Hidden Chicano Cinema: Film Dramas in the Borderlands

Lives and Faces Plying through Exotica

81 in contrast to Native Americans, who have been the subject of a great many ethnographic films and photographic surveys, there is a comparatively small amount of ethnographic materials related to the Mexican Americans of the Southwest before the s.1 As a rule, the visual ethnographies that do exist, at best, are ad hoc assessments of Chicano material culture (i.e., photo surveys of religious iconography, shrines, courtyards, home altars, roadside memorials, and so on). The documentation of these places and artifacts is almost always severed from the people and their cultural ways. As such, exceptions to this pattern are fundamentally important in augmenting the visual representations that are available of Mexican-origin peoples in the United States. Despite its shortcomings, visual documentation still affords the possibility to see how members of subaltern communities lived out their lives in subtle tension with greater American society. The collection of Farm Security Administration (FSA) photographs of towns and villages in the Southwest stand out as the exception to omission of Mexican Americans in the Depression-era ethnographic record of the nation. For this reason the work of FSA photographers Russell Lee and John Collier Jr. merit consideration here. 4 lives and Faces Plying through exotica then i knew we had won something they could never take away— something i could leave to our children—and they, the salt of the earth, would inherit it. — esperanza Quintero, Salt of the Earth, 1954 you are the salt of the earth. —Matthew 5:13 82 HiDDen CHiCAno CineMA Russell Lee came to New Mexico in  and returned in  as a photographer employed by the Farm Security Administration, a New Deal project devoted to documenting the devastation the Depression visited upon the nation’s rural populations (Wroth , ). Other FSA notables include Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, Maynard Dixon, and Gordon Parks. Lee’s images of the nuevomexicanos and of tejanos are imbued with qualities that set them apart from the aesthetically conscious photos by other Southwestern devotees such as Ansel Adams, Eliot Porter, and Edward Weston. In considering the New Mexico portion of Lee’s work, William Wroth observes that the photographs “constitute an important visual document of a way of life that was and is still little known and appreciated by the larger society” (, ). Lee’s work, to a photo, privileges depictions of people over those of the landscape and the built environment. In Lee’s photographs men, women, and children can be found completely absorbed in work, play, and ritual. Put another way, the people of the communities he photographed can be seen, asserting agency in any number of culture-making endeavors. Lee records human activity in the pursuit of self-sufficiency and independence, an approach that ties his work to a school of socially relevant documentary photography that had begun with the documentation of immigrant tenements in New York at the turn of the twentieth century. Photographing America’s Forgotten People My specific aim in discussing Lee here is to show that his work allows the image of the Spanish-speaking Borderlands communities to ply through the layers of postcolonial exotic imagery that had been brokered and fashioned into the adventure and vengeance narratives of earlier eras. I do this even as on the face of things this view contradicts Rosa Linda Fregoso ’s estimation of Lee’s presence in the Borderlands. Fregoso asserts that Lee was a border crosser (more a transgressor), “an image maker crossed the border into Mexican Texas, inserting tejano bodies into representational space” (Fregoso , ). Given the nature of Lee’s New Mexico and Texas photographic commissions, I would argue that Lee’s presence, equally in the villages of Taos and Rio Arriba counties in  or a few year later in Corpus Christi, was meant to sensitize the public at large and to PlyinG tHrouGH exotiCA 83 change public policy and spur government interventions on behalf of the populations he photographed. I also contend that by inserting tejano and nuevomexicano bodies “into representational space,” as Fregoso offers, Lee sought to provide America at large its first glimpse into mexicano lives in the Borderlands by publishing these same photographs in national publications such as Survey Graphic, U.S. Camera, and Look. Lee did not sensationalize his subjects, and in both Texas and New Mexico he knew better than to intrude on Indo-Hispano religion and cultural practices as the vagabond photographers of the Penitentes had done in years...