as representative of the conditions of border crossers in Los...