[In the following essay, Limόn argues that Lone Star presents a “radical revision” of traditional gender roles in relationships between the Anglo-American and Mexican communities.]

John Sayles's new film, Lone Star, will provide closure to an argument I wish to make concerning certain American identities. I will also have occasion to revisit another classic treatment of such identities in the film High Noon. Before film became their primary discourse, these identities were first fully articulated in nineteenth-century dime novels of the West, many of which were, like Lone Star, set in Texas. A now very distant discursive cousin of the Sayles film called, in fact, Little Lone Star (1886) and written by one Sam Hall features Anita, “a physically precocious” young Mexican woman living on a Texas hacienda, “whose passions and complexion are compared to the red-hot volcanoes of her native Mexico” (Pettit 39). She is being threatened with rape by Caldelas the Coyote, a vicious, degenerate Mexican bandit, until she is rescued by a strong, clean-cut, fair-haired Anglo-Texan cowboy named William Waldron. Anita reciprocates the sexual interest of the “fair-haired hero” (Pettit 39). Such identities were to be on display again and again in fiction, film, song, and even television advertising. Who can forget the Frito-Bandito, cartoon cousin of Caldelas the Coyote? We thus have inherited a potent and perduring American cultural iconography of Anglo-American/Mexican relations that has a special intensity in Texas.

In this essay, I take up the intertwined theoretical spheres of post-colonialism, race, and sexuality to re-examine this iconography in the conflicted social history of these two peoples. I suggest that this iconographic relationship goes beyond simple mutual stereotyping; it has politically critical ambivalence. Sayles's Lone Star offers a radical revision of this iconography and its inherent ambivalence, a revision consistent with a major shift in the social relations between Anglos and Mexicans, at least in Texas, at the present moment.

1. ICONOGRAPHY, SEXUALITY, AND THE COLONIAL ORDER

The male Anglo icon is a tough, swaggering, boastful—sometimes taciturn—hard-drinking, hard-riding, straight-shooting cowboy. We also usually visualize a tall, strong, lean, handsome, and of course white figure—John Wayne in any of his Westerns. These bodily attributes contrast with a fat, slovenly, dark, mustachioed, and often drunken, deceitful, and treacherous Mexican male with whom our Anglo cowboy is usually at personal and political odds—for example, the Mexicans in Little Lone Star and in Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch (1969). The figure of a Mexican woman brought into close sexual conjunction with the cowboy mediates these two. She is usually an upper-class, very attractive, light-complected, often “Spanish” senorita, such as Alejandra in Cormac McCarthy's otherwise subtle, “modernist” All the Pretty Horses (1992). Those of us who came of age in the late 1950s may recall Marty Robbins's popular song “El Paso” (1959), beginning, “Out in the west Texas town of El Paso, I fell in love with a Mexican girl.” While attractive like the Spanish senorita, this “girl,” Selena, has a distinctively “darker” sexual semiosis. She is, characteristically, a “bar-girl,” or prostitute, and sometime lover to the song's cowboy hero, like Little Lone Star’s Anita. This figure of “darker” and lower-class, illicit sexuality—usually positioned on the real and figurative border—is more common in the popular imagery than the senorita. Robbins's cowboy-narrator, Gary Cooper's Will Kane and McCarthy's John Grady Cole may be attracted to, have sex with, and even fall in love with such a figure, but usually these relationships are not culturally meant to last, as we see in a nineteenth-century cowboy song:

Me and Juana talkin' low
So the “madre” couldn't hear—
How those hours would go a-flyin',
And too soon I'd hear her sighin',
In her little sorry tone—
“Adios, mi corazon”
.....Never seen her since that night;
I kain't cross the Line, you know.
She was Mex and I was white;
Like as not it's better so.

(Lomax 67-68)

More often than not, our cowboy must take up romantic permanency with his own racial-cultural kind:

I'm free to think of Susie—
Fairer than the stars above,—
She's the waitress at the station
And she is my turtle dove.
.....I take my saddle, Sundays,—
The one with inlaid flaps,—
And on my new sombrero
And my white angora chaps;
Then I take a bronc for Susie
And she leaves her pots and pans
And we figure out our future
And talk o'er our homestead plans.

(Lomax 65-66)

Yet another song fills out the spiritual dimensions of this female figure:

You wonders why I slicks up so
On Sundays, when I gits to go
To see her—well, I'm free to say
She's like religion that-a-way.
Jes sort o' like some holy thing,
As clean as young grass in the spring;

(Lomax 72)

Anglo women are represented, on one hand, as religious, virtuous, faithful, hard-working housewives or potential housewives—pretty, if sometimes a bit homey. According to Pettit, in High Noon the “prim and proper” Amy, just such an Anglo woman, does not forsake Will Kane on his wedding day, for example (205). On the other hand, we have the image of the tough-talking, somewhat sexually available, take-charge, Anglo woman who can drink—Miss Kitty of the old television series Gunsmoke (1955-75). A related version is the older-woman-in-charge, such as Jordan Benedict's feisty unmarried sister, Luz, in Edna Ferber's Giant, as both novel (1952) and film (1956; produced by George Stevens and Henry Ginsburg). Susie in the cowboy song has a bit of this type, and more recently we have the ex-prostitute Anglo character Lorena, in Larry McMurtry's Streets of Laredo, as both novel and television mini-series.

This cultural complex attracted significant analytical attention in the 1960s, even as early as 1958, with Américo Paredes's “With His Pistol in His Hand”: A Border Ballad and Its Hero. In the 1960s Chicano and Chicana cultural critics offered a critical reading of its iconography, although Anglo scholars generally share the view as well.¹ They unequivocally implicated these recurrent images in the history of Anglo conquest and the quasi-colonialism of Mexican communities, not only in what later became the Southwest, but in Mexico as well. Casting Mexican women, in particular, as sexually promiscuous made them morally available within a code of racism ratifying and extending the right of Anglo conquest to the realm of the sexual. By taking “his” woman, the Anglo colonizer further diminished the already desexualized Mexican male even as the Anglo male body was sexually affirmed. Anglo males thus extracted not only economic surplus value from Mexicans but also what Chicano Marxist critic Guillermo Flores calls “racial-cultural surplus value” (194). In their extensive review of American literature treating this subject, Alfredo Mirandé and Evangelina Enríquez conclude: “The progressively bleak picture we have presented … reveals a pathetic series of depictions of the Chicana in American literature. From the coquettish señorita to the lusty whore … a series of portrayals unfolds that pays little tribute to Mexican femininity. Underscoring this series, which recedes into negativity, is the theme of an encounter between two very different cultures which produces a pattern of initial attraction that quickly gives way to rejection, seduction, and finally, relegation to inferior status of one by the other” (158). Otherwise highly critical of such representations, Mirandé and Enríquez offer one ambivalent passage that, as early as 1979, began to lead me away from my own former view that this iconography simply reproduces colonialist dominance: “Although their [Mexican women's] deficiencies are cited as frequently as their attractions, it is noteworthy that their exotic qualities often triumph when they are compared with their American sisters” (143).

The very persistence and predictability of the iconography, together with the advent of certain strains of postcolonial theory and the passage of time and change of circumstance, now lead me in a direction that lends full valence to the exotic and erotic character of these figurations, even as it restores a part of the iconography often left out of such analyses: hard-working, faithful, religious, sort of pretty Anglo Susie and the somewhat later “Latin Lover.” An intriguing passage focused on Texas in Arnoldo De Leon's 1983 They Called Them Greasers: Anglo Attitudes toward Mexicans in Texas, 1821-1900 further encouraged this new direction: “The image of Mexicans as irresponsible and promiscuous laid the foundation for another important theme in nineteenth-century Texas—the sexual desire of white men for Mexican women. White men took Mexican senoritas to bed, perhaps more often than can ever be known. But the sexual relations were not just something that naturally came to be: on the contrary, they occurred only after the physical drive of white men wrestled with the discriminating psyche that resisted such relations” (39). Charles Ramirez-Berg has also taken something of this anticipatory perspective to my own work but in Lacanian theoretical terms; in such images, he says: “the Other is (temporarily) idealized as the path back to wholeness, until what always happens does happen—the subject realizes that the Other is lacking. In terms of Hispanic stereotypes, it might be speculated that the stereotypes have persisted in cinema—since the earliest years of this century—because they fulfilled a need of the Anglos” (291).

The alternative reading I would offer of this iconography conceptually departs from De Leon's perhaps unintended double-entendre on the Anglo “discriminating psyche.”² The Anglo male's struggle is not so much between his psyche and something distinct called the physical; rather, it is deeply intrapsychic even as it is social. The problem of “discrimination” is not confined to external social relationships; it is a struggle to discriminate between deeply internalized political relationships and allegiances. Needed also relative to Ramirez-Berg's Lacanian thesis is a historicization of an otherwise quite persuasive psychoanalytic insight that informs my own account as well. One must account for these complexities of desire with greater historical specificity as to social change and conditions that might be loosely termed colonialist.³

2. POLITICAL ECONOMY, SEXUALITY, AND AMBIVALENCE

I am swayed in this direction by Homi Bhabha's recent theoretical work on race, sexuality, and colonialism. Robert Young explains how Bhabha exploits a somewhat repressed distinction that Edward Said made in his now famous formulation of Orientalism as the discursive project through which the West came to fashion its inherently denigrating view of the colonized cultural Other. Employing a psychoanalytic perspective, Bhabha pursues Said's brief notice of a latent as well as a manifest Orientalism, or what Young terms “an unconscious positivity of fantasmatic desire” (161). By emphasizing the extent to which the two levels fused, Young explains, Bhabha shows us “how colonial discourse of whatever kind operated not only as an instrumental construction of knowledge but also according to the ambivalent protocols of fantasy and desire” (161). Bhabha would move us away from a rigid, univocal understanding of such cultural constructions toward ambivalence: “To recognize the stereotype as an ambivalent mode of knowledge and power demands a theoretical and political response that challenges deterministic or functionalist modes of conceiving of the relationship between discourse and politics. The analytic of ambivalence questions dogmatic and moralistic positions on the meaning of oppression and discrimination” (66-67). He would have us shift from “the ready recognition of images as positive or negative, to an understanding of the processes of subjectification made possible (and plausible) through stereotypical discourse” (67). Rather than simply judge such a construction as the sexy senorita “bad” image, he would have us “displace” it, by engaging with its “effectivity; with the repertoire of positions of power and resistance, domination and dependence that constructs colonial identification subject (both colonizer and colonized)” in forms of difference that are racial and sexual. “[S]uch a reading reveals … the boundaries of colonial discourse,” Bhabha believes, “and it enables a transgression of these limits from the space of that otherness” (67). “In making ambivalence the constitutive heart of his analyses,” Young explains, “Bhabha has in effect performed a political reversal at a conceptual level in which the periphery—the borderline, the marginal, the unclassifiable, the doubtful—has become the equivocal, indefinite, indeterminate ambivalence that characterizes the centre” (161).

How can ambivalence help us understand the cultural iconography in which, against a degenerate Mexican male, the Anglo cowboy seeks a Mexican woman, even as Susie waits ready to homestead with her pots, pans, and religion? How can we now rethink the relationship of this expressive complex to quasi-colonialism in the Southwest, especially Texas—a quasi-colonialism that included land usurpation and physical violence, but, more significantly, the daily extraction of labor power and racial-cultural gratification and status within a code of racial segregation often enforced through the power of the state, which prevailed well into my own lifetime? In the summer of 1962, I drove back to south Texas with other angry, disappointed, working-class Mexican guys, on a senior trip to anglo-dominated central Texas, after we were refused admission to the wonderful swimming areas in a town named San Marcos, fed by three rivers—named in the seventeenth century as the San Antonio, the Guadalupe, and the Medina. We listened to Robbins's “El Paso” on the car radio. What did it mean to not only listen to such a song with some pleasure but actually to sing along in chorus about a heroic but lonesome Anglo cowboy longing for an attractive Mexican bar-girl? What pleasure could segregated Mexican boys, or those who segregated them, take in a musical performance seemingly reproducing their social relationship, a relationship still more viciously dominant in the nineteenth-century Texas setting of this song? Is this not a case of what Renato Rosaldo calls “imperialist nostalgia,” which “uses a pose of ‘innocent yearning’ both to capture people's imagination and to conceal its complicity with often brutal domination” (70)? For such instances from the Mexican border, I want to suggest a more complicated signification.

Frederick Pike reminds us of the way nineteenth-century middle-class Anglo-America conflated sexual repression and control with capitalist expansion. “For the businessmen intent upon building America's economic foundations,” he tells us, “thrift seemed a cardinal virtue; and thrift meant establishing strict control over spending—both dollars and sperm. … Nineteenth-century defenders of American middle-class respectability assumed that excess spending of male sperm was bad both for the nation's economy and its morality” (53). The lack of this capitalist virtue was then projected onto what later came to be called the Third World, which, for such Americans, meant Latin America and, according to Pike, the American South. Challenges to such a capitalism—the 1960s, for example—have always carried with them a sexual practice critiquing repression, along with more instrumentalist political-economic analyses and actions.

I want to suggest that the American cowboy, the Mexican female figure of illicit sexuality, and the “prim and proper” Anglo female figure represent a scenario of ambivalence played out in partial and unconscious challenge to the ruling cultural order. Significantly, this scenario's central figure of ambivalence is a cowboy, a figure on the lower rungs of American capitalism at its most expansive moment, working in the West and in Texas, a periphery of the American capitalist culture centered in the East and Midwest well into the twentieth century (Montejano 309-20). A complicated ambivalent resistance to this expansive culture has always been sited on the cowboy. While many such figures represent societal law and order—Matt Dillon in Gunsmoke, for instance—loner figures like Clint Eastwood are already at the critical margins of society. When either enter the realm of the sexual Other, however, the critical possibilities are enhanced if we give full valence to the rhetorically sexualized Mexican woman for what this figure might say about the subject who so persistently desires her. In the figure of the desiring cowboy we can, indeed, see the colonizing agent—white, tall, strong gunfighter—but we can also detect a fissure in the colonial enterprise, a break with the sexual repression concomitant with the ruling order that desire for the racial Other accentuates. At its most extreme, the agent of colonialism may actually die in his quest for the Other. In the song “El Paso,” the Anglo cowboy finally dies in Selena's arms. We also need to recall her desire for him. Critics often read such a woman's active pursuit as yet another example of colonial dominance—she longs for his domination. However, as bell hooks notes of such racialized Otherness, “within this fantasy … the longing for pleasure is projected as a force that can disrupt and subvert the will to dominate. It acts to both mediate and challenge” (27)—although I would add, never wholly undo. We may imagine such mutual longing as always ambivalent guerrillalike activity destabilizing the unitary, repressed colonialist capitalist culture at its most primal site of value.

Such a sexualized destabilization without clear victory is, I think, the critical value of High Noon's appearance in the early 1950s, when the segregation and labor exploitation of Mexican-Americans was everywhere evident in Texas and the rest of the nation. As a Mexican boy growing up in the aforementioned San Marcos, Texas, in the mid '50s, Tino Villanueva, now a well-known poet, drew deep racial instruction from Giant (see his Scene from the Movie “Giant” [1993]), while I, in southern Texas, watched Stanley Kramer's High Noon in utter fascination. Perhaps more boy than Mexican, I, like many other Americans, was wholly taken by Gary Cooper as town marshall Will Kane awaiting, in his small nineteenth-century Western town of Hadleyville, gunfighters from Texas sworn to kill him at high noon. But one now sees the significance of Helen Ramirez, the town madam and Will Kane's former lover, played by Katy Jurado. At first, wholly within the tradition of the eroticized Mexican woman, she is inevitably contrasted with Amy, Kane's new bride. A Quaker, Amy will not abide her husband's impending violence and decides to leave him, though later she abruptly changes her mind. Out of her very sexual marginality, however, Helen has forged a distinctive subversive identity within the town's repressive moral and political economy. Her professional sexual practice has led to a “primitive” accumulation of capital which she has used to convert herself into a “legitimate” and competent businesswoman, owner of a saloon and a store. Her combined sexual and economic power allows her to hold sway over the town's white male community as they make ritual, obsequious visits to her queenly apartment above the bar to curry favor while their repressed white wives wait at home.

In a long and telling middle scene, she and Kane confront each other at the height of Kane's crisis, and it is abundantly clear that Kane has fully experienced her evident passion and still cares deeply for her as does she for him. Imbedded in their dialogue is a brief but fulsome exchange of deeply romantic words uttered in Spanish, probably lost on the predominantly Anglo audience since they are inserted without any translation and are therefore already subversive. These words speak massive cultural volumes to any native member of the Spanish-speaking world: “Un año sin verte” (A year without seeing you), she says to him as she gazes deeply into his eyes; “lo se” (I know), he answers. He answers in such an informed Spanish that it is clear that he has been interpellated by the language just as he has by her entire sexual-cultural being. Indeed, he knows a great deal, more than he will be willing to admit, but she knows that in their mano a mano he has capitulated to the other side. She decides to leave town with their love never permanently fulfilled.

They see each other only once more. Helen is riding to the train station in a buggy with Amy, who is also leaving town; they pass Kane standing in the street awaiting his assailants. Amy looks away from him, but Helen's eyes lock onto Kane's, and through her eyes the camera holds him for a full five seconds as he returns her steady parting gaze. So how could this passionate romance have failed? Why does Kane leave Helen for Amy and the life of a small shopkeeper? The implication is quite clear: he has been unable to escape the racism and the sexual/economic repression of the town's capitalist moral economy. Helen comments on this economy as she gets ready to leave: “I hate this town. I've always hated it, to be a Mexican woman in a town like this.” Kane leaves Helen for Amy even though Helen is the superior figure; she even rhetorically forces Amy to assist in his final moment of crisis as the gunfight begins. At the end of the film, he and Amy emerge triumphant heroes over some part of this economy, but it is also clear that they have both derived great strength from the racial-sexual Other—Helen Ramirez—even as Kane denies her claim on his sexual and moral sensibility. She will, of course, lose Kane to Amy and leave town. In her final scene, however, Helen is on the train and as the camera focuses on her strong, beautiful, Mexican face, we clearly sense that she has achieved some large measure of victory in this contest even as the film at the end too quickly erases her strong, sexualized, Mexican female presence to make narrative way for the white reunited couple, triumphant heroes of the rising yet repressed bourgeois social order in the later nineteenth century.

One conventional, circumscribed reading of High Noon is that the town has morally failed the heroic Will Kane, taking this as a critical commentary on the McCarthyite 1950s, when society failed to act against the “bad men” until it was almost too late. But as a perhaps unintended critical commentary on the Anglo-Mexican racial politics of this period, the film is a local intervention often ignored in efforts to nationalize and universalize the film. While heroic in one way, Kane fails in another. I submit that after their climactic meeting Kane labors with his own racially motivated moral failure to fully respond to Helen's plenitude and to thereby transcend the racialized political-economic moral order. Even as he survives the gunfight and restores his marriage with Amy, it is clear that his petit bourgeois world has been forever destabilized by his prior knowledge of the Mexican sexual Other. Helen's parting gaze is on him forever and “un año sin verte” plus many more may never be enough to undo her ambivalent yet powerful incursion into Will Kane's life.

3. THE UNFORGIVEN, PRIM AND PROPER CULTURE, AND LATIN LOVERS

If the Mexican woman in her full sexuality has critical possibilities, what of the clearly despised Mexican male? With none of the exoticism, the eroticism, or freer play given that of the Mexican woman, he is a rhetorical construction for which the term stereotype is in unforgivingly full force. In this discursive encounter men read other men in a discursive mano a mano. Denigration of the Mexican male is conventionally understood as the articulation of colonialism directed specifically at the male body that traditionally offered the greatest opposition, namely the heroic male figures of the Texas-Mexican border ballads, or corridos. In the context of the Anglo male's politically and psychologically necessary desire for Mexican women, however, we begin to see here a psychoanalytic relationship of identity and difference, narcissism and aggressivity. The Mexican and Anglo males narcissistically identify with each other as equally available sexual partners for Mexican women. Indeed, Américo Paredes suggests that the ideal Mexican cowboy or vaquero, quite contrary to the stereotypic image, was more likely to be tall, lean, and dark with green or tawny eyes, more like his Anglo counterpart than not. (“With His Pistol in His Hand” 111). However, such a Mexican man would still have a cultural advantage over his Anglo mirror image relative to Mexican women, if only by his Spanish fluency. In response, the Anglo, who controls this discursive site, produces a maximum form of difference and aggressivity so as to wholly deny the identity of the Mexican man, which, if it were acknowledged, puts him at a disadvantage in his quest. When it comes to the construction of Mexican males by Anglo males, there can be no rhetorical quarter given, no ambivalence.

Ambivalent toward Mexican women as he is, the Anglo male nevertheless recognizes the limits of his transgression and returns to Susie. And what else is Susie—pots, pans, hard work, religion and all (likely including a timid sexuality)—but the figure of the dominant culture that compels this resolution. In the white “settlement” of the West, such women represented the most effective form of colonialism, bringing with them the daily habitus of households, social etiquette, religion, and schools for the reproduction of fundamental colonial values (Deutsch 63). The schoolmarm emerges as the ultimate pairing for our cowboy once he is done with his transgressive experimentation at the border. As mothers, such women were also obligated to reproduce Anglo culture, literally, in its numbers, but also through socialization. J. Frank Dobie, an archetypal cowboy, grew up on a Texas ranch in the late nineteenth century and told of his very religious mother, who was a schoolteacher in south Texas before marrying his rancher father, bore six children, and eventually persuaded him to move the family into town (71-82). Giving up his range life for the sake of such civilizing women is another vector of cowboy ambivalence, as “A Cowboy's Son” also suggests:

Whar y'u from, little stranger, little boy?
Y'u was ridin' a cloud on that star-strewn plain,
But y'u fell from the skies like a drop of rain
To this world of sorrow and long, long pain.
Will y'u care fo' yo' mothah, little boy?
When y'u grows, little varmint, little boy,
Y'u'll be ridin' a hoss by yo' fathah's side
With yo' gun and yo' spurs and yo' howstrong pride.
Will y'u think of yo' home when the world rolls wide?
Will y'u wish for yo' mothah, little boy?
When y'u love in yo' manhood, little boy,—
When y'u dream of a girl who is angel fair,—
When the stars are her eyes and the wind is her hair,—
When the sun is her smile and yo' heaven's there,—
Will y'u care for yo' mothah, little boy?

(Lomax 88)

In this cowboy world, the mother, conflated with the “angel fair” girl, exerts civilizing power along with domesticity. Though “fathah” appears as cowboy mentor with horse, gun, and pride, the song never asks the question: “Will y'u care for yo' fathah?”

The Anglo male's ambivalent transgression with the Other as sexualized Mexican woman is usually resolved in the direction of this hegemonic Anglo woman-centered culture, from where such a woman might also recognize her greatest enemy. For we learn again from J. Frank Dobie's autobiography that his mother had specifically instructed her sons never to “debase themselves by living with Mexican women” (89). As I have suggested about Will Kane in High Noon, this resolution of ambivalence often occurred with nostalgia:

Her eyes were brown—a deep, deep brown:
Her hair was darker than her eyes;
And something in her smile and frown,
Curled crimson lip and instep high,
Showed that there ran in each blue vein,
Mixed with the milder Aztec strain,
The vigorous vintage of Old Spain.
.....The air was heavy, the night was hot,
I sat by her side and forgot, forgot;
Forgot the herd that were taking rest,
Forgot that the air was close oppressed.
.....And I wonder why I do not care
For the things that are, like the things that were.
Does half my heart lie buried there
In Texas, down by the Rio Grande?

(Lomax 24-26)

Thus far I have been dealing with a cultural iconography born out of the nineteenth century with a specific siting in the West and, to some considerable degree, in Texas. The twentieth century brings another image, broadly Latin American; it might be said to begin in the early 1920s with the film career of the Italian Rudolph Valentino and his portrayal of the “Latin Lover” and to have developed up through our own time in a lineage that includes, most prominently, Gilbert Roland, Desi Arnaz (before he loved Lucy), Fernando Lamas, Ricardo Montalban, Zorro, Julio Iglesias, and—in contemporary, funkier versions—Jimmy Smits and Antonio Banderas. How does this strong, slender, suave, sophisticated, slightly accented, slightly dark, simmering, sultry—is it necessary to say sexy?—figure work into this iconography? It seems not unreasonable to view this image in relation to two factors emerging out of the period between the two World Wars and gaining potency after the second: first, the greater cultural tolerance at the national level for Latin America, especially Mexico, as a result, in significant part, of the latter's enlistment on the Allied side in World War II—what Helen Delpar has called “the enormous vogue of things Mexican”—second, the increasing structural and cultural freedom of Anglo-American women—the presumed desiring audience for this icon. Recall how often in films and TV shows she meets the “Latin Lover” while she is on vacation somewhere in Latin America either by herself or with a girlfriend. Ricky came to love Lucy while she was vacationing in Havana with Ethel sometime before 1959, for example.⁴ In the relationship of these latter-day Anglo women—now at some considerable distance from Susie and J. Frank Dobie's mother—to this figure of Latin male sexuality, do we not have a relationship similar to the traditional Anglo male—Mexican woman conjunction? Does this relationship not also make a momentary ambivalent claim to greater though transgressive fulfillment, although the Anglo woman also usually finds permanence elsewhere?⁵

In the preceding, I have tried to shift us from a directly correlated, univocal relationship between such iconography and quasi-colonialism to one of ambivalence. The colonized thus become a site for witnessing a fissure or decentering within the colonizer, remaining unequal. A larger realm of freedom for colonized and colonizer would require termination of even this ambivalence and a revision of the social relations that have sustained it. John Sayles's recent film Lone Star suggests such a termination by radically revising the history of this iconography.

4. BLOOD ONLY MEANS WHAT YOU LET IT⁶

A murder mystery, Lone Star is set in contemporary small-town southern Texas along the US-Mexico border. Through flashbacks it spans the years from the 1930s to the present. In the 1990s Sam Deeds—the young, tough, lean, soft-spoken Anglo county sheriff—is trying to solve the murder of Charlie Wade—the former corrupt, tyrannical, and racist sheriff, whose remains were accidently found in the desert after his mysterious disappearance some 40 years previous. Between these two sheriffs' tenure, the office was filled by Sam's father, Buddy Deeds, said to be the living definition of the epic Texas male. Although Buddy too is now dead, he becomes a prime suspect in Wade's murder. Buddy served as Wade's deputy before becoming sheriff and they clashed over Wade's corruption. Led by Hollis, the mayor and a former deputy to both Wade and Buddy, the town—Anglo, Mexican, and African-American—remains loyal both to Buddy's epic quality and his patronage politics. Revered almost as much as Buddy, his now dead Anglo wife, Muriel, is said to have been “an angel of a woman.” In the course of his investigation, Sam comes upon repressed information that revisits the traditional iconography.

Sam eventually discovers the identity of Wade's killer, but this other knowledge of past and present racialized sexualities gives the story greater significance. It sketches the evolution of Anglo-Mexican relations in Texas and radically revises the traditional iconography. Buddy presided as sheriff in the period roughly from the late 1950s to the early 1970s. Though not Charlie Wade, he still participated in maintaining a colonialist social order in which the local Mexicans knew their place; he did not, for example, permit his teenaged son, Sam, to date Pilar, a Mexican-American, and was livid when he caught them necking at a local drive-in theater. The reason for these strictures turns out to be more complex than simple racism: Pilar is the attractive daughter of Mercedes Cruz, the owner of a successful local Mexican restaurant and herself a beautiful woman in her youth. Mercedes's husband, Eladio Cruz, had died some years previous. While Sam has become sheriff, Pilar has become an activist high school history teacher. As the murder investigation proceeds, Sam and Pilar rekindle their romantic relationship, culminating in a slow romantic dance to juke box music after-hours in her mother's restaurant. Befitting the social forces they come to represent, they dance to the 1960s tune by Ivory Joe Hunter with the refrain, “Since I met you baby, my whole life has changed,” sung, however, in Spanish by Freddy Fender.

As late as the mid 1960s, colonial order still prevailed in many parts of Texas, of which the administrations of both Charlie Wade and Buddy Deeds are very accurate representations. Buddy changes the style of administration, however, from one of violent coercion to one in which, in Gramscian terms, the state justifies and maintains its dominance by winning the active consent of the dominated (see Adamson 165). Buddy, our archtypal Texas male, played out the sexualized cultural politics of ambivalence. While married to an Anglo woman with an appropriately angelic name, Muriel, he completes the traditional constellation of images through a love affair with the beautiful Mercedes. As with Kane and Ramirez, this is an affair that questions the cultural totality of the ruling order, especially since the erstwhile “Mexican” Pilar is his daughter and therefore Sam's half-sister. It remains for his son Sam and his daughter Pilar to move beyond this dialectic of rule and ambivalence into a greater realm of freedom.

As the film ends Sam and Pilar are sitting on the hood of a car parked at the now abandoned drive-in theater as Sam tells her all that he has discovered about their mixed parentage. Sam and Pilar, like Will Kane and Helen Ramirez, must make a critical decision. They can go their separate ways, or they can continue and make permanent through marriage their relationship despite, or perhaps through, this knowledge. The film ends without an absolutely clear resolution. For me, there is nothing now in the social order to prevent the legal and moral consummation of their love. They are free to do what Kane, in his shallow heroism, could not. I am not persuaded that Pilar and Sam will forsake each other on their wedding day about-to-be. It is entirely appropriate that this final scene and decision take place in the now decaying drive-in theater where they once made illicit teenage love: the theater and the love making symbolize another era when the colonial order was still in full force (when Mexicans were not allowed to swim in the swimming areas of San Marcos fed by the San Antonio, Medina, and Guadalupe rivers).

“Forget the Alamo,” says Pilar, as she and Sam appear to decide to forge a relationship based not on sexually transgressive ambivalence but rather on a clear recognition of their relative equality and the public continuation of their love. A college-educated intellectual, she has social status equalizing whatever cultural capital still accrues to him as an Anglo in the 1990s. As a public school teacher—indeed a teacher of history, the “queen” of the sciences—she revises the image of the Mexican woman at the sexual and social margins of society, often as a prostitute. In effect, Pilar appropriates the traditional image of the civilizing Anglo schoolmarm with a critical difference: she is a civilized and civilizing individual while maintaining a full and healthy display of her sexuality. Her initiation in a Mexican restaurant of the sex she will enjoy with Sam revises the iconographic sexual encounter between Anglo cowboy and Mexican woman in a cantina. Not a cantina, this is a socially sanctioned space; the fact that it is not only a Mexican but also a Mexican-owned restaurant testifies to the full emergence of a Mexican-American social class that would now effectively demand an equal place in society. Other well-educated Mexican-American figures appear who are on the verge of taking over civil and state society, replacing the Hollises and Sams or at least sharing power with them. Represented by clean-cut, earnest young Mexican-American males—a journalist and a mayoral candidate who will replace Hollis and Sam—they are garbed in the coats and ties of civil society. These Mexican-American male figures have no discernible sexual valence in the film, negative or positive; they are a considerable distance from both the rapacious Mexican bandit and the “Latin Lover.”

This implied ending of the colonial order has much to do with the sexualized kinship twist that Sayles has given his story. The fact that Pilar and Sam are simultaneously lovers and blood brother and sister reinforces their sexually constituted love with the enduring bonds of consanguineous affiliation. Their half-blood relations suggest that these two social sectors are now also united in brother-sisterhood, though still with some, perhaps minimal, social distance. Public equals and in unambivalent love, in semi-brother-sisterhood, still aware of their ethnicities, Pilar and Sam are willing, in her words, (and it is critical that she say them) to “forget the Alamo.”⁷ She is a teacher of history, and one senses that she means negate history in the present by moving beyond the colonial, if ambivalent, sexual and social worlds of her parents. Is this a utopian vision? Perhaps, but the foremost social historian of these matters in Texas, with great sociological supporting data, wrote in 1986: “From the long view of a century and a half, Mexican-Anglo relations have traversed a difficult path, from the hatred and suspicion engendered by war to a form of reconciliation” (Montejano 297); “[T]his does not mean that ethnic solidarity has become a matter of the past; it means rather that it has become subordinated to the voices of moderation from both communities. The politics of negotiation and compromise have replaced the politics of conflict and control” (Montejano 306). Negotiation and compromise characterize a good marriage, one beyond domination, inequality, stereotypic iconographies, and ambivalence.⁸ Seen in the context of a correlation of social forces now underway in Texas, New Mexico, and perhaps other parts of Mexican America, Lone Star is a film that seems to end the legacy of Little Lone Star; it invites us to review this iconographic and social history even as it seems to propose productive forgetfulness in the name of a larger vision long overdue. Relative to this conflicted history, is Sayles an obscurantist, or in Alan Stone's words, “a prophet of hope”?

Notes

1. See my review of this Chicano critique. The principal Anglo-American scholarship is that of Pettit, preceded by Cecil Robinson's With the Ears of Strangers: The Mexican in American Literature (1963).

2. I was also motivated in this direction by Americo Paredes' brief and general yet intriguing assessment of this iconography in his 1978 essay “The Problem of Identity in a Changing Culture” (43).

3. I do not wish to adhere to any rigid definition of colonialism, internal or otherwise, relative to this Mexican-American community that represents a mixture of landed conquered people dating back to the sixteenth century and third and fourth generation children of immigrants, as well as more recent ones. My loose sense of such a colonial order between Anglos and Mexicans in the US would suggest that in some respects, especially in the realm of culture, the Anglos and Mexicans have interacted in a manner that bears some similarities to classic examples of world colonialism. This seems to me to be especially the case in the realm of sexuality. For a fine discussion of the history of the concept of “colonialism” relative to Anglos and Mexicans in the Southwest, see Almaguer.

4. My discussion here is indebted to Gustavo Pérez Firmat on Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball (chs. 1 and 2).

5. There is also the more complicated case where an Anglo male such as D. H. Lawrence imagines Anglo women desiring Mexican men, combining the “Latin Lover” with something of the degenerate Mexican bandit. As Marianna Torgovnick tells us, for Kate in Lawrence's Plumed Serpent, “Mexico can also offer Mexican men, especially ‘silent, semi-barbarous men’ in whom she finds ‘humility, and the pathos of grace … something very beautiful and truly male, and very hard to find in a civilised white man. It was not of the spirit. It was of the dark, strong, unbroken blood, the flowering of the soul’” (163).

6. My heading is a phrase uttered by Otis Payne, the central African-American character in Lone Star. Except for a rather forced implication of Otis in the murder plot at the very end, the Mexican and African-American stories rarely come together. I think Sayles was imagining the film's appeal to a larger national audience too likely to see Lone Star as just another border “Western.”

7. Sayles has to foreclose the possibility of biosocial reproduction, however; so Pilar, for past medical reasons, can no longer get pregnant. Yet Sam and Pilar have nothing to prove on this score; already products of such racialized sexuality, they foretell the shape of the new social order. Admittedly, this is an ambiguous ending, although it is clear that Sayles expected his audience to understand that Pilar and Sam would stay together. See Stone.

8. We must note that this “marriage” does not seem to include recent undocumented Mexican immigrants such as those working in the kitchen of Mercedes's restaurant. In her movement from hostility to some sympathy for this population, Mercedes represents Mexican-American ambivalence toward Mexican immigrants. See de la Garza et al. 10-102; and Gutiérrez 207-16.

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