Border Studies and Hemispheric Studies: Rethinking America

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One of the most long-standing myths in American cultural history is the myth of the Frontier. The conflict between settlers and Indians, between “civilization” and “savagery” as well as the association of the Frontier with “empty” spaces providing unlimited opportunity and adventure was romanticized in countless dime novel Westerns and films. Frederick Jackson Turner, in his lecture on “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” in 1893, perpetuated this myth, arguing that the Frontier and Western expansion were crucially important for the creation of American values such as democracy and individualism (see Chapter 6). Especially the idea of an “empty” West had long been opposed by those population groups who had lived in the region before it was settled in the process of US-American expansionism, predominantly Mexican Americans and Native Americans. Beginning in the 1970s, scholars of Mexican and Native American history began to unearth texts and artifacts that documented the complex history and culture of the region, including the history of the 2,000 miles long border between the United States and Mexico and the territories north and south of this border. Their critical voices were joined by those of historians and literary critics such as Patricia Limerick andAnnette Kolodny who pointed out the limitations of the Frontier myth and argued for a revised conception of the Frontier as a “meeting ground” (Limerick 269) or a space of “ongoing first encounters” (Kolodny 13) and for the necessity to incorporate the voices and perspectives marginalized by Turner. Border Studies emerged from this critical engagement with the Frontier myth and from the awareness that people living at the USMexican border – today the most densely populated border space worldwide and the site of a considerable theoretical and cultural production – are often rooted transnationally and at the intersection of different cultures, languages, ethnic, and racial groups. In his 1996 movie Lone Star, film director John Sayles presents us with a contemporary view of the border at the turn to the twenty-first century. The movie opens as two men find human bones and a weathered sheriff’s star in a dusty desert landscape. The scene is set in Frontera, Texas, a fictional border town, and the bones belong to Charlie Wade, a notoriously cruel and racist sheriff who ruled Frontera in the 1950s before he disappeared one day as did ten thousand dollars from the county funds. When Frontera’s current sheriff Sam Deeds arrives on the scene, it becomes clear that a crime needs to be solved. Although, as Kimberly Sultze (20) has pointed out, all important components for a Western are there – desert scenery, a dead man, a crime, and a sheriff willing to resolve it – something is amiss right from the start. Instead of a spectacular mythic landscape typical of classic Westerns – such as Monument Valley in a John Ford film – the camera lingers at low angle, giving us a view of cacti and shrubbery. One of the two men wears a polo shirt and shorts and reads out plant names from a book – he is a nature lover; the second man, a collector of old metals, wears headphones and a metal detector. These two unheroic figures are then joined by Sheriff Sam Deeds who does not even carry a weapon. The camera does not look up to him, presenting him as a largerthan-l ife figure, but rather invites the viewer to look down on him as he is shown crouching on the ground looking for pieces of evidence. Viewers also need to listen closely to what the characters are saying – another feature untypical of a classic Western where voices are usually very clear. And while in most Western movies we have only a few central characters, Sayles’s film presents us with over fifty different characters, some of whom only appear in one or two scenes. This is sometimes confusing, as we do not know immediately what the function of some of these characters and what they say for the plotline is. Moreover, the film includes many flashbacks that shed a light on episodes several decades previous to the current events, without clear cinematic signals that it is moving back in time. The element of confusion created by these cinematic strategies is of course intended, conveying a sense of the interrelations of past and present and of the complexity of Frontera’s border history. An indicator of this complexity is the Spanish name of the place, which points to the fact that the territory – Texas – used to be Mexican before its incorporation into the United States in 1845. The movie – unlike manyWesterns – presents us with a view of the town’s history that gives a voice to the people who call the border home. However, this history is not presented to us in one piece. It emerges gradually in the course of Sheriff Deeds’s investigation of the murder case and has to be assembled from information he gathers from the townspeople – little fragments of memory, hearsay, casual remarks – and old documents. In the course of the movie it becomes clear that there are a multitude of stories in Frontera. But not all of these stories are equally accepted. Some linger unexplored and invisible beneath the “official” version of Frontera’s history, some are present only as rumors, some are publicly denied. The movie unravels Frontera’s history on several levels, as characters in the movie explore the history of the town or their own history and that of their parents. The image that emerges sheds a light not only on the events surrounding the death of Charlie Wade, but also on the many boundaries that fracture the community of this town – boundaries of “race,” class, language, and historical perspective. In a scene at the beginning of the film, high school teachers and parents are engaged in a heated discussion about which version of history is to be taught to the children and how far the textbook version should be followed. Some of the parents and teachers are Anglo-Americans, but at least half of them are of Mexican American descent. While some parents argue that the winners of history should decide about this, and that the textbook version should be taught because it reflects the “winners’” viewpoint, others point out that the majority of inhabitants of Frontera are Mexican Americans, Blacks, and Native Americans and that their children have a right to learn about alternative versions. While one Anglo teacher thinks that the tolerance for difference should only apply to food and music, another suggests that it is important to present a more inclusive picture. What becomes clear in this scene as in the entire film is that the issues at stake at the border are centrally issues that are also at stake in the nation – or, as Chicano critic José David Saldívar put it in a seminal book in 1997, that “border matters” for the nation. Critically interrogating traditional narratives of “American” identity and national paradigms of culture that proclaim a monocultural and monolithic version of history, and that have regarded the border region as peripheral and negligible, Saldívar argues that the transnational culture of the borderlands constitutes a social space in which new imaginaries, hybrid cultures, and theoretical productions emerge. In Lone Star, Texas operates for Sayles as a microcosm of America, as he himself has stated: “One of the reasons I chose Texas for this thing is because the state of Texas has a compressed history that is like a metaphor for the history of the United States” (Smith 232). One of the plotlines in Lone Star circles around sheriff Deeds’s father, the legendary Buddy Deeds who replaced Charlie Wade as sheriff after Wade’s disappearance. Official town lore still presents Buddy Deeds as a hero and benefactor of the town. After the remains of Charlie Wade have been found, Buddy Deeds becomes a prime suspect as he had opposed Wade early on. Most of Frontera’s citizens do not want to believe he is a murderer, unlike his son Sam who has resented his father ever since he broke up Sam’s high school love relationship with a Mexican American girl, Pilar. Sam, who left town as a young man and has only recently returned to Frontera, becomes the main driving force in trying to uncover the mystery about Charlie Wade’s disappearance. He assumes his father to have been a racist like his predecessor, but after listening to the stories told him by different people in town, he needs to revise his image of his father. As it turns out, Buddy Deeds was not the murderer of Charlie Wade, and he was respected in town because, while he used politics to foster his own personal interests and that of his friends, these friends were Black, Anglo, and Mexican Americans alike. It is significant how borders are presented in the movie. While some protagonists (like former Sheriff Charlie Wade) try to keep borders clear and definite – especially those that demarcate “race” and class hierarchies – the unraveling plot makes clear that these borders have always been permeable, if only unofficially. This becomes visible in the plotline that concerns the story of Sam’s high school girlfriend Pilar and her parents, Mercedes Cruz and her husband Eladio who was killed by Charlie Wade while trying to bring Mexican friends of his across the border. While Pilar, now a teacher at the local high school, tries to convey to her students a more accurate version of history than the textbook presents, her mother Mercedes, a successful local businesswoman, advocates an assimilationist stance, prohibiting her employees from speaking Spanish at work and calling the police when she sees people trying to cross the Rio Grande from Mexico to the United States. In a later flashback however, it becomes clear that Mercedes herself came to the United States as an undocumented immigrant and that she is denying her own history. Moreover, as it turns out, she was conducting an affair with Sam’s father Buddy Deeds after her husband’s death, and Pilar is actually not Eladio’s daughter, but Buddy Deeds’s, and thus Sam Deeds’s half-sister. This detail is found out by Sam after he has resumed his romantic relationship with Pilar and as he investigates the murder case. In one scene Sam crosses the border into Mexico to question a former friend of Eladio Cruz, a local tire dealer in Ciudad León. As the tire dealer makes clear to him, for many Mexican Americans the border at the time of Charlie Wade’s rule was just a “line in the dust,” an arbitrary boundary drawn by those in power after the occupation of Mexico in 1848. In his narrative, Eladio Cruz died because he was “giving some friends of his a lift in his camión one day – but because he’s on one side of this invisible line and not the other, they got to hide in the back like criminals.” For Charlie Wade, Eladio Cruz was committing a transgression, and the ensuing violence indicates the power hierarchies in place at that border. John Sayles’s Lone Star was a commercial success and an Oscar nominee (for best screenplay). This is quite remarkable if we consider how provocative the movie is not only in its revision of border history, but even more in its depiction of an incestuous relationship that takes the issue of borders and border-crossing on yet a different level. After Sam has told Pilar what he has found out – that they are siblings – they decide to ignore the incest taboo and stay together. As Kim Magowan has convincingly argued, “Sayles combines incest, society’s most ubiquitous taboo, with miscegenation in ways that simultaneously nod to cultural tradition and break from it” (20). Interracial relationships for a long time in American history were outlawed and yet practiced, especially in the American South by slave owners who sexually exploited their female “property.” While Sayles moves the scene from the binary racial setting of the slavery South to the realm of the Texas border region, it becomes clear that the taboo of racial mixture played an important role in the history of Frontera, even if it was often transgressed. Interracial relationships are a frequent phenomenon in the Frontera community, generating much of its population. If the miscegenation taboo has been ignored, Sayles seems to argue, it might be possible to choose to ignore the incest taboo, too. Since both taboos are cultural constructions they are both negotiable (Magowan 22). As we can see in this reading of the movie, the concept of the border refers not only to a geographical location but is also used metaphorically to interrogate boundaries between culturally constructed categories such as “race” or ethnicity. An author who has famously addressed constructions of gender and sexuality as well as spirituality in her use of the term “border” is Chicana writer Gloria Anzaldúa.

About the Author

Prof. Dr. Gabriele Pisarz-Ramirez (SFB 1199 & Leipzig University)

My research focuses on the cultural processes which link American culture to other cultures or which are situated in between cultures. My doctoral dissertation investigated literary translations of Stephen Crane texts as cultural products at the intersection of literary studies, cultural studies and translation studies. For my Habilitation project, I researched the border zone between the United States and Mexico as a culturally productive space which plays an important role in redefining concepts of nation and national culture. My current research interests are in the fields of 19th century inter-American relations, transnational studies and critical regionalism, Latino/a studies, migration studies, and 21st century concepts of race and ethnicity.