excerpt from "Movies’ Most Memorable Mexican-American Moments: From Stand and Deliver to Giant, These Are Hollywood's Strongest Cinematic Depictions of America’s Third Largest Ethnic Group" http://www.whatitmeanstobeamerican.org, May 2015.
Esther Gabara
Near the end of Cheech Marín’s 1978 Born in East L.A., the movie’s born-and-bred- Angeleno hero, who had been wrongly deported to Mexico, leads a mass dash back across the border. Neil Diamond’s “Coming to America” blasts in the background. The border itself disappears in the face of an alliance between Mexicans from both sides. The solitary Chicano standing atop a mountain ridge multiplies into a cast of thousands who run and walk across the border. Under their feet the divide between north and south becomes just another valley, and Diamond’s song includes them, laughingly and provocatively, in the cherished story of this as a country of immigrants.
Artists from around the world have used film, literature, and fine art to show that the border between the U.S. and Mexico is both real and imaginary. More than half a century ago, Nobel laureate Octavio Paz opened his landmark essay on Mexican national identity, The Labyrinth of Solitude, with pachucos in Los Angeles, teenagers whose flamboyant style differentiated them from traditional Mexican norms as much as the “American way of life.” In Por mis pistolas (For My Pistols) (1968), Mexican film legend Cantinflas helpfully picked the lock to a border crossing, composed only of a gate with no fence, for a U.S. border agent who lost his key.
The contemporary art series InSITE, which took place between 1992 and 2005, sponsored artworks that moved between San Diego and Tijuana. In 1997 Marco Ramírez ERRE created Toy An-Horse, a two-headed Trojan horse that presumably could smuggle stowaways both north and south. Javier Téllez’s One Flew over the Void (Human Cannonball) from 2005 shot a human cannonball into the terror and promise of the other side.
These artists reveal the flimsy “common sense” of national borders by showing the real violence of a border that separates families and, like Prohibition did to alcohol, produces criminality where it need not exist. The border appears and disappears to remind us that the U.S. and Mexico are not two separate entities. For better and for worse, our experiences and histories are deeply wedded.
Esther Gabara
Esther Gabara is the E. Blake Byrne associate professor of romance studies, and art, art history, and visual studies at Duke University. She is the author of Errant Modernism: The Ethos of Photography in Mexico and Brazil, 1920-1940.
Art, Art History & Visual Studies
