Abstract
The US-Mexico border has been an iconic space in American cinema ever since movies were invented. As the Ringo Kid and Dallas head across the border into Mexico to start a new life at the end of Stagecoach (Ford, 1939) (see figure 0.1), the border becomes a space of renewal and hope where their romance can flourish. For South of the Border (Sherman, 1939) starring Gene Autry’s singing cowboy, the border similarly offers the promise of romance; but while Autry serenades a beautiful señorita one moment, he is captured by Mexican revolutionaries the next. Mexico also becomes synonymous with ideas of revolution in films such as Vera Cruz (Aldrich, 1954) and The Professionals (Brooks, 1966) as American heroes head south of the border to join the revolution and test their political ambitions against those of the Mexican radicals. In these and other movies, crossing the US-Mexico border has served as an escape from the regulations of American law. As Bart and Laurie tear south through the United States in Gun Crazy (Lewis, 1950), the international line harbors an elusive promise of escape from the police on their tail. But cinematic border crossings are also policed and regulated, particularly for those seeking to head north into the United States, and films such as Border Incident (Mann, 1949) dramatize the exploitation and hardships faced by Mexican workers in the American south.
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Notes
The chronology of the Cold War has been much debated among historians, with some arguing that it lasted in total from 1945 to 1991. However, I use “cold war period” to refer to what M. Keith Booker terms the “long 1950s” and Alan Nadel calls the “peak cold war,” covering the period of approximately 1946 to 1964, and centering on the 1950s. As Booker argues, this periodization encompasses the development of the Cold War from its initial outbreak up until the period when “nuclear and anti-Soviet paranoia in the United States began noticeably to decline.” M. Keith Booker, Monsters, Mushroom Clouds, and the Cold War: American Science Fiction and the Roots of Postmodernism, 1946–1964 (Westport, CT, and London: Greenwood Press, 2001), 3
Alan Nadel, Containment Culture: American Narrative, Postmodernism and the Atomic Age (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 1995), 4.
For a definition of the long Cold War, see, for example, David S. Painter, The Cold War: An International History (London: Routledge, 1999), 1.
The vast majority of critical work on Hollywood cinema and American culture, more generally during the Cold War, focuses on specific genres. See, for example, Mark Jancovich, Rational Fears: American Horror in the 1950s (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996)
Cynthia Hendershot, Paranoia, the Bomb and 1950s Science Fiction Films (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1999)
David Seed, American Science Fiction and the Cold War: Literature and Film (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999)
Stanley Corkin, Cowboys as Cold Warriors: The Western and U.S. History (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2004).
Notable exceptions include Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, 1988) and Nadel, Containment Culture, works which cut across generic frameworks.
Yi-Fu Tuan, Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes, and Values (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 2.
Michel Foucault, “Questions on Geography,” in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, ed. and trans. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon, 1980), 77.
Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” Diacritics 16 (1) (1986): 22.
For example, Jane Tompkins and Deborah Carmichael’s books center on cinematic space and the Western, while Vivan Sobchack, Rob Kitchen, and James Kneale have considered space in science fiction. Jane Tompkins, West of Everything: The Inner Life of Westerns (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992)
Deborah A. Carmichael, ed., The Landscape of Hollywood Westerns: Ecocriticism in an American Film Genre (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2006)
Vivian Sobchack, Screening the Space: The American Science Fiction Film (New York: Ungar, 1987)
Rob Kitchin and James Kneale, eds., Lost in Space: Geographies of Science Fiction (London: Continuum, 2002).
Pamela Robertson Wojcik, The Apartment Plot: Urban Living in American Film and Popular Culture, 1945–1975 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 8.
Peter Lev, The Fifties: Transforming the Screen, 1950–1959 (Berkley and London: University of California Press, 2003), 63.
Franco Moretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees (London and New York: Verso, 2007), 3.
Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 38–9.
For insightful histories of the border that detail such changes, see, for example, David Lorey, The TJ.S.-Mexican Border in the Twentieth Century: A History of Economic and Social Transformation (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1999)
Samuel Truett and Elliott Young, eds., Continental Crossroads: Remapping U.S.-Mexico Borderlands History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004)
Joseph Nevins, Operation Gatekeeper and Beyond: The War on “Illegals” and the Remaking of the U.S.-Mexico Boundary, 2nd ed. (New York and London: Routledge, 2010).
More specifically on the border and migration, see Kitty Calavita, Inside the State: The Bracero Program, Immigration, and the INS (New York and London: Routledge, 1992)
Patrick Ettinger, Imaginary Lines: Border Enforcement and the Origins of Undocumented Immigration, 1882–1930 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009)
Raul A. Fernandez and Gilbert G. Gonzalez, A Century of Chicano History: Empire, Nations and Migration (New York and London: Routledge, 2003).
A note on terminology: I use “undocumented” to describe migrants without official permission to stay or work in the United States throughout the book. Today’s popular lexicon of “illegal aliens” and “illegals” is both pejorative and inaccurate; as Kevin Johnson argues, the term “illegal” “fails to distinguish between types of undocumented persons in the United States.” Given the specific historical context and the fact that US immigration agencies often turned a blind eye to such undocumented migration during this period (see chapter 3), the illegality of this kind of border crossing is itself questionable. I further differentiate between “migrant” and “immigrant” deliberately. “Migrant” is used to describe people intending to stay temporarily or periodically in the United States, as was the case for many Mexican workers crossing the border during the 1950s. “Immigrant” is used to refer to those with the intention of staying permanently in the country. Kevin R. Johnson, The “Huddled Masses” Myth: Immigration and Civil Rights (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2004), 156.
For authors who take a different stand on these terminological issues see, for example, Linda Newton, Illegal, Alien, or Immigrant: The Politics of Immigration Reform (New York: New York University Press, 2008)
Frank D. Bean and Marta Tienda, The Hispanic Population of the United States (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1987).
John A. Garcia, “The Chicano Movement: Its Legacy for Politics and Policy,” in Chicanas/Chicanos at the Crossroads: Social, Economic, and Political Change, ed. David R. Maciel and Isidro D. Ortiz (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1996), 83–107.
See Timothy J. Dunn, The Militarization of the U.S.-Mexico Border 1978–1992: Low-Intensity Conflict Doctrine Comes Home (Austin: Center for Mexican American Studies, University of Texas, 1996).
For useful accounts of situation on the borderline into the twenty-first century, see, for example, Kathleen Staudt and Irasema Coronado, Fronteras No Más: Towards Social Justice at the U.S.-Mexico Border (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002)
Andrew Grant Wood, ed., On the Border: Society and Culture between the United States and Mexico (Lanham, MD, and Oxford: SR Books, 2004)
Alejandro Lugo, Fragmented Lives, Assembled Parts: Culture, Capitalism, and Conquest at the U.S.-Mexico Border (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008)
David Spener and Kathleen Staudt, eds., The U.S.-Mexico Border: Transcending Divisions, Contesting Identities (Boulder, CO, and London: Lynne Rienner, 1998)
Pablo Vila, Border Identifications: Narratives of Religion, Gender, and Class on the U.S.-Mexico Border (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005)
Ed Vulliamy, Amexica: War along the Borderline (London: Vintage, 2011)
Melissa W. Wright, “Necropolitics, Narcopolitics, and Femicide: Gendered Violence on the Mexico-U.S. Border,” Signs 36 (3) (2011): 707–31.
David R. Maciel, El Norte: The Jj’.S.-Mexican Border in Contemporary Cinema (San Diego, CA: Institute for Regional Studies of the Californias, San Diego State University, 1990), 83.
Camilla Fojas, Border Bandits: Hollywood on the Southern Frontier (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008), 2.
Carlos E. Cortês, “To View a Neighbor: The Hollywood Textbook on Mexico,” in Images of Mexico in the United States, ed. John Coatsworth and Carlos Rico (San Diego: Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies, University of California, 1989), 95.
See, for example, Edward Renehan, The Monroe Doctrine: The Cornerstone of American Foreign Policy (New York: Chelsea House, 2007).
Mark Philip Bradley, “Decolonization, the Global South, and the Cold War, 1919–1962,” in The Cambridge History of the Cold War, Volume 1: Origins, ed. Melvyn P. Leffler and Odd Arne Westad (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 473.
Christian G. Appy, “Eisenhower’s Guatemalan Doodle, or How to Draw, Deny, and Take Credit for a Third World Coup,” in Cold War Constructions: The Political Culture of United States Imperialism, 1945–1966, ed. Christian G. Appy (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2000), 186.
Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Atheneum, 1992), 407
John A. Britton, Revolution and Ideology: Images of the Mexican Revolution in the United States (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1995), 8.
William Pietz, “The ‘Post-Colonialism’ of Cold War Discourse,” Social Text 19–20 (1988): 55.
See also Booker, Monsters, 8–9 and M. Keith Booker, Colonial Power, Colonial Texts: India in the Modern British Novel (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1997).
Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties, revised ed. (New York: Free Press, 1962), 404–6.
John Urry, The Tourist Gaze: Leisure and Travel in Contemporary Societies, 2nd ed. (London: Sage, 2002), 2.
Bronwyn Morkham and Russell Staiff, “The Cinematic Tourist: Perception and Subjectivity,” in The Tourist as a Metaphor of the Social World, ed. Graham M. S. Dann (New York: CABI, 2002), 311, n. 1.
Giuliana Bruno, Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture and Film (New York and London: Verso, 2002).
Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (repr., London: Vintage, 1994 [1993]), 93.
Cole Harris, “How Did Colonialism Dispossess? Comments from an Edge of Empire,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 94 (1) (2004): 175.
Genre is, of course, a much-debated and contentious term in film scholarship, and a structuring framework that this study seeks to avoid. I understand genres to be, as Rick Altman has contended, “not just discursive but, because they are mechanisms for co-ordinating diverse users, multi-discursive. Instead of utilizing a single master language…a genre may appropriately be considered multi-coded,” comprising different, overlapping definitions and assignations according to different historical periods and different users. Rick Altman, Film/Genre (London: British Film Institute, 1999), 208. Genre debates are discussed in more detail in chapters 4 and 5.
See Christopher Frayling, Spaghetti Westerns: Cowboys and Europeans from Karl May to Sergio Leone (repr., London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 1998 [1981]), 222; Corkin, Cowboys as Cold Warriors and Corkin, “Cowboys and Free Markets: Post-World War II Westerns and U.S. Hegemony,” Cinema Journal 39 (3) (2000): 66–91.
For other studies of the West and the Western that focus on frontier mythology see, for example, Peter C. Rollins and John E. O’Connor, eds., Hollywood’s West: The American Frontier in Film, Television and History (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2005)
Jennifer L. McMahon and B. Steve Csaki, eds., The Philosophy of the Western (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2010)
Robert G. Athearn, The Mythic West in Twentieth Century America (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1986)
Chris Bruce, Myth of the West (New York: Rizzoli, 1990)
Richard A. Maynard, The American West on Film: Myth and Reality (Rochelle Park, NJ: Hayden, 1974).
For interpretations that question the relationship between the West and the frontier, see Patricia Nelson Limerick, “The Adventures of the Frontier in the Twentieth Century,” in The Frontier in American Culture: Essays by Richard White and Patricia Nelson Limerick, ed. James Grossman (Berkley and London: University of California Press, 1994), 67–102
Gary J. Hausladen, ed., Western Places, American Myths: How We Think about the West (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2003)
William G. Robbins, Colony and Empire: The Capitalist Transformation of the American West (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1994).
Peter Stanfield, Hollywood, Westerns and the 1930s: The Lost Trail (Exeter: Exeter University Press, 2001), 8.
A non-exhaustive list of other useful titles on cold war culture includes Appy, Cold War Constructions; Tom Engelhardt, The End of Victory Culture: Cold War America and the Disillusioning of a Generation (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2007)
Woody Haut, Pulp Fiction: Hardboiled Fiction and the Cold War (London: Serpent’s Tail, 1995)
Richard M. Fried, The Russians Are Coming! The Russians Are Coming!: Pageantry and Patriotism in Cold-War America (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998)
Lary May, ed., Recasting America: Culture and Politics in the Age of Cold War (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1989)
Stephen J. Whitfield, The Culture of the Cold War (Baltimore, MD, and London: John Hopkins University Press, 1996)
Frances Stonor Saunders, Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War (London: Granta, 1999).
Ronald Radosh and Allis Radosh, Red Star over Hollywood: The Film Colony’s Long Romance with the Left (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2005), 207
Lary May, The Hiß Tomorrow: Hollywood and the Politics of the American Way (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 2.
Drew Casper, Postwar Hollywood, 1946–1962 (Maiden, MA, and Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 2007), 5.
In addition to the works mentioned in the text, see also Paul Buhle and David Wagner, A Very Dangerous Citizen: Abraham Lincoln Polonsky and the Hollywood Left (Berkley and London: University of California Press, 2001)
Bob Hertzberg, The Left Side of the Screen: Communist and Left-Winß Ideology in Hollywood, 1929–2009 (Jefferson, NC, and London: McFarland and Co., Inc., Publishers, 2011)
Frank Krutnik et al eds., “UnAmerican” Hollywood: Politics and Film in the Blacklist Era (Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007)
Larry Ceplair, “The Film Industry’s Battle against Left-Wing Influences, from the Russian Revolution to the Blacklist,” Film History 20 (4) (2008): 399–411.
Specifically on the HUAC investigations in Hollywood, see Larry Ceplair and Steven Englund, The Inquisition in Hollywood: Politics and the Film Community,1930–1960 (repr., Berkley and London: University of California Press, 1983 [1980])
M. Keith Booker, From Box Office to Ballot Box: The American Political Tilm (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2007)
John Joseph Gladchuk, Hollywood and Anticommunism: HUAC and the Evolution of the Red Menace, 1935–1950 (London: Routledge, 2007).
Paul Buhle and David Wagner, Radical Hollywood: The Untold Story behind America’s Favorite Movies (New York: New Press, 2002), xvii.
John Fousek, To Lead the Free World: American Nationalism and the Cultural Roots of the Cold War, (Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 2.
Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (repr., London and New York: Verso, 2010 [1997]), xvi.
Rebecca M. Schreiber, Cold War Exiles in Mexico: U.S. Dissidents and the Culture of Resistance (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), ix–xii.
In this approach, I draw on the concept of mobility as developed particularly by Urry and Peter Adey. See John Urry, Mobilities (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2007)
Peter Adey, Mobility (London: Routledge, 2010). Chapter 6 further elaborates on theories of mobility in relation to regulation. Of course, no cultural text can be reduced to a single simple political position, and it is certainly not the aim of this book to label particular films as left-wing, liberal, radical, or conservative. Rather, taking into consideration the complex and contradictory politics of these texts, I will question how multiple influences including filmmakers’ stated personal political positions may have impacted on films and will track political tensions within representations of colonialism at the border. In doing so, I seek to emphasize the plurality and diversity of political reactions to American cold war policies that are articulated through the US-Mexico border. I make use of terms such as “left-wing” and “right-wing” but I do not seek to flatten the politics of these films or their filmmakers into simple binaries, but to emphasize the fact that each text presents a complex, contradictory, and different politics. Indeed, as Richard Pells has argued, during the 1950s, “the terms liberal and conservative had already begun to shed whatever precise political meanings they might have once possessed.” In using this terminology I wish not only to evoke the historical slippage of such labels, but also to indicate the broad positioning of people and films discussed within the political continuum and to emphasize the differences between their ideologies.
Richard H. Pells, The Liberal Mind in a Conservative Age: American Intellectuals in the 1940s and 1950s, 2nd ed. (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1989), vii.
Peter Jackson, Maps of Meaning: An Introduction to Cultural Geography (repr., London and New York: Routledge, 2001 [1989]), 3. Emphasis in original.
See Bruno, Atlas, and Tom Conley, Cartographic Cinema (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2007).
Bruno, Atlas, 16. One of the few texts written about the border that has a specifically spatial focus is Lawrence Arthur Herzog’s Where North Meets South: Cities, Space and Politics on the U.S.-Mexico Border (Austin: University of Texas, 1990).
Edward Soja, Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places (Cambridge, MA, and Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishers, 1996), 3.
Edward Said, Orientalism (repr., London: Penguin, 2003 [1978]).
For example, Dennis Porter argues that Said “fails to historicize adequately the texts he cites and summarizes, finding always the same triumphant discourse when frequently several are in conflict.” Dennis Porter, “Orientalism and Its Problems,” in Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader, ed. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 160. Bhabha too criticizes Orientalism, claiming that the book retains the binary opposition that separates knowledge and power that Said seeks to deconstruct. Bhabha, Location of Culture, 72.
The idea of a nation as an “imagined political community” is borrowed from Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London and New York: Verso, 1983), 6.
The newspaper primarily used is the New York Times. As one of the leading national newspapers in terms of both circulation figures and prestige, the Times held a highly influential position in the United States during this period. As Donald Shaw and Charles McKenzie argue, in addition to priding itself on publishing “all the news that is fit to print,” the Times served the “normative role of establishing news agendas for both [its] communities and the nation—and for television networks and national magazines.” Donald Shaw and Charles McKenzie, “American Daily Newspaper Evolution: Past, Present… and Future,” in The Function of Newspapers in Society: A Global Perspective, ed. Shannon E. Martin and David A. Copeland (Westport, CT, and London: Praeger, 2003), 140.
Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore, MD, and London: The John Hopkins University Press, 1976), see, for example, 24.
Although I do retain “America” to refer to Colonial America. Jeffrey Geiger, American Documentary Film: Projecting the Nation (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), 1.
As Geiger notes, alternative approaches to the use of “America” are also offered by Malini Johar Schueller, U.S. Orientalisms: Race, Nation, and Gender in Literature, 1790–1890 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998)
Mary A. Renda, Taking Tahiti: Military Occupation and the Culture of U.S. Imperialism, 1915–1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001).
Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987).
Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987).
On the Chicano and Chicana/o movements see, for example, David R. Maciel and Isidro D. Ortiz, eds., Chicanas/Chicanos at the Crossroads; Angie Chabram-Dernersesian, ed., The Chicana/o Cultural Studies Reader (London: Routledge, 2006)
Rodolfo F. Acuna, The Making of Chicana/o Studies: In the Trenches of Academe (New Brunswick, NJ, and London: Rutgers University Press, 2010)
Adela de la Torre and Beatriz M. Pesquera, Buildingwith Our Hands: New Directions in Chicana Studies (Berkley and London: University of California Press, 1993).
Specifically on Chicano and Chicana/o studies and film, see Chon A. Noriega, ed., Chicanos and Film: Representation and Resistance (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992)
Chon A. Noriega, ed., Visible Nations: Latin American Cinema and Video (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000)
Frederick Luis Aldama, Brown on Brown: Chicano/a Representations of Gender, Sexuality, and Ethnicity (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005)
Rosa Linda Fregoso, The Bronze Screen: Chicana and Chicano Film Culture (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1993).
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Fuller, S. (2015). Introduction. In: The US-Mexico Border in American Cold War Film. Screening Spaces. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137535603_1
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