Hidden Chicano Cinema: Film Dramas in the Borderlands

Borderlands Cinema and the Proxemics of Hidden and Manifest Film Encounters

1 More than once I have recalled an exchange among graduate students in my seminar “Critical Regionalism: Discourses on the Southwest.” Early one semester students brought forth their ideas regarding the ethnic and cultural make-up of the Southwest. From the discussion that ensued I learned that some newcomers to the region were working from the assumption that the American Southwest was a region populated by whites and American Indians, as in the notion of “playing cowboys and Indians.” Indeed, this view seems to follow what recently has become the strongest projection of the region in the American cultural imagination. Other students held to a different view. One student in particular, a well-read, well-traveled white woman, asserted: “I’ve always thought of Mexicans when I think of the Southwest.” As I came to learn, this student’s view had not been colored by what she had read (she was forthcoming about having enrolled in the seminar to read and study the region’s history and literature) but rather from what she had seen and learned from movies. Until then the idea had never dawned on me that segmented and mutually exclusive images of the Southwest lived in the public imagination. This differentiation of the region by race, ethnicity, and culture challenges the notion of “triculturalism ” so often invoked by scholars of the Southwest Borderlands. For some it seems the Southwest is almost always “Indian Country,” a land of desert cliff dwellers and mobile Apaches, a place renowned today for the “Indian Market” held each summer in Santa Fe. For others, the Southwest is a tableau upon which white cowboys yodeling over happy trails are ever 1 Borderlands Cinema and the Proxemics of Hidden and Manifest Film encounters 2 HiDDen CHiCAno CineMA threatened by desperados, bandidos, or “bad hombres” and are driven by their heated desire for hacienda maidens or loosely corseted cantina girls. The discussion with my graduate students, and now this work, circles me back to an early piece of Chicano film scholarship by Carlos Cortes. In “Who Is María? What Is Juan? Dilemmas of Analyzing the Chicano Image in U.S. Feature Films,” Cortes asserts that schools and formal learning are not uniformly synonymous with education (, ). Cortes argues that we are constantly receiving information from a “societal curriculum” (the informal curriculum of family, peers, and the media) that has as much if not more to do with the formation of hegemonic knowledge than do schools and universities: “Movies teach. The celluloid curriculum teaches about myriad topics, including race, ethnicity, culture, and nationality” (, ). Cortes arrives at several considerations that are pertinent to my study. He makes the case that movies provide information about race, ethnicity , culture, and foreignness, they organize information about these very notions, they influence values and attitudes, they help shape expectations of viewers, and they provide models for action (–). Equally useful are Cortes’s observations on the role of moviemakers as textbook writers. Cortes notes that the intention and purpose of filmmakers varies widely and, he maintains, there is a tendency in films to employ ethnicity as a social signpost to mark difference and, in the worst of cases, to perform deviance. According to Cortes, some image-makers intentionally set out to create celluloid portraits of ethnic groups while others do so incidentally by inclusion or exclusion, or by adding ethnic traits to their film characters. Cortes divides U.S. feature films with racial and ethnic content into three categories : () films that use ethnic images to examine national character; () films that attempt to influence societal attitudes toward ethnic groups; and () films that simply take advantage of existing audience predispositions about ethnic groups (often ideas fueled by earlier movies) (–). The Proxemics of Mexicans in Front of the Camera The filming of the Borderlands has been a vast proposition, one that over the decades has involved the crafting of images of Indians, Mexicans, and Anglos, with representatives of each group casting about in a mix of interethnic relationships set against the backdrop of the Southwest as either BorDerlAnDs CineMA 3 a mythic landscape or a foreign and wild place. From time to time some representations have been redeemed, though most remain dated fixtures of a multiethic regionalism that has come to be known as triculturalism in New Mexico or, as José Limón () notes, as wars of maneuver and position in South Texas. In legend, it was none other than Thomas Alva Edison...