Hidden Chicano Cinema: Film Dramas in the Borderlands

Conclusion

242 it has come time to ask what might be profitably learned from stringing together a comparison of a handful of difficult-to-locate films and proceeding to analyze them on account of two elements: first, they happened to be filmed in the Southwest Borderlands, and second, they present and in some instances re-present mexicano/Chicano/Hispanic stories. In some instances, these are stories we know a great deal about, while others are relatively unknown. My initial supposition about the films and documentaries I have looked at here is that all point to a set of offscreen stories about intercultural encounters. It holds true that films generally say something about the period in which they were made and about the people represented in them, but what I did not anticipate finding when I began this work was the sheer ironic power that emerges from comparing the filmic drama of these works to the social drama that shapes their appearance in the first place. In a real sense, here is a set of film representations that spring from the particularly complex contact zone that is the Southwest Borderlands. These films share a common denominator, since to one degree or another they are infused with the historical, cultural, racial, gender, socioeconomic, religious, and ethnic complexity of the Borderlands . When Governor David Cargo established the first New Mexico Film Commission in , he pushed to bring Southwestern and New Mexico– themed film projects to the state. By the summer of  such prospects were on the horizon: Conclusion ConClusion 243 In a news release in late June, Cargo said a th Century Fox special, “Everyday is a Special War,” will use the Santa Fe Fiesta as background , as will a Walt Disney feature. A Western by Jack Warner will be filmed in northern New Mexico, and a Metro-GoldwynMayer production in Albuquerque, Roswell, or Las Cruces. “Red Sky at Morning” is definitely scheduled for the state this summer, said Gov. Cargo, “the filming to be done at Santa Fe, Taos and Truchas.” (Las Cruces Citizen-Sun, July , ) New Mexico’s culture and history were already being offered up for popular consumption. Where better than the Southwest Borderlands to film gunfights , fiestas, TV episodes of Lassie, Gunsmoke, The Virginian, and the antics of a present-day paranoid cowboy chased by Apaches?1 Where else could you find real Indians, real Indian reservations, real Mexicans, and real Mexican American villages to serve as on-location film lots? In addition to Red Sky at Morning, New Mexico did get Easy Rider (),2 The Hired Hand (), and several Billy Jack movies, along with a host of lesser-known westerns. New Mexico’s current film industry boom was led by former governor Bill Richardson. His new film commission did little of the old romancing of the Southwest that characterized Cargo’s tenure. The present situation is cut and dried. It makes no overtures to culture, history, or even western landscape. Film commission representatives in fact crow about the fact that Albuquerque (the site of most of the current filmmaking in the region) can double for Phoenix, Los Angeles, Montreal, and other urban locales. There is simply not much call for filming against the backdrop of the Santa Fe Fiestas, Chaco Canyon, or the high-low ranching country of eastern New Mexico, not that (as I have tried to demonstrate here) Southwest exotica and landscape was ever a panacea. The new film commission ’s agenda is about providing tax incentives to film companies, enticing film executives to take advantage of New Mexico’s lower production costs, and accommodating production teams and movie executives when and wherever they wish to set up filming in the state. Consequently, it is difficult to know whether the current spate of filmmaking will or will not do anything positive or negative in the matter of representing Chicanos, Indo-Hispanos, or Borderlands culture in cinema. We know that it played almost no role in supporting independent and 244 HiDDen CHiCAno CineMA documentary filmmakers. This work is in some ways detachable from film production needs. Still, it is important to ask what is to become of the entire matter of cultural encounters. Have the old Borderlands themes and antagonisms been surpassed? Are we in a post-Chicano era? Is the contact zone no longer relevant? Where have all the Indians and Mexicans gone? In , the independent specialty film The Penitent, starring the late Raul Julia...