“Crossing the Beast”: American Identity and Frontier Mythology in Sin Nombre

Abstract

The 2,000-mile border that separates Mexico from the United States has long provided producers of popular culture with fertile grounds for exploring American identity. Hollywood has typically viewed the region through the broader prism of US national frontier mythology, cementing the Western as its inspirational genre of choice for myth-infused explorations of the borderlands. The source of the frontier myth itself was a political discourse informed by notions of Anglo-Saxon racial superiority, American exceptionalism and of imperialism justified through divine sanction. Among other things, belief in this Manifest Destiny misrepresented a history by which one can acknowledge Mexico as the victim of US aggression. The 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ended one-and-a-half years of a conflict that Mexicans still call the War of the North American Invasion. In defeat, vast tracts of Mexico’s territory-from Texas to California-were ceded to the United States and the US-Mexico border was officially established as a geopolitical entity. Throughout the twentieth century, the US attitude to the border has generally been one of paranoid defense: typically (if tacitly) understood in terms of race, of safeguarding Anglo-American civilization from the Latin American other, something “to distinguish us from them” (Anzaldúa 25, original italics).¹ Maintaining this distinction meant resisting-often with extreme violence-the attempted “incursions” of this other.