University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Self-representation, cultural formation, and Mexican-American modernism

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Self-representation, cultural formation, and Mexican-American modernism

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SELF-REPRESENTATION, CULTURAL FORMATION, AND

MEXICAN-AMERICAN MODERNISM

by

JESSICA BREMMER

_______________________________________________________

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(ENGLISH)

DECEMBER 2012

Copyright 2012 Jessica Bremmer

ii

Dedication

For Christian and Henry

With all my love, thank you

iii

Acknowledgments

I owe my sincere gratitude to the many people who helped me complete this project.
First and foremost, I’d like to thank John Carlos Rowe, my dissertation chair, for his unwavering
support. Always patient, insightful, and encouraging, he gently pushed me when I needed to be
pushed, reassured me when I felt overwhelmed, and believed in the value of my work at every
step. This project would never have reached this stage without his help. William Handley has
been so generous with his time and stepped in as a committee member on a moment’s notice, and
I thank him for his thoughtful consideration of my work. William Deverell has been a wonderful
member of my committee and I so appreciate his insights about the different lenses through
which I can view my work. I thank him for always finding the time to meet with me to discuss
my project from its earliest stages.
I also want to thank several friends who have supported me in ways they probably never
imagined. Brett García Myhren and Stephen Park have been generous colleagues who have
always been willing to share their knowledge and resources with me and who have been
genuinely interested in my work. But, more importantly, they consistently encouraged me to just
keep writing when I thought I would never complete this project. Their words of encouragement
did more than they know. I would also like to thank Trisha Tucker and Erika Wenstrom. They
have both supported me from our earliest days at USC, have shared in my excitement about this
project, and I am lucky to call these brilliant women my friends.
My parents have been wonderful. When I struggled the most with completing this
project as I tried to balance my family life with my work, they reminded me at every turn that
they had faith in me, that they were proud of me, and that they loved me. When I needed extra
help (with my son, with my Spanish, with my confidence) they stepped in without hesitation.
iv

And finally, I must thank my very best friend, my husband Christian, and our amazing
son, Henry. I really don’t have the words to express how grateful I am for our family. Thank
you for loving me, for the sacrifices you have made to help get me here, and for understanding
how much this means to me. The only way I could ever have done this is with you both by my
side.

v

Table of Contents

Dedication ii
Acknowledgements iii
List of Figures vi
Introduction 1
Chapter One: Situating Josefina Niggli 19
Chapter Two: Américo Paredes’s Modernist Poetics 67
Chapter Three: Anita Brenner’s Transnational Documentary 113
Chapter Four: Mexican-American Self-Representation in Film 160
Bibliography 213

vi

List of Figures

Figure 3.1: Dorothea Lange, “If you die, you’re dead – That’s all,” American Exodus 125
(1939)
Figure 3.2: Margaret Bourke-White, Untitled, You Have Seen Their Faces (1937) 127
Figure 3.3: Walker Evans, Untitled, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941) 130
Figure 3.4: Photograph #1, from Brenner’s The Wind That Swept Mexico 144
Figure 3.5: Photograph #15, from Brenner’s The Wind That Swept Mexico 145
Figure 3.6: Photograph #58, from Brenner’s The Wind That Swept Mexico 148
Figure 3.7: Photograph #121, from Brenner’s The Wind That Swept Mexico 151
Figure 3.8: Photograph #163, from Brenner’s The Wind That Swept Mexico 153
Figure 3.9: Photograph #129, from Brenner’s The Wind That Swept Mexico 155
Figure 3.10: Photograph #123, from Brenner’s The Wind That Swept Mexico 156

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Introduction

In the early decades of the twentieth-century, Mexican-Americans were forging a cultural
identity for themselves that both reflected their Mexican heritage and recognized their American
citizenship. In the face of outright racism, cultural disavowal from both Mexicans and Anglos,
and the historical realities of revolution, economic depression, and rapid industrialization,
Mexican-Americans came to occupy a liminal cultural space in which they were, as Américo
Paredes writes, “neither Mexican or American” (qtd. in Medrano 21). And while this liminality
was fraught with difficulty and cultural confusion, it also created the space in which Mexican-
Americans could advocate for themselves as Mexican-Americans, and do to so through acts of
artistic self-representation. The writers and artists I have included in this dissertation do not
attempt to legitimate themselves as American or to cling to a romanticized vision of Mexico.
Instead, they articulate ideas of Mexican-American cultural identity that are less about an
“either/or” configuration and more about a distinctly transnational identity that allows for the
possibility of an “and.” They might not be Mexican or American, but I argue that their work
expresses a cultural identity that is Mexican and American, work that is culturally-generative as
opposed to culturally-reflective.
The writers and works I have included in this dissertation move beyond simply
documenting Mexican-American identity. Instead, they in many ways contribute to the
emergence of this cultural identity by providing an artistic framework that counters the
hegemonic and often-times racist narratives surrounding Mexicans and Mexican-Americans in
the early twentieth-century. Josefina Niggli, for example, committed her artistic life to
correcting the stereotypical lens through which her American audience viewed Mexican culture
both in Mexico and in the United States. And Paredes, whose poetry I discuss in the second
2

chapter, challenges both American and Mexican exceptionalism by positioning both perspectives
as ultimately insufficient for Mexican-Americans. He instead, I assert, reimagines the space of
in-betweenness as a space of actual cultural possibility. Ultimately, my argument is that Niggli
and Paredes, along with the other writers included in this project, were not cultural
commentators. The works I have included are not the records of a fully-realized Mexican-
American cultural identity. Instead, these writers and their works reflect efforts to contribute to
the formation of Mexican-American cultural identity as it was emerging. They are, essentially,
productive as opposed to reflective.
The idea of self-representation inherent in these cultural contributions is vital to the
arguments I make in this dissertation. Mexican-Americans living in the U.S. in the early
twentieth-century were the victims of racism both subtle and explicit, and the texts I have
included in these four chapters all answer that racism in various ways through acts of self-
representation. Paredes, for example, comments in “The Mexico-Texan” on the designation of
the poetic subject as a “greaser,” a “burden,” and a “boot-licker,” the pejoratives flung at the
poem’s Mexican-American figure a direct expression of outright racism. But the racism
reflected by the other writers and artists in this dissertation is more implicit than explicit, though
no less sinister. Niggli, for example, laments the perception circulating within the United States
that Mexico is “inhabited by sleepy Indians, bandits, velvet clothed young gentleman with
guitars, and shawled maidens who somehow manage to pass through the vicissitudes of eating
without removing a rose from their lips” (qtd. in Coonrod Martínez 151). Implicit in such ideas
is that Mexican culture is hopelessly stuck in the past - that it is characterized by laziness,
criminality, and a romanticized vision of its own history that it either cannot or will not move
beyond. John Steinbeck’s film The Forgotten Village, which I address in chapter four, reflects
3

these same racist beliefs. Based on the story of a rural Mexican village so entrenched in tradition
that its villagers cannot see the literal death this brings to its children, Steinbeck positions the
film’s Mexican subjects as backward, uneducated, and illogically opposed to modern technology.
And in the documentary text The Wind That Swept Mexico, Anita Brenner addresses the racism
implicit in the United States’ inability to recognize Mexico as a powerful influence in Latin
American, and by extension, U.S. politics.
Yet for each of these iterations of racism against Mexican-American cultural identity, the
authors and filmmakers I have included find ways to subvert this racism through the artistic self-
representation manifest in their various works. Paredes, for example, concludes “The Mexico-
Texan” with an image of the poetic subject celebrating a cultural identity that does not relegate
him to the periphery as a “greaser” or a “burden,” but rather one that allows for the possibility of
a third option (so to speak), one whose personal history is impacted by both Mexico and the
United States. And for all the trafficking in racist stereotypes evident in The Forgotten Village,
I offer the film Salt of the Earth as a counterpoint in that it was conceived of and produced with
the intention of creating a vehicle for Mexican-American self-representation. The latter features
characters who are proud of their Mexican heritage and who are anxious to exercise the rights
granted to them as American citizens. And this narrative unfolds within the context of a
welcome acceptance of modernization. Finally, in answer to the racist underestimation of the
United States toward Mexico, Brenner articulates in her text a transnational notion of what it
means to be “American” while challenging Anglo-Americans to consider carefully the lessons to
be learned by the Mexican Revolution. Each of the four chapters in this dissertation features
writers or filmmakers who self-identified as Mexican-American, and who each, in different
ways, confront racist attitudes toward Mexican-Americans through their articulation of Mexican-
4

American cultural identity as they understand it and experience it. Their acts of self-
representation in print, photographs, and onscreen combat in ways implicit and explicit the racist
narratives circulating within the United States, and, I contend, contribute to the formation of
Mexican-American cultural and artistic identity in the process.
An additional facet of the argument in this dissertation is that these authors and
filmmakers are part of a Mexican-American modernism that is impacted by U.S., Mexican, and
European modernist influences but that creates a distinct cultural ethos. I contend that Mexican-
American modernism as it applies to the figures I have included in this project is culturally and
historically inflected, and while it features aesthetic similarities to literary and artistic modernism
as we might more commonly understand that term, it is more concerned with the lived realities
of Mexican-Americans in the U.S. in the first half of the twentieth century. For example,
Brenner’s The Wind That Swept Mexico is aesthetically similar to more canonical U.S.
documentary texts such as You Have Seen Their Faces and Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. It
features similar black-and-white photographs of men working in fields and women and children
living in squalor as they scramble for basic necessities such as clean water. Brenner’s text also
employs captions to tell the story in the photographs, and like James Agee and Erskine Caldwell,
she includes a section of written text to accompany the photographic images. But rather than
attempting to hide her presence in the text (a move other U.S. documentarians have tried
unsuccessfully to accomplish), Brenner declares herself as Mexican-American, declares her
position as it relates to U.S./Mexico relations, and declares that it is essential for her readers to
broaden their perspective of “America” to include both Mexico and the U.S. Acutely aware of
the ways in which the Great Depression mirrors pre-Revolution conditions in Mexico, Brenner
5

adapts U.S. documentary techniques (techniques that originated in Europe), to her interests in
Mexico and in a transnational America.
Niggli and Paredes also include aesthetic features of literary modernism but then adapt
those features to address Mexican-American cultural experiences. Much has been written, for
example, about the ways in which Niggli’s syntax mirrors how a sentence might read if it was
translated from Spanish to English. Her linguistic choices render the English in her works
somehow unfamiliar despite the fact that they were never written in Spanish. And Paredes
includes untranslated Spanish words in his poems that make it difficult for non-fluent speakers to
arrive at a clear understanding of the meaning in his lines. This “lingual confusion” (Miller 295)
mirrors the modernist project of jarring readers out of comfortable familiarity with language, but
I maintain that this is not its teleological purpose, that it does not defamiliarize for the sake of
defamiliarizing. Rather, as Joshua Miller asserts in Accented America, the presence of Spanish
and English within a single text, and the difficulties this bilingual presence creates for readers,
reflects the experience of those living in and with two cultures (295). As such, Paredes and
Niggli reframe the “traditionally” modernist strategy of linguistic experimentation for the
purposes of recreating the experiences of Mexican-Americans.
Project Scope and Chapter Outline
The chapters in this dissertation focus primarily on texts from the 1930’s and 1940’s,
with the exception of my fourth chapter which addresses the 1954 film Salt of the Earth.
Although anachronistic in terms of the rest of my dissertation, this film offers a striking visual
example of the issues foregrounded in the remainder of my project. Each chapter features a
writer or text that has remained relatively unexplored in Mexican-American cultural and literary
studies, and the texts I address reflect the historical realities of the early twentieth century as they
6

applied to Mexican-Americans, including the Mexican Revolution, the Great Depression,
industrialized agriculture, increased political activity, and the ways in which one might arrive at
a transnational cultural identity. Finally, the majority of the texts I have included are written or
presented in English. This was not a conscious decision on my part as I considered which
selections I might include in this dissertation. I was intensely interested in considering the ways
in which Mexican-American artists articulated notions of cultural identity through their artistic
expressions, and I found myself drawn to some figures whose self-identity poses challenges to
literary and cultural critics. Quite often, those challenges spring from the decision to write in
English as opposed to Spanish. And while I did not choose to include these writers because of
this decision, linguistic considerations prove to be fruitful discussions in several of my chapters.
Central to notions of cultural identity, the complications associated with linguistic choices are
issues that arise at multiple places in this dissertation.
My first chapter considers the work of Josefina Niggli, a central but polarizing figure in
Mexican-American literature. Born in Mexico to American parents just before the Mexican
Revolution, Niggli self-identified as Mexican-American and declared as her artistic project a
desire to subvert the damaging stereotypes about Mexicans and Mexican-Americans circulating
within the United States. She was a playwright, poet, and novelist who spent most of her adult
life in North Carolina but who always felt strongly connected to Mexico and to her Mexican
identity; however, the details of her heritage have created some discomfort among current
literary and cultural critics who are reticent to categorize her work as that of a Mexican-
American. Coupled with the fact that she sought to educate an American audience by writing in
English, her self-identity is often cited as precisely the reason she should be considered a
Mexican-American writer and precisely the reason it is so difficult for some to do so. I focus on
7

two of Niggli’s texts – her 1936 play The Singing Valley and her most well-known work, the
novel entitled Mexican Village.
The Singing Valley was Niggli’s master’s thesis at the University of North Carolina, and
it revolves around a Mexican father and his American-born children who return to Mexico after
the Revolution. Don Antonio is forced into exile during the war and while living abroad he
amasses a large fortune that allows him to return to his home in Abasolo, Mexico, with the
means to improve the lives of its citizens. He proposes to the valley’s residents that they shift
from an economic system based on goat-herding to one based on industrialized agriculture, and
he envisions his birthplace blanketed in citrus trees with every resident possessed of the means to
be self-sufficient. However, in Don Antonio’s absence, the valley has fallen prey to the
exploitative practices of Don Rufino who has devised on economic system that keeps the
majority of the valley’s people in his debt. As Don Antonio and Don Rufino engage in a battle
of wills about technology, modernization, tradition, and economic freedom, Antonio’s children
experience struggles of their own. Antonio’s son Abel must come to terms with whether or not
he wants to claim his place in the valley as the heir to his father’s plans and Antonio’s daughter
Lupita must contend with the fact that the she finds herself “stuck” in Mexico, a place that in her
estimation is happy to languish in the past and to let life in the modern era pass it by.
Antonio’s children arrive in Mexico feeling disconnected from their Mexican heritage (in
fact, Lupita actively disavows this cultural identity until the play’s conclusion), and I argue that
their gradual understanding and acceptance of it reflects Niggli’s attempt to articulate a hybrid
cultural identity that encompasses both their Mexican heritage and their American cultural
identity. As both come to understand their connection to their father’s birthplace, they do so
without disavowing or negating the parts of themselves that the play’s other characters identify
8

as distinctly “American.” And when both decide to remain in the valley, to remain in Mexico,
they do so with a more fully realized transnational cultural identity.
Mexican Village is a collection of interrelated narratives that revolves around the figure
of Bob Webster, the son of an Anglo father and a Mexican-Indian mother. When Webster’s
father refuses to acknowledge his paternity, he travels to Mexico in an effort to combat the
isolation he feels at being neither “fully” American nor “fully” Mexican. He accepts a position
at a quarry in Hidalgo, a town just south of the U.S./Mexico border, and when he arrives he does
so with the idea that he will remain in Mexico only temporarily. Although not as outwardly
disdainful of “outdated” Mexican culture as is Lupita, Webster nevertheless finds himself
amused by the “suspicions” and rituals that guide daily life in the small town. And what he does
share with Lupita is an active resistance to his Mexican heritage. Although Webster has chosen
to travel to Mexico in an attempt to satiate some longing he feels, he consistently ignores or
discredits the moments in which he feels truly connected to Hidalgo’s residents. However,
Webster reaches a point at which he no longer wishes to deny his Mexican heritage, and he too
emerges with a more fully-realized Mexican-American cultural identity. Niggli critics and
scholars often cite Webster as exemplary in that he is both of Mexico and of the United States,
and Niggli positions him as a figure who is reawakened to his Mexican heritage without negating
the presence of his “Americanness.” Ultimately, my argument is that through the characters of
Webster, Abel, and Lupita, Niggli inscribes Mexican-American cultural identity as it was
emerging, and she does so with an intense desire to combat the stereotypes of Mexicans and
Mexican-Americans circulating within the United States.
Both of Niggli’s texts also confront issues of technology and modernization, and in the
process she actively challenges the notion that Mexican and Mexican-American cultures are
9

stuck hopelessly in the past. Webster arrives in Hidalgo to work at a quarry at a time when, as
Rubén Gallo notes, cement was changing the physical and cultural landscape of Mexico (170),
and Don Antonio’s plans to industrialize Abasolo’s agriculture engenders a debate about the
benefits and disadvantages of technological progress. I argue that Niggli ultimately envisions a
Mexican-American cultural identity as one that is profoundly impacted by the forces of
modernization and that, rather than resisting these forces in an attempt to hold on to an idealized
past, the characters in Mexican Village and The Singing Valley reflect the ways in which one
might find an equilibrium between tradition and futurity.
Chapter two focuses on a writer who is perhaps the most influential figure in early
twentieth-century Mexican-American literature and culture – Américo Paredes. George
Washington Gómez and With His Pistol in His Hand are the works for which he is best known,
but Paredes was also a poet and his poems are relatively unexplored works within his oeuvre. He
published two collections of poetry, Cantos de adolescencia and Between Two Worlds, and this
chapter considers four selections from the latter -“The Rio Grande,” “Esquinita de mi Pueblo,”
“The Mexico-Texan,” and “Tres Faces del Pocho.”
In The Borderlands of Culture: Américo Paredes and the Transnational Imaginary,
Ramón Saldívar contextualizes Paredes’s poetics through a cultural and historical lens and
argues that for Paredes, history is an ever-present and compelling force in his writing. Saldívar
recognizes in Paredes’s literary and ethnographic work an active resistance against historical
invisibility and erasure, and each of the four poems I discuss do confront the history associated
with Mexican-American cultural identity. However, I argue that these poems are as much about
looking forward as they are about documenting the past. As Paredes navigates the complexities
of a transnational cultural identity, he casts an eye on the future even as he considers the impact
10

of the past. Paredes’s poems express the ways in which Mexican-Americans respond to the
forward movement symbolized by the emergence of a hybrid cultural identity while
simultaneously articulating the desire for a return to the comfort of one’s “origins,” and while he
never presents this push-and-pull as easy or simple, he does, I argue, present it as culturally-
generative.
The four poems I explore also offer Paredes’s commentary on the liminal space, the state
of “in-betweenness,” that Mexican-Americans occupy. “The Mexico-Texan” and “Tres Faces
del Pocho” are the most direct expressions of this liminality as each confronts the ways in which
Mexican-Americans are disavowed as too Mexican to be American or too American to be truly
Mexican. As the poetic subjects struggle to identify as either Mexican or American they find
themselves suspended in a state of in-betweenness, but I contend that Paredes enacts an
important shift when he refigures this “or” as an “and.” In “The Mexico-Texan” for example,
the poem concludes with the poetic subject celebrating the independence of both Mexico and the
United States, and he envisions himself flying the flags of both nations as symbols of his national
and cultural identity. And in “Tres Faces del Pocho,” the final iteration of the pocho is a poet
who identifies his history as one influenced by modern border figures rather than by Aztec gods
or Spanish conquerors. Ultimately, I argue that Paredes’s poems reimagine the space of
liminality as one from which a distinct Mexican-American cultural identity can emerge.
My consideration of Paredes’s poems also addresses the ways in which we might
understand his literary modernism as historically and culturally-inflected. While I do consider
the formal modernism in his poems reflected in, for example, his linguistic choices, I also
consider the ways in which he confronts issues of modernization as a key element of his
modernism. In “Esquinita de mi Pueblo,” Paredes utilizes the metaphor of a traffic light to
11

express the halting move forward experienced by the poem’s subject as he sits at an eternal red
light waiting for a green light that may never appear. And in “The Mexico-Texan” Paredes
reminds us of the impact of industrialized agriculture on migrant farmworkers as he addresses
the difficulties associated with the Great Depression. Paredes is certainly a literary modernist as
we might traditionally understand this designation, but his cultural modernism is an equally
compelling force in these four poems. He addresses the impact of modernization on Mexican-
Americans and, like Niggli, expresses this impact as an important element of Mexican-American
cultural identity.
My third chapter shifts to a discussion of American documentary and focuses on Anita
Brenner’s documentary text The Wind That Swept Mexico. Brenner was a Mexican-born, Jewish
woman who self-identified as Mexican, American, and Jewish, and she spent her life traveling
between and within both Mexico and the United States. She was surrounded by a remarkable
circle of Mexican and American artists and intellectuals (Diego Rivera, Tina Modotti, Manuel
Gamio, Franz Boas, and Carleton Beals, to name just a few), and while she never declared
herself as a member of the Communist party, her leftist politics emerged from an acute concern
with and about the working classes in Mexico and the United States. Brenner was a prolific
writer and she penned texts ranging from book-length studies of Mexican folk art to newspaper
articles about her Jewish identity and about the Spanish Civil War, but it is her account of the
Mexican Revolution and the warnings she felt it could offer the U.S. that serves as the focus of
this chapter. The Wind That Swept Mexico combines a written account of the Revolution with
the roughly 185 photographs that comprise “The Photographic History of the Mexican
Revolution.” As Brenner traces the shifts in power from Porfirio Díaz through Plutarco Calles,
she does so with an intense focus on how the Revolution impacted Mexico’s working class and
12

she unabashedly criticizes Mexican politicians for the exploitative economic system that
rendered the majority of Mexico’s population destitute and disempowered.
The written text and photographs in Brenner’s text feature an aesthetic similar to that of
better-known documentarians such as Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, and Margaret Bourke-
White. The black-and-white images feature poverty-stricken Mexicans covered in tattered
clothes, farmworkers plowing fields, villagers waiting in line for their share of the village’s
meager water supply, and the lifeless bodies of men who dared challenge Porfirio Díaz’s
policies. The captions that accompany the photographs offer a great deal of Brenner’s pointed
commentary on the conditions in Mexico, and the one hundred pages of written history that
precede the photographs express her clearly defined socio-political views even as they appear to
be a neutral account of the events leading up to and during the Revolution.
My argument about The Wind That Swept Mexico is, essentially, two-fold. While
canonical documentary texts such You Have Seen Their Faces and Let Us Now Praise Famous
Men suggest that U.S. documentary was focused squarely on the plight of southern tenant
farmers, I argue that Brenner’s text exemplifies the ways in which U.S. documentary was being
adapted to interests in Mexico. Brenner offers a unique transnational perspective on the
Mexican Revolution by outlining the influence of Mexico on the rest of Latin America and by
warning the United States against ignoring this influence. When she refers to “America,” she
does so with the understanding that both Mexico and the United States are parts of this
configuration, and she mounts a convincing argument about the ways in which the economic
conditions in the United States during the Great Depression mirror those in Mexico that resulted
in the Mexican Revolution. As Brenner articulates a transnational notion of the
interconnectedness of the United States and Mexico, she creates a documentary text that reminds
13

us that U.S. documentarians were concerned with issues that extended beyond the southern
states. In his seminal study entitled Documentary: A History of the Non-Fiction Film, Erik
Barnouw traces the international/transnational origins of documentary that are so often occluded
in discussions of U.S. documentary texts, but The Wind That Swept Mexico recalls those
transnational origins and configures them along a U.S./Mexico axis.
My argument about The Wind That Swept Mexico also extends into issues of self-
representation in documentary texts. Agee, Evans, and Bourke-White have all been criticized for
the degree to which they manipulated their subjects, and documentary scholars such as William
Stott and Paula Rabinowitz have carefully outlined the ways in which these writers and
photographers functioned as “outsiders” attempting to document a culture of which they were
not a part. These documentarians have been charged with exploitation, cultural insensitivity, and
voyeurism, and while they made concerted efforts to somehow position themselves within the
culture of southern tenant farmers, they could never successfully erase the foreign presence they
occupied in their respective texts. Whether it was by writing captions to photographs that
guessed what the photographic subjects might say or by manipulating those subjects in supposed
“candid” shots, the most well-known documentary texts of the 1930’s negated the possibility for
self-representation in many ways.
Brenner, however, offers a different perspective in The Wind That Swept Mexico. Her
life was profoundly impacted by the Mexican Revolution - she and her family were forced out of
Mexico on several occasions as violence increased, and these migrations back and forth between
the two countries shaped her politics and her aesthetics. And rather than attempting to present
her text as a neutral document, Brenner makes very clear that her aim is to convince her
American readers to adopt a more transnational perspective and to understand the Mexican
14

Revolution as vitally important to socio-political issues within the United States. And we
should not ignore the fact that Brenner was Mexican-American and, therefore, aligned with both
cultures and nations about which she was writing. Brenner felt deeply connected to Mexico and
to the U.S., and at various points in The Wind That Swept Mexico she positions herself as an
“American” who is both of Mexico and of the United States. She does not attempt to erase her
presence in the text; instead, she declares herself to be a transnational figure with a specific
cultural aim in mind.
The final chapter in this dissertation considers two films, The Forgotten Village and Salt
of the Earth. The former was written by John Steinbeck and relates the story of a small Mexican
village as it struggles with the advent of modernization and the “invasion” of technology. The
latter was blacklisted- director Herbert Biberman’s first film after his imprisonment by the House
Un-American Activities Committee as one of the “Hollywood Ten” and tells the true story of a
Mexican-American miners’ strike in New Mexico. I offer these films as counterpoints to each
other and argue that while Steinbeck’s film perpetuates negative cultural stereotypes and
prevents the film’s subjects from speaking for themselves in any meaningful way, Biberman’s
film offers a remarkable example of Mexican-American self-representation in early twentieth-
century film.
In his prologue to the script of The Forgotten Village, Steinbeck declares that his film is
an authentic documentary in that he and the other filmmakers merely captured what they
witnessed in Mexico without any degree of manipulation or bias, and in the opening shots we
learn that the film features no professional actors and instead features the actual villagers,
teachers, and medical doctors who lived in and around Santiago, Mexico. But Steinbeck’s
declarations of neutrality quickly disintegrate when he identifies the story as one that occurs in
15

“the long moment when the past slips reluctantly into the future.” Steinbeck consistently
positions the Mexican villagers as hopelessly stuck in the past and when they refuse the help of
modern medicine and technology to cure a water-borne disease in favor of the village Wise
Woman’s ancient cures, he presents them as illogical, uneducated, and infantilized. Unwilling or
unable to see that the curandera’s rituals fail to heal the village’s sick children, the villagers
watch as their sons and daughters die around them, and Steinbeck clearly articulates the idea that
their refusal to accept modernization makes them culpable in these deaths. Although a young
villager named Juan Diego eventually brings modern medicine to the village, he is disowned by
his father for humiliating him by aligning himself with the doctors who come from Mexico City.
The film concludes with Juan Diego traveling to the city to lean about modern medicine and
scientific technology with the idea that he will return to Santiago to educate “his people,” but, as
I argue, the film’s damage has already been done. Trafficking in the stereotype of Mexicans as
innately backward-thinking people, Steinbeck’s film only serves to present that stereotype on
film.
There is also a noticeable absence of self-representation in The Forgotten Village.
Although the film features actual Mexican villagers, they are never allowed to speak for
themselves. Instead of hearing the voices of two women as they participate in a fortune-telling
ritual, for example, we hear the voice of Burgess Meredith, the film’s narrator, as he chants about
the life-giving corn over which the women pray. The only time we ever hear the villager’s
voices is during a religious procession in which they sing to their saints, but even this scene
features Meredith’s voice as he speaks over the singing and essentially drowns it out. The
villagers are never given the chance to answer the charges leveled at them by Steinbeck, and the
16

film becomes his account of rural Mexican culture, with all the bias that implies, as opposed to
the neutral document he professes it to be.
Salt of Earth, I argue, succeeds where The Forgotten Village fails. Focused on the
struggles of Mexican-Americans as they confront problems associated with modern industry, the
film is more immediately aligned with the issues in the rest of this dissertation. However, I
argue that this film counters The Forgotten Village in significant ways that extend beyond its
relevance to the rest of this project. The film recounts a labor strike waged against Empire Zinc
by its largely Mexican-American workforce as they struggled for equitable working conditions
and parity in their compensation. Told through the experiences of a fictional married couple,
Ramón and Esperanza Quintero, the film offers a visual account of the institutionalized racism
that plagued the Mexican-American miners and their families as they struggled to be recognized
as American. With their Mexican heritage consistently held against them as evidence of their
“foreignness,” the characters in this film experience cultural disavowal from parties other than
themselves. They are Mexican and American, but the men for whom they work will only
acknowledge the former. However, the strikers eventually prevail and the film ultimately
celebrates their Mexican-American cultural identity. As they maintain close ties to their
Mexican heritage, the miners and their families also engage in the political activity that George
Sánchez identifies as a vital component of Mexican-American culture in the early twentieth
century. They do not distance themselves from their Mexican heritage in the wake of
discrimination; instead, they maintain that connection while forging an identity that also includes
their connection to the U.S.
Salt of the Earth also presents what I characterize as a unique moment of self-
representation for Mexican-Americans in American film. Although the film was written,
17

produced, and directed by Anglo filmmakers, they did so with the stated purpose of allowing the
miners to tell their own story from their own perspective. Herbert Biberman (director), Paul
Jarrico (producer), and Michael Wilson (writer) were committed to providing a forum in which
the Mexican-American miners could articulate and present their own struggles, so they hired
Mexican-American members of the International Union of Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers to
serve as actors, they presented the film’s script to the miners and their families for approval, and
they turned to the miners for technical advising. If something in the script did not receive
approval, no matter how strongly the filmmakers felt about it, the miners had ultimate power to
cut it. And when it came to casting the film’s leads, the miners and their families advocated for
actual union members to be given these parts. As a result, several of the union’s high-level
members appear in the film’s key roles, including miner Juan Chacón as Ramón Quintero. This
is not to say that Salt of the Earth does not encounter some of the same issues related to self-
representation that plague the other texts I explore. It is true that the film was conceived of,
written, and visually stylized by Hollywood filmmakers who were not Mexican-American, but I
contend that what makes the film of particular importance is the fact that it was created with the
idea that it should serve as an opportunity for self-representation that was conspicuously lacking
in other Hollywood films. I would argue that we can fairly characterize Salt of the Earth as the
Mexican-American miners’ representation of themselves and their lived experiences. They
impacted nearly every aspect of the film and as such it is, finally, their story.
The writers and filmmakers I have included in this dissertation emerged at a unique
historical moment. They were forging a new identity as opposed to simply committing it to
record, and in doing so they had to confront the historical realities that surrounded them. The
various selections I include in this dissertation reflect those realities as they address issues of
18

liminality, disavowal, modernization, and transnationalism. Each of the texts I have included
considers what it means to be Mexican and American and how one might carve out a cultural
space that allows for this hybridity. What the works in this dissertation make clear is that this is
a path fraught with difficulty, but they also articulate the idea that these difficulties can,
ultimately, be culturally generative. These authors, artists, and texts do not constitute a literary
tradition; this project is not meant as an argument about the canon or about what, exactly,
constitutes Mexican-American literature. And this project is by no means exhaustive. There is
much, much more to be done in Mexican-American modernist studies. For example, Spanish-
language newspapers circulating within the United States often featured original works by
Mexican-American poets, playwrights, and novelists. Mexican-Americans were commenting on
the Revolution and on the Great Depression in major magazines. Songs written by Mexican-
American lyricists enjoyed wide circulation in parts of the U.S. and Mexico. These would all be
fruitful “next steps” in a project such as mine. What I hope the texts I have included, along with
my discussion of them, illustrate are the various ways in which Mexican-American cultural
identity is imagined, envisioned, and expressed by Mexican-Americans in artistic acts of self-
representation. The novels, poems, films, and documentary texts included in this dissertation
extend beyond mere records of early twentieth-century Mexican-American identity. They
engage in the active formation of that identity, in all of its iterations, by creating narratives that
counter the racist images circulating within the United States. This is the vital work they do by
advocating for a Mexican-American cultural identity that is actually determined by Mexican-
Americans. Niggli, Paredes, Brenner, and the Mexican-American miners attached to Salt of the
Earth invite conversation about self-representation and cultural formation, and that is, ultimately,
the conversation I have joined with this project.
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Chapter 1
Situating Josefina Niggli

Josefina Niggli is a polarizing figure in Mexican-American cultural and literary studies.
While there is a critical consensus about the general importance of her work within Mexican-
American literature (both among her contemporaries and among current scholars), concerns
about her ethnicity, her complicity in perpetuating cultural stereotypes, and her relationship to
her Anglo audience have created questions about what role her writing does occupy and should
occupy within Mexican-American literary studies. However, I would argue that these very
concerns, along with the issues Niggli foregrounds in her writing, are reasons why a study of
Mexican-American literature, and particularly Mexican-American modernist literature, might
begin with this writer.
Niggli’s career coincides with shifts in immigration patterns between Mexico and the
U.S. in the wake of the Mexican Revolution, in addition to a shift in cultural identity that
emerged when the children of immigrants began to self-identify as Mexican-American. A new
generation of Mexican-Americans confronted issues associated with the Great Depression, labor
disparities, the New Deal, and industrialization, all while trying to “reconcile their Mexican
heritage with a new role as citizens of the United States” (Sánchez 273). And while Niggli
herself may not have struggled with these precise issues, the scholarly concerns about her own
ethnicity when discussing her literature do mirror the more widespread question about what it
meant to be Mexican-American in the early twentieth century (a question that is a thematic
recurrence in much of her writing). Alicia Arrizón, who castigates much in Niggli’s writing,
does at least concede that, “Her plays and stories bear witness to the efforts of a generation that
20

tried to respond innovatively to the new materiality of life in the United States by forging a bi-
sensibility that transformed two separate cultures into a new synthesis” (30). It is also crucial to
recognize that Niggli foregrounds the Mexican Revolution in much of her work and identifies it,
much as numerous other scholars do, as a turning point in Mexican and Mexican-American
history and culture. Yolanda Padilla maintains that “Niggli reveals the significance of the
Revolution as part of a transnational event that left a deep mark on the political, cultural, and
social histories of both countries [Mexico and the United States], even as it played a constitutive
role in the emergence of Mexican American literature and culture” (69). The fact that Niggli
chooses the historical moment of the Revolution and the years just after it to contextualize much
of her writing suggests her concern with the Mexican American experience. And finally, the
encroaching presence of industrialization looms in the periphery of a great deal of Niggli’s
writing (and more centrally in some of her works), even as she seems to fixate on the
preservation of a particular Mexican history more interested in the past (a common criticism
leveled at Niggli and one that I will address at a later point in this chapter). Elizabeth Coonrod
Martínez maintains that a central part of Niggli’s artistic project was to “depict the tensions of
mixed values and heritages within Mexican society in an era of rapid modernization” and “that
this applies to their inclusion in U.S. society” (126). In her desire to inscribe an emerging
Mexican-American cultural identity, Niggli recognizes that reactions to modernization are a
constitutive element, and as such she positions issues of modernity as critical moments on her
characters’ path to cultural self-awareness. Ultimately, what Niggli’s writing provides is an
opportunity to consider far-reaching issues that are vital to Mexican-American cultural identity –
issues of hybridity, of modernization and progress, and of the impact of specific historical
moments on cultural formation.
21

Niggli was born in Mexico in 1910 to American parents (her father was from Texas, her
mother from Virginia, and both were of European descent). When she was three years old, her
family fled Mexico to San Antonio, Texas, because of increased violence associated with the
Mexican Revolution, and by all accounts they spent “the next seven years . . . roam[ing] the
southwestern United States, never finding a home until they moved back to Mexico in 1920”
(Keresztesi 96). Niggli did not stay in Mexico for long, however. As the Revolution raged on
and became increasingly violent, her family sent her back to the United States to attend high
school and college in San Antonio. She then attended graduate school at The University of
North Carolina at Chapel Hill to study playwriting and spent much of the rest of her life in North
Carolina. While she did travel to Mexico on several occasions, she called North Carolina
“home” for most of the remainder of her life.
And yet, Niggli always thought of Mexico as her “home” as well. Rita Keresztesi notes
that Niggli “grew up bilingual and bicultural, identifying as both Mexican and American” (96).
Niggli felt strongly connected to her place of birth –to its culture, to its people, to the language,
and particularly to the struggles associated with the Mexican Revolution. Although she was
“technically” American because of her parents, she self-identified as Mexican-American
(sometimes more Mexican than American) and devoted her creative and professional life to
exploring in her writing the issues related to this hybrid cultural identity. Niggli was acutely
aware of the caricature of Mexican culture circulating in the United States at the time. She
lamented the images of “sleepy Indians, bandits, velvet clothed young gentlemen with guitars,
and shawled maidens who somehow manage to pass through the vicissitudes of eating and
sleeping without ever removing a rose from their lips” (qtd. in Martínez 151) that predominated
Anglo America’s vision of Mexico, and as she began her professional writing career she did so
22

with the single-minded focus of upending these visions. An often-quoted statement from Niggli
expresses her artistic project: “When I was a young kid, starting out as a writer, I had a shining
goal. I was going to present Mexico and Mexicans as they had never before been presented” (1).
And because Niggli intended to present a “corrected” vision of Mexico and Mexicans to an
American audience, she chose to write in English.
It is precisely these details of Niggli’s life that make it difficult to determine where and
how she fits within the Mexican-American literary tradition, and it precisely these details that
make some scholars uncomfortable with designating her as Mexican-American. For some, it is
not enough that she was born in Mexico, not enough that, as Yolanda Padilla notes, “her subject
matter, the themes she developed, and the perspective from which she wrote” (45) were
bicultural. Niggli self-identified as Mexican-American, she was forever influenced by the
Mexican Revolution, and she was fiercely devoted to the project of transforming the gaze of
Americans as they looked South to Mexico. Additionally, she was intimately familiar with the
experiences associated with being both Mexican and American and of crossing the border
between the U.S. and Mexico. And yet there are scholars who resist Niggli’s designation as
Mexican-American. Her biography creates questions about her cultural identity, and it is clear
that the answers to these questions depend on whom one asks.
In his seminal 1978 article “The Evolution of Chicano Literature,” Raymund Paredes
declares Niggli’s novel Mexican Village “a landmark in Mexican-American literary history” (88)
and he applauds Niggli’s refusal “to accept conventional American views of her (my emphasis)
people” (90). Yet, just a few sentences later he refers to the novel “as a major transitional (again
my emphasis) work in the development of Chicano fiction” (90), suggesting that it is not quite a
part of this tradition but that it serves as an important bridge. Perhaps Paredes is making the
23

crucial distinction between “Mexican-American” and “Chicano” here (one that I make myself
and that is essential to my own project), but it seems just as likely that he is hedging a bit (so to
speak).
Likewise, in her study of the trajectory of Latina drama in the United States, Arrizón
identifies Niggli as “a privileged upper-class writer of the 1930s [who] took part in the
intellectual search for community that characterized the emerging Mexican American upper and
middle class during the Mexican American period” (43). Arrizón seems willing to grant Niggli
her “Mexican-Americanness,” but she also asserts that, “Her writing developed as a product of
her Americanization” (43), thereby negating to some degree the role that her Mexican cultural
heritage plays in her writing.
In addition to questions about her own ethnicity and the degree to which it qualifies her
as a Mexican-American writer, Niggli is at times accused of being complicit in perpetuating the
very stereotypes she works so diligently to challenge, and some critics seem uncomfortable with
her relationship with her readers. Much is made of the fact that Niggli chose to write in English
instead of in Spanish and there is the implicit suggestion in some scholarship that Niggli was
simply pandering to her Anglo readers. Padilla asserts that “Niggli’s portrayals of Mexico’s
nationalist agenda are shaped by her position as a U.S. writer who was expected to indulge the
Mexican fantasies of her American readers, a task which often gave her pleasure” (my emphasis)
(47-48). In the midst of his description of Mexican Village as a sort of watershed moment in
Mexican-American literature, Paredes does concede that, “To be sure, some of [Niggli’s]
characters verge close to stereotypes: the swaggering macho, the haughty Spaniard, the long-
suffering Mexican woman” (90). And Arrizón criticizes Niggli for being unconcerned or unable
to present her American audience with “the complex realities of life in Mexico” and for being
24

uninterested “in examining the dilemmas facing Mexican Americans” (47), instead creating “a
kind of magical world summoned from objective knowledge and memory, a gauzy mixture of
the real and the imagined” (47). Not only does Niggli essentialize the Mexican experience and
ignore the Mexican-American experience, according to Arrizón, she does so at the cost of
realistic literary portrayal.
Niggli is a complicated literary figure. Her intentions and her practice might seem at
odds at times, her own hybrid identity creates complex questions about the requisites for
inclusion in a particular cultural, ethnic, and literary group, and the corrective project she
outlines for herself might actually be construed as undermining itself when we really look
closely at her writing. But these contradictions are exactly why I begin my own project with her.
She grapples with questions of history and progress, of being Mexican and American, of cultural
preservation in the face of massive cultural transformation. And she does so not in hindsight, but
as these issues presented themselves. William Orchard and Yolanda Padilla contend that, “The
reservations voiced by [Niggli’s] critics imply that Mexican American identity is homogenous
and prescribed. But the version of Mexican American identity that these critics are using to
evaluate Niggli was in the process of being formed in precisely the moment that Niggli was
writing” (108). This historical condition is crucial to an understanding of Niggli’s contribution
to Mexican American literature. I am not interested in designating her as a “first” in Mexican-
American literature, but for all of these reasons I am interested in understanding her as central to
this literature.

25

The Singing Valley and Niggli’s Cultural Modernism
In Chicano Narrative, Ramón Saldívar maintains that, “For Chicano narrative, history is
the subtext that we must recover because history itself is the subject of its discourse. History
cannot be conceived as mere ‘background’ or ‘context’ for this literature; rather, history turns out
to be the decisive determinant of the form and content of the literature” (5). Quite often this
history gets figured as nostalgia for a romantic Mexican past that is somehow at odds with the
modernity represented by American culture. Arrizón charges Niggli with precisely this tendency
when she writes that Niggli’s “(unsuccessful) solution to the difficulties of blending her two
heritages was to place the Mexican world wholly in the past and situate the inevitable process of
assimilation in the present” (47). But I would argue that Niggli’s position is more nuanced than
this characterization allows. She is clearly invested in the preservation of Mexican culture in her
writing, but I would characterize this less as nostalgia in the traditional sense and more as the
desire to understand how that culture can and does coexist with the modern present.
Jovita González and Eve Raleigh’s Caballero offers a useful and contemporaneous
counterpoint to Niggli’s writing, therefore I would like to begin with a brief detour of sorts in
order to contextualize my reading of Niggli’s work. Caballero was written in the 1930’s and
1940’s and is considered, as Jose Limón writes, a major contribution to the “recovery of a
Mexican-American literary heritage [that] has become an important project for literary critics
and historians” (Introduction xii) (as are Niggli’s plays, novels, and poems). But instead of
focusing on the more recent conflict of the Mexican Revolution, the narrative focuses on
U.S./Mexico relations during the mid-nineteenth century (particularly the Mexican-American
War and the ratification of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo), and I would argue that Caballero
26

is far more exemplary of the Mexican past/American future dichotomy (and the resulting sense
of nostalgic longing) than is Niggli’s work.
The nostalgic tendency in Caballero rests firmly in the character of Don Santiago de
Mendoza y Soría, a wealthy rancher who clings to tradition in the face of U.S. expansion into
Mexico, expansion that poses threats to both his landholdings and to his patriarchal authority
over his family. A neighboring rancher urges Don Santiago to register his land titles so the
United States cannot claim them as American territory: “Now before it is too late, before the
greedy ones come in hordes and finding the land unregistered take it by force, because they
know there can be no dispute about it” (González and Raleigh 217). But Don Santiago refuses to
take such measures, refuses to believe that the way of life he holds so dear might disappear,
refuses to imagine a future different from the past. And while he may be able to ignore the signs
of impending American encroachment on his land, he cannot ignore the specter of American
influence on his family.
Despite his intense hatred of “Americanos, a dread word, which held nothing of good”
(12), Don Santiago senses that his children are susceptible to the “menace [of American cultural
influence]. A menace worse than war, for it was creeping silently on [the hacienda’s] children”
(219). His suspicions are confirmed when his son Luis, long alienated by his father for his
“effeminate” interest in art, befriends an American artist at the local military outpost and decides
to travel to the United States with him in order to complete his artistic education. Although both
Don Santiago and his fellow rancheros attribute Luis’s “betrayal” to the fact that “he had been a
misfit” (219), this initial erosion of the family develops into full-blown disintegration when both
of Don Santiago’s daughters marry Americans and he casts them out of his house as well.
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And in the midst of this familial turmoil, Don Santiago is faced with the mounting threat to his
material wealth and physical safety as “Americans roam the land in groups, look[ing] for the
places where the grass was greenest, where the land showed fertility” (301), and as “Rangers
kill...Mexicans by the hundreds” (301). His ancestral land and his social position are slipping
away from him with an increased American presence, and he must find some way to resist.
His response to the devastating changes he sees around him is to cling more ferociously to the
past, to seek refuge in the tradition that has served him so well up to this point, to secure his
position as the “bulwark against encroachments of alien ways” (282). Rather than “meet[ing] the
Americanos halfway” (14) and thus accepting the inevitable transformation wrought by their
presence, he retreats to his family’s ranch, “where a man was lord of his world and his peace”
(165), in a symbolic act of nostalgic resistance.
Upon arriving at Rancho la Palma, Don Santiago surveys his land through the haze of
nostalgia and sees it as he wants to see it, not as it actually is:
It might have been that the pictures of the ranch he loved, in the nostalgia of home
life, had been painted overly green and fair. He saw only spring mornings wet
with dew, the drops on flowering nopales like fire opals in the early sun; the
carpets of blue and white and yellow blooms in the valleys, the gray cenizo
spattered with streaks of lavender and pink swelling over the rounded hills. [. . .]
His spells of longing had run ahead of the season. He knew it was too early for
the pictures his homesickness had conjured, for winter was barely passing. (165)

The ranch represents all that Don Santiago holds dear. It is the place his own father built to resist
the changes of his time: “Here he would create a new empire, and his place the finest of them
all. Here he could rear his family and keep the old ways and traditions, safely away from the
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[…] infiltration of foreign doctrines; not only for himself but for the generations to come”
(xxxvi). Don Santiago is thus part of a long family tradition of resistance to foreign influence
and he replicates his father’s method of doing so by returning to the ranch. His nostalgic view of
the land that was first his father’s and is now his represents his own resistance to American
expansion since the ranch symbolizes the last untouched tradition in his life. And it is, therefore,
entirely appropriate that he dies on the ranch, at the same spot in which the narrative begins, his
hand “tightly clenched” (337) around a mound of the ranch’s dirt, “[holding] to the last to his
staff of traditions” (337).
There are debates as to whether Caballero is a pro-assimilation or anti-assimilation
novel. For those who view Don Santiago as a villain (or at the very least, as the misguided head
of a family), his eventual demise suggests that his nostalgia for a time past and his unwillingness
to let go of that past are dangerous and unrealistic. Conversely, those who view the patriarch as
a sympathetic character understand his death as the tragic circumstance of American imperialist
designs on Mexico. But in the context of my argument, it matters little if Don Santiago is meant
to be a villainous and tyrannical figure who would rather compromise his family than his way of
life or if he is a sort of tragic hero who clings to his beliefs until his last breath. What I am
interested in is the nostalgic presence in the novel that does indeed align Mexico with the past
and America with a sense of futurity. It is fair to suggest that a novel like Caballero inhabits a
space in which the “Mexican world [is] wholly in the past” (Arrizón 47), but I believe that when
we read the idea of nostalgia and history in Niggli’s writing, particularly in those texts situated
during and after the Mexican Revolution, this demarcation is not as clear-cut. Niggli’s is a more
nuanced idea of historical presence- one that has less to do with maintaining the hacienda
lifestyle and has more to do with balancing one’s Mexican heritage with one’s American cultural
29

identification. Niggli’s writing reflects her attempts to inscribe an inchoate Mexican-American
identity that does not reside in the past but that tries to integrate it with the material, cultural, and
historical realities of the post-Revolution era in Mexico and the United States.
Niggli’s 1936 play The Singing Valley is one of her lesser-known works, but it was an
important early text for the author (the play was actually her master’s thesis) and it shows us that
Niggli had begun to consider the idea of cultural hybridity very early in her career. The play
relates the story of a Mexican-born patriarch, Don Antonio, who returns to Abasolo, Mexico,
after years in exile during the Mexican Revolution. Antonio brings with him his two American-
born children, Lupita and Abel, who initially feel none of the connection to their father’s
birthplace that he hopes will spring within them as soon as they set foot on Mexican soil. During
his exile, Antonio is sustained by the hope that he will someday return to Abasolo, wealthier than
when he left and possessed of the means to improve life for the village’s residents. And while he
does amass great wealth and does return triumphantly to his birthplace, he is also faced with the
character of Don Rufino, the wealthy and dictatorial mayor of Abasolo who has created a system
by which he can keep the bulk of Abasolo’s young men in debt to him. Abasolo is an
agricultural and farming community, and their economy is driven by farm animals (namely
goats). Rufino owns large numbers of the animals (in fact, he owns most of the goats in the
valley), and he pays his goatherds not in cash, but in goats. When they need to sell back the
goats in order to buy food and clothing, he drastically underpays the men, leaving them destitute
and him even wealthier. Don Antonio immediately recognizes the exploitation of his fellow
villagers and he proposes that they abandon goat herding and instead industrialize the agriculture
in the valley by building a powerhouse, creating irrigation systems, and growing oranges. Thus
Abasolo becomes the locus of conflict between the two men, between stagnation and progress,
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between the pastoral and the technological. But it also becomes the catalyst for Antonio’s
reconnection to the culture associated with his birthplace and for his Mexican-American
children’s recognition of the Mexican heritage that has, until this point, remained largely
ignored.
In her foreword to The Singing Valley, Niggli poses the central conflict of the play when
she wonders about Don Antonio’s son, Abel, and his reaction to finding himself in Mexico with
his father: “I have often wondered how this son felt when he first saw the village and the valley.
Did he love it then as I know he loves it now? Or did he fight it, longing desperately for the old
life as does [his sister] Lupita in this play?” (Niggli 53). In an interesting turn here, Niggli refers
to Abel and Lupita’s “non-Mexican” lives as “the old life,” and it is the “new life” that awaits
them in Mexico that poses the greatest challenge for the two. She writes, “This process of
adjustment to environment is a very great problem for many young Mexicans today. The old and
the new fight for possession of them. Which wins? That is the problem of this drama” (53).
While Niggli directs this line of questioning to young Mexicans, the characters in the play
consistently remind us that Abel and Lupita are both Mexican and American, and I would argue
that it is thus fair for us to understand this “fight” as one that is reflective of Niggli’s concern
with the Mexican-American experience in the post-Revolution era. How does one reconcile
Mexican heritage and American culture? How does one reconcile the old and the new? How, in
fact, does one arrive at a Mexican-American cultural identity? These are not questions of
nostalgia. This is not a problem of residing so completely in the past that one cannot see the
present or the future. What Don Antonio rediscovers, and what Abel and Lupita discover for the
first time, is a connection to one’s heritage that does not negate the “new,” but rather contributes
to a fully-realized hybrid cultural identity.
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Don Antonio rediscovers his connection to Abasolo immediately upon his return.
Although Rufino questions why Antonio would choose to return to the valley instead of taking
his money to more cosmopolitan locales, the rest of the villagers understand that something
intangible pulls Antonio back to his home in Mexico. In this exchange between Rufino, Father
Zacaya (the town priest), and Doña Beca (the town matriarch), the three discuss what might
compel Antonio to “come home” after his years in exile:
DON RUFINO: Twenty-two years. He has roamed the world. He has found gold
in Australia. And now, suddenly, with all the money . . . does he go to Paris?
Does he go to New York? No. He comes here, to this valley . . . to our valley.
Why? Have you asked yourselves that question, eh? He, who could buy sacred
Rome . . . why does he come to our poor little corner of the world?

FATHER ZACAYA: This is his home.

DON RUFINO: After twenty-two years? He’d lose himself between the plaza
and the church.

DOÑA BECA: Old friends . . . old memories . . . the house where he was born . . .

DON RUFINO: This tumbled down place? And he used to fine hotels. As for
friends and memories . . . of my wisdom I tell you: gold knows no friends, and
has no memories.

DOÑA BECA: Antonio is different! You speak with a foreign mouth . . .

DON RUFINO (sullenly): I’ve lived here fifteen years. I am the elected mayor of
Abasolo…

FATHER ZACAYA: What are fifteen years? This valley is very old. Why, the
first Spaniards came here in 1539 . . .

DON RUFINO: Give me no history, good Father. That is in the past . . . it is
finished . . . done with . . .

FATHER ZACAYA: Is it indeed? Then let me remind you of the proverb: He
who comes to this valley and drinks of its water, will stay here forever.

DOÑA BECA (triumphantly): That is the true answer, Rufino Gonzalez. Antonio
is a child of this valley. His first ancestor came here in the seventeen
32

hundreds…and he returns like a swallow to his nest, bringing his children with
him. (Niggli 57-58)

Doña Beca and Father Zacaya understand what Don Rufino does not – that Don Antonio never
really left Abasolo. Although he spends his exile in countries other than Mexico, the valley is as
much a part of him as is the blood that runs through his veins. What Doña Beca intimates is that
the desire to return “to his nest” is not simply a matter of choice for Antonio; it is rather an
ancestral pull that beckons him back to Mexico, back to Abasolo:
DON ANTONIO: My valley. When I first left here it was my courage, my hope,
the one thing that gave me strength. For over twenty years I’ve remembered
standing here at this gate, and looking down there . . . with the valley spreading
wide to the mountains, and in the middle of it, that little village. It has burned in
my memory. I’m really standing here. And out there is the magic of my valley...

DOÑA AMPARO: (timidly): But it’s the same as any other valley, Antonio.

DON ANTONIO: Not to me. Never to me. (70)

What we begin to see in this exchange is the idea that this “place” has more to do with Antonio’s
longing for home that does any nostalgic attachment to a way of life that has been replaced by
modernization. He does not lament the loss of a simpler time or a past that can never be
recaptured. It is his personal history, his family’s history, that beckons him back to Mexico –
one that Abel and Lupita eventually recognize in themselves. But their Mexican heritage does
not supplant their American cultural identity entirely. Instead, the two emerge as the play’s
examples of a generation of descendants who are distinctly Mexican-American.
Upon their arrival in Abasolo, Antonio’s son and daughter are conspicuously
“American.” When, for example, Abel asks Doña Beca about her history with his father, Father
Zacaya is quick to point out that Abel does not speak the valley’s language:
ABEL (moving forward eagerly): Are you the one who threw water on my father
when he serenaded you?

33

DOÑA BECA: That was my dear father. Antonio sang under the wrong window
that evening.

FATHER ZACAYA: You must learn our language, my son. Here one does not
serenade . . . one sings the rooster. (60)

Abel accepts this little lesson good-naturedly, and while he is not literate in the language of the
valley yet, he is quick to recognize and appreciate Abasolo in ways that resemble his father:
ABEL (at the gate, looking out): I like it. The air is so clear, and those distant
mountains . . . they look close enough to touch them with my hand. At this
moment I could build a bridge to span the valley. […] The air shimmers like an
opal . . . And all the cactus scattered about . . . and those trees that look like bent
pencils . . . I wonder what they are. (66)

It is not just that Abel recognizes the “real beauty” (66) of the valley, although this is clearly an
appreciation he shares with Antonio. There is also the subtle hint of ownership in Abel’s
declaration that he could build a bridge in the valley that echoes Antonio’s plans to modernize
Abasolo in order to free the valley from poverty. Although Abel’s rumination is merely the
daydream of a young man caught up in the natural splendor of his surroundings, we begin to see
a connection between this young man and this place almost immediately. Something in Abasolo
is his, and he feels instantly “at home” in Mexico, even though he has never been there. And yet,
his assimilation into Mexican life is not complete the instant he sets foot in his father’s
birthplace. Although he “likes” the valley right away, he is not “of” the valley, “of” Mexico, just
yet. His path to this self-identification is gradual and comes only after he is faced with leaving
Mexico.
The play’s second act commences three months after Antonio, Lupita, and Abel’s arrival
in Abasolo. Although Abel is clearly comfortable in the valley – flirting with Abasolo’s young
women, camping with the surveyors working with Antonio – he still struggles with the “too
many rules and regulations in [the] valley” (77) that dictate social interaction, and he admits that,
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“This new way of life is hard to get used to” (77). But he slowly starts to consider himself part
of Abasolo and begins to discover a piece of himself that has been dormant his entire life.
Although Lupita has held fast to her determination to get back to the United States, back
to “real” art and music and literature, Abel has come to recognize that Abasolo can offer them
access to these cultural expressions. He sees art in the “stone carvings on the outside of the
church” (82), music in the way the villagers “open their throats and let the music pour out of
their own hearts” (82), and literature in the campfire stories of the traveling goatherders who tell
tales of “the strongest man in the world who had a bear for a father; of the woman who must
weep every night because she betrayed her people to Cortés” (83). He even begins to speak the
valley’s language when he chastises Lupita for positioning herself as somehow superior to the
other women in the valley. “‘He who was born to be a gourd will never become a painted vase’”
(82), he tells his sister. And when an incredulous Lupita demands to know if Abel will keep his
promise to her to speak to their father about returning to the U.S., Abel has to admit to her that
he is no longer willing to do so:
LUPITA (catching his shoulders): Abel, you’re not growing to (She lets go of him
and steps back) . . . love this valley are you?

ABEL: I’m finding something here . . .something I’ve wanted all my life. […]
When I made that promise I didn’t know what this valley would mean to me. But
now I do … (82-84)

The “something” that has been missing in Abel’s life is the valley and the Mexican cultural
heritage it symbolizes. It is this place and this culture that have always been a part of him, and
now that he has spent some time in Abasolo he feels for the valley the same connection that
sustained Antonio during his exile. And yet, he comes dangerously close to walking away (both
literally and figuratively) when he and Antonio clash.
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Much of Abel’s time in Abasolo has been spent helping his father build the powerhouse
that will generate the power for the valley’s irrigation systems, but he has also had time to fall in
love with Ester, Doña Beca’s niece. He wants to marry her, but before he can propose he wants
written proof that the woman he proposed to in New York, Lupita’s friend Nancy Moreno, has
refused him (this is really just to appease Ester, who refuses to believe that Abel no longer has a
desire to marry Nancy). He is in the process of writing Nancy a letter when Antonio finds him at
home in the middle of the day and he berates him for taking time off of work when he should be
working on the plans for a flour mill they intend to build. Antonio quickly loses his patience
when he learns to whom Abel is writing, and he implores his son to return to work immediately,
shocked that Abel could be distracted by such a trifle. When Abel resists, explaining to his
father that this letter, at least for the time being, “is more important than flour-mill plans” (98),
Antonio’s retort is swift and hurtful as he questions Abel’s commitment to the valley:
DON ANTONIO: Sometimes I wonder if you are my own son. Does this valley
mean so little to you that you can neglect it for something of no value?

ABEL: My happiness has value!

DON ANTONIO: The valley is our happiness.

ABEL: Father, do you realize what you are saying? I don’t think you can, or you
wouldn’t say it.

DON ANTONIO: Am I to be constantly torn at by these little things? Why must I
go on fighting when I thought my days of fighting were finished?

ABEL: I knew you loved this valley, but I didn’t think you’d put it before …me.
(98)

Abel has come to love the valley and to recognize the connection he has to it, but his initial
resistance to this “new way of life” comes roaring back when he realizes that his father is almost
blinded by his devotion to this part of his personal history. When Antonio declares that helping
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the people of Abasolo “has been [his] religion for almost thirty years” (98), Abel begins to
question the effect of the valley on him and his family: “[Lupita] said this valley was a poison
that seeped in to a man’s blood. (He sits.) It’s in yours. I’d never realized it before. And it’s
beginning to get in mine” (98). Antonio misunderstands Abel’s sentiments entirely and is at first
pleased to hear that Abel is experiencing the same sort of ancestral connection to this place (and
to this culture) that he has. He wants Abel to protect the people of Abasolo, to accept the
Mexican part of himself: “For centuries my people have been whipped down to the earth, first
by the Spaniards and then by men like this Rufino. Protecting them is your duty. I place it upon
you” (99). When he learns that Abel has told his sister that he doesn’t want to leave the valley,
Antonio believes that Abel shares this sense of cultural duty. But Abel’s use of the term
“poison” suggests something far different. The valley, and all it stands for, looms like a threat to
Antonio’s American children. It threatens to swallow up the lives they led before arriving in
Mexico, to imprison them in a world that is still unfamiliar to them. And so Abel angrily
declares to his father that he and Lupita will be leaving Mexico, “to go back to the States and
drink a little freedom of [their] own” (99), to, in a sense, go back to being American. There is
no middle ground yet, no Mexican-American cultural identity for Abel. He can either stay in
Abasolo and “be” Mexican, or he can return to the United States and “be” American.
Antonio reacts with all of the anger one might expect of him, and he ceremoniously
disowns his children for betraying him, and worse, for betraying their cultural history when
Lupita pleads with him to understand their needs:
DON ANTONIO: Go back to the States with him. The two of you aren’t fit to
stay in my valley. Go back to the long exile. Until dust covers my eyes I shall
weep because I am childless, and my tears shall make the ground fertile. (His
voice almost choked with his emotion). But I shall be at home, at home, while you
will be homeless and far away. Because when you leave you shall never return.

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LUPITA (appealingly): Father, this never could be our home.

DON ANTONIO: When the days crawl into other days, you will listen for voices
laughing with the wisdom and joy of the earth. No air perfumed with orange
blossoms and flowering thorn and night-blooming jasmine will be in your nostrils.
No friendly heart will open to your smile. You will know then what it is to
desperately long for something of home. (100)

Antonio cannot envision a hybrid identity for his children since his sense of identity is
ineluctably linked to this particular place. The United States and Mexico are diametrically
opposed ideas in his eyes, and as such, he is unable to imagine his children being of both places.
And for a brief interlude, Abel seems to feel the same when he is determined to leave Mexico.
But he is jarred out of this myopic vision when he is threatened with the loss of all he has built in
the valley.
In the midst of Antonio’s argument with his children, a servant runs into the house and
frantically informs them that the powerhouse is on fire. Antonio realizes instantly that Rufino
has deliberately set the blaze in order to destroy the one man who can challenge his power over
Abasolo, and he rushes to the fire to try to salvage anything he can. When he returns, it is with
Abel and a crowd of people declaring Abel a hero. It seems that as he was angrily rushing away
from Antonio after their argument, he happened to pass the powerhouse and managed to
distinguish the fire by himself. Antonio declares proudly that his son “ […] saved the
powerhouse” (104), and in the midst of the celebration Abel realizes that he really cannot leave
Ester, cannot leave the valley. He admits to Antonio that he was right about his duty to this
place and to these people: “When I saw smoke from the windows of the powerhouse, I realized
what you were trying to tell me this afternoon. I helped to build it, to create it out of nothing,
and no one can destroy it. You were right. My place is here, guarding this valley” (106). But it
is not just that Abel feels possessive of the structure he helped build in Abasolo. He finally
38

accepts that there is a piece of him that has always been in this place. He may indeed be
American by birth and by cultural identity, but his Mexican heritage has always been a part of
him as well. Unlike his father, however, he does not see the two as mutually exclusive. Nothing
suggests that Abel will abandon the American part of himself. He is able to be more objective
than his father when it comes to the valley, and the implication is that he is reflective of a
burgeoning Mexican-American identity that is more nuanced than the identity his father
envisions for him.
While Niggli’s foreword to the play suggests that Abel is the character most conflicted by
his cultural identity, Lupita is no mere afterthought. In fact, I would argue that Lupita’s eventual
identification with her Mexican heritage is more hard-won than is her brother’s. Lupita is far
more resolute in her “Americanness,” and her distaste for the valley is absolute, resentful, and
brimming with condescension for what she perceives as the backward way of life in her father’s
birthplace.
Upon her arrival, Lupita is greeted with a gift from Doña Amparo – a hand-sewn
nightgown top crafted from a design that Amparo has “treasured […] since 1910” (63). When
Lupita reminds her, “But this is 1935,” (63), Amparo explains that this is precisely the reason
why the design is so “rare” (63). Lupita has no idea what she has been given, and Amparo has to
explain that she made it in order for the former to be able to sew it into one of her own
nightgowns. The women are shocked to hear that Lupita does not sew, and when Doña Beca
declares that she, and the valley, have much to teach the young woman, Lupita is quick to correct
her - “I doubt it” (63) she replies with disdain. At least initially, there is nothing Lupita can see
as valuable in this Mexican valley. She wants the life she had in New York, surrounded by
39

artists and poets – a life she equates with progress and futurity. She will not be the kind of
woman who sews.
As soon as Abel and Lupita are alone after their arrival, Lupita pleads with her brother to
secure their father’s permission to return to the United States. She is terrified that she will
somehow be left behind if she is forced to stay in Mexico:
LUPITA: Abel, don’t you understand? Father wants to smother us with this
valley . . . cut us off from all of the important things in life . . . for . . . a bunch of
goats! […] I’m afraid, Abel. Really afraid. If Father has his way, he’ll bury us
here. And the wonderful world, where people speak our language . . . where they
love beauty the way we do . . . they’re going on, into their wonderful future,
forgetting all about us.”

ABEL: Poor Lupita. All you have to do is open your eyes. There’s real beauty
here . . .

LUPITA (grabbing the nightgown top and shaking it at him): Do you call this…
this absurdity . . . beautiful? Twenty-five years out of date! That’s what’s going
to happen to us! We’re going to be out of date, unless we get out of here now . . .
tonight! (65-66)

Lupita clearly subscribes to the past/present dichotomy that Arrizón accuses Niggli of
perpetuating, and she actually resembles Antonio in many ways in her inability to imagine an
existence that allows for both her Mexican heritage and her American cultural identity.
Additionally, her desperate need to return to the United States reflects her understanding that this
heritage is linked to this place, just as Antonio does. For most of the play, Lupita remains
stubborn in her determination to remain somehow separate from Abasolo, from the people in it,
and from the threat it poses to her “wonderful” American future.
But subtle cracks begin to appear in Lupita’s self-imposed exile almost immediately,
although she is less willing to admit to them than is her brother. When, for example, Ester refers
to Lupita’s great –grandmother, Lupita is slightly intrigued by the idea that her family’s history
in the valley extends beyond her father:
40

LUPITA (indicating the niche [in the patio wall]): What is this thing for?

ESTER: That’s for Our Blessed Lady. She’s a miracle virgin.

LUPITA: Does she cure people?

ESTER: Oh, no. She saved the valley from the French. That was in your great-
grandmother’s time.

LUPITA: In my . . .? That’s strange. I never thought about my great-grandmother
living here.

ESTER: The world says she was a very fine lady. (67)

Lupita is very quickly faced with the idea that part of her cultural make-up resides in Mexico, but
she is equally as quick to push this aside in favor of her condescending distaste for Abasolo and
for the folklore and (some might say) superstition of its people. When talk turns to Rufino, Ester
declares him a “great traveler” (68) since he has been “as far as Mexico City” (68) and she
reveals with all seriousness that she believes the mayor is “the Devil’s own stepson” (68).
Lupita laughs this off as utter nonsense and is only further repulsed by the provincialism of the
valley. She redoubles her efforts to convince her brother to leave Mexico, all the while adhering
to her belief that Abasolo is destined to wallow in the past while America will go forth into the
future, a fact made clear in her discussion with Abel about art. After Abel mentions the music of
the valley as preferential to the noise her American friend Nancy creates, Lupita is quick to
defend the latter because of the progress it symbolizes:
ABEL: Of course it hasn’t all the technical tricks of Nancy Moreno’s fine
compositions. What was her latest effort? That one where she used the factory
whistle to show the boy’s love for the girl?

LUPITA: Even Pierre Dumarque considered that a masterpiece. And you’re just
showing your own ignorance. It wasn’t a boy and a girl. It was two robots. She
was showing the pulse of the future in sound. The music around here just . . .

ABEL: Shows the pulse of a human heart, and people aren’t as important as
robots. (83)
41

For most of the play, the character of Nancy Moreno symbolizes the American life and culture to
which Lupita so desperately wants to return, and she is very clearly aligned with ideas of futurity
and modernity in this exchange. Lupita’s defense of Nancy is a thinly-veiled defense of her own
American identity against the encroaching Mexican heritage she encounters in Abasolo, and she
is fighting hard against the Mexican-American identity that eventually emerges by the end of the
play. But it does, eventually, emerge.
Lupita continues to plan her return to the U.S., but this return is predicated on the fact
that Abel will join her. When he decides to remain in Abasolo, she engages in a tearful
conversation with Doña Beca about the prison she feels she is in, and this prison is once again
figured along the lines of resistance to progress. Doña Beca declares that Lupita is “more
American than Mexican” (88) for her inability to see that there is indeed “ambition” in Abasolo,
but all Lupita can see is the “backward” people who “keep their eyes fixed on the ground, their
hands always curved as though fastened on the plow. They’re worse than the chickens and the
dogs! They’re weeds growing out of the earth” (90). Doña Beca reminds her that, “From the
earth comes all life, Lupita . . . and the souls of men” (90), echoing Abel’s earlier statement that
the music of the valley is about actual hearts and souls. Thus, the distinction between America
and Abasolo is not one of a place stuck in the past and one with its eyes on the future. Abel and
Beca view the distinction as having more to do with an investment in human emotion that is not,
I would argue, at all reflective of a nostalgia for an extinct way of life. They are not suspicious
of modernity or progress or ambition, but rather are aware that actual people should not get
displaced in the wake of such progress. The challenge is not to American culture in general, but
rather to Lupita’s idea of it.
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But for all of her fierce resistance to the stagnation she associates with Mexican life,
Lupita does begin to reveal the subtle ways in which she is transforming. In a very short but
telling exchange between Antonio, Lupita, and a visiting reporter named Perez, Lupita displays a
surprising skill that she must have acquired in spite of herself:
LUPITA: Perhaps the Señor Perez would care to rest before dinner. (Looking up
at the sky). It is nearly time to serve it.

DON ANTONIO (laughing): You see, señor, my little Lupita is learning to tell
time by the sun. Soon she will be as clever as any girl in the village. (Lupita
steps back and raises her hand to her face as though she had felt him strike her).
(92)

Despite her best efforts, Lupita begins to adapt to life in the village in subconscious ways.
Literally speaking, she probably just picked up the habit of telling time without a watch because
she is surrounded by other people who do so, but the fact that this happens without her really
being aware of it suggests the same dormant memory of her heritage that Abel realizes in himself
almost immediately.
And yet, she continues to fight. In a desperate attempt to get back to New York, Lupita
writes to Nancy to ask for her help and she assumes that her friend will respond quickly and
enthusiastically. Seven months later, Nancy finally writes back and Lupita is so elated to receive
the letter that she cannot see straight enough to read it. She asks Beca to read it to her, but she
quickly discovers that the letter is written in English, which confuses her: “LUPITA (puzzled): I
wonder why she wrote in English? She’s as Mexican as we are” (my emphasis) (114). Despite
her rigid determination to remain as “American” as possible, Lupita’s Mexican heritage has
begun to seep through the cracks (so to speak) as she begins to self-identify as Mexican, and
when she tries to explain to Abel, who has been summoned to read the letter, why she cannot
make sense of what Nancy has written, we get a very clear articulation of the precarious
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cultural/ethnic position in which Lupita finds herself: “LUPITA: The letter came from Nancy.
But she wrote in English, and I haven’t spoken in English in so long. I’m all confused. I can’t . . .
I can’t understand what she’s saying” (115). English has, quite literally, become a foreign
language to Lupita, but her inability to understand Nancy, who has functioned as a symbol of
American life and culture for Lupita, suggests that the latter’s initial cultural identification has
also become a bit foreign to her. Lupita cannot make sense of her Mexican-American identity
just yet, despite the subtle clues that this identity has begun to emerge at an almost subconscious
level, and this cultural confusion engenders in Lupita an even greater determination to return to
the U.S., despite the fact that she has no money with which to do so.
It is not until the play’s conclusion that Lupita finally seems at ease with the hybrid
cultural identity that comes from being Mexican and American. Throughout her time in the
village, a candy maker named Carlos has fallen in love with Lupita. Not surprisingly, she does
not reciprocate his feelings because she considers him too provincial and lacking in ambition.
Doña Beca insists that Carlos and Lupita should be married, that Lupita is precisely the type of
woman Carlos needs to rekindle the ambition he once displayed. Lupita resists and suggests that
Carlos actually needs a woman who is gentler, more passive, more traditional (and by
implication, more Mexican). But something in her starts to change when she learns the
surprising news that Carlos fought with Pancho Villa during the Revolution and amassed a great
deal of power:
LUPITA: Carlos needs a girl like Ester . . . sweet, simple, in love with a home.

DOÑA BECA: Carlos needs ambition! He needs a woman behind him to push
him. He has great talent . . . he has courage, he’s dependable, he’s honest . . .
every man in this valley would follow him if he chose to lead them. But he
prefers to stand in his candy kitchen and watch the world pass by . . . when the
world, his world, this valley needs him. You could give him that push, Lupita. A
girl like Ester would destroy him . . . make him even worse than he is now.
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LUPITA: Doña Beca, you don’t understand . . . you’ve never understood. I
wouldn’t be content with this valley. It isn’t big enough for me. But it is big
enough for Carlos . . . and that’s the difference between us.

DOÑA BECA: There’s a circle of mountains around this valley, but Carlos has
climbed their peak many times. He left them behind when he went to fight with
Pancho Villa. When Villa captured Mexico City, did you know he put Carlos in
charge of the whole Republic?

LUPITA (startled): Carlos? Carlos Baldera?

DOÑA BECA: Yes. Who knows? He might have been president, if Villa hadn’t
been driven out of the city . . . his army broken up. An ambitious man would
have stayed and fought for his rights, but Carlos was sick of fighting, sick of
political squabbles. He wanted to come home . . . to peace. But married to you,
Lupita, he can always climb those mountains again. (113)

There are the obvious gender implications in this exchange as Doña Beca imagines a life in
which Lupita is the proverbial “woman behind the man,” but there is also the implicit notion that
it is Lupita’s “Americanness” that would make her a more suitable wife for Carlos than the other
women in the village. Lupita’s independence, her fierce resistance to tradition and the ambition
she herself displays, are reasons she would be well-suited to a man who needs these very
attributes awakened in himself. But Carlos will not leave Mexico, and he realizes that Lupita
does not want to stay. So, he offers her a way out. Because he loves her so much, he presents
Lupita with his life savings so she can return to the U.S. and support herself “until [she] find[s] a
job” (119). Lupita is touched and confused by this gesture, and she retreats to her room in tears.
This scene occurs in the midst of preparations for Lupita’s Saint’s Day celebration, a
Mexican holiday that commemorates the saint after which a person has been named. As various
citizens of Abasolo converge at the home of Don Antonio, Lupita shocks them by emerging from
her bedroom, “wear[ing] the colored skirts and the gay blouse of a village girl,” and Niggli notes
that, “She really is pretty now” (122). Everyone is thrilled to see Lupita’s transformation, and
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Doña Beca poses a question that is really the thematic question of the entire play: “You have
been in exile, Lupe. Will you come home to us?” (123) Lupita is not quite prepared to answer
this question yet, is not quite able to realize her Mexican-American identity, but when Carlos
returns and they begin the celebration by hitting a piñata, Lupita seems finally to have reached a
new level of cultural self-awareness. When she hears that the first person to break the piñata will
also be the next person to get married, she removes the blindfold she is wearing, breaks the
piñata, “turns to face Carlos, and stares straight at him” (125). Her father is shocked at her
forward behavior, but Doña Beca assures him that his daughter has finally “come to her senses”
(125). And as the play concludes, Lupita declares that she “want[s] to hear singing. [She] wants
to hear the songs of this valley” (126), suggesting that she has finally accepted that this valley,
and the culture that is a part of it, are also a part of her.
It is probably fair to say that Niggli is a bit heavy-handed here as she sets the scene for
Lupita’s cultural transformation. Dressed in the traditional garb of a Mexican village and
surrounded by family and friends on her Saint’s Day, Lupita, and Niggli’s audience, are in some
ways barraged with stereotypes of Mexican culture. And Lupita does accept her role as Carlos’s
wife, a traditional gender role that she associates with being Mexican for much of the play. But
it is important to remember that The Singing Valley is a play, and thus Niggli must depend on
visual cues in ways that are different than if this were a novel, for example. We must also
consider historical context since, as Padilla notes, Niggli’s work is constitutive of a burgeoning
Mexican-American identity, and I would argue that Lupita emerges with her Mexican-American
identity fully intact by the end of the play. Her willingness to continue to ignore the social
dictates of the village as they relate to gender manifest in her very forward behavior towards
Carlos and suggests that she retains a good deal of her American cultural identity since, it has
46

been made clear to us, no Mexican girl would act in such a way. And the idea that Carlos’s
future is predicated on Lupita’s own ambition continues to align her with the progress she
associates with the United States. Niggli does not suggest that these fade away or get subsumed
by Lupita’s recognition of her Mexican heritage. Instead this long-dormant part of her ethnic
identity is awakened and weaves itself with the American cultural identity that has guided her
through most of her life. And I would argue that, although Lupita concludes the play looking
every part the traditional Mexican woman, her Mexican-American identity is as fully realized as
is Abel’s. She is consistently positioned as somehow different than the other women in the
village, as an “other,” and this “otherness” is clearly the American part of her. But she also
comes to understand and recognize the Mexican part of her that has always been there as a sort
of cultural memory. Thus she and Abel emerge as interesting counterpoints to their father’s
myopic vision of cultural identity. He is resolute in his self-identification as Mexican, but his
son and daughter come to represent a generation of Mexican-Americans who recognize the
cultural ties to place, but who also create a space in which the American culture in which they
have been raised can coexist with the Mexican heritage that is part of their familial and
communal history.

Bob Webster’s Reawakening in Mexican Village
The notion of cultural hybridity that begins to emerge in Niggli’s early work also
functions as the thematic center in her most well-known text, the novel Mexican Village.
Published in 1945, the novel comments in direct ways on the issues surrounding Mexican-
American identity that are implicit throughout The Singing Valley. Niggli’s collection of stories
focuses on Bob Webster, “an American-born product of a liaison between a Mexican woman and
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an Anglo who rejects his son when his Mexican blood manifests itself rather too clearly” (R.
Paredes 88). The moment of Bob’s rejection is swift but absolute as his father declares in no
uncertain terms that he will not admit his paternity. Bob recalls the scene in which “a very blond
man stiffened in his office chair and said bitingly, ‘Are you suggesting that I admit an Indian is a
son of mine? Damn it, I’m a white man!’” (Niggli, Mexican Village165). The mention of Bob’s
blond father and his rejection of “an Indian” suggests that Bob looks far less Anglo than does the
man who helped to conceive him, and yet Bob does not, at least at this point, self-identify as
Mexican. Thus, the terms of his father’s rejection almost immediately introduce the notion of
cultural in-betweenness. The origin of his Anglo identity disavows him, and Bob has yet to
accept his mother’s cultural identity as his own. His is, therefore, left feeling lost and unsure
about who he is. In his sadness and loneliness, Bob decides to travel to Europe to fight in World
War I, but he eventually decides to return to the Mexican village where his grandmother lived
and to work as a quarry chief for a year. He hopes that “the nostalgia of the blood” that is “a part
of his [Mexican] heritage” (147) will finally be satiated upon his return, but what actually
emerges is Bob’s Mexican-American cultural identity. Similar to Abel and Lupita in The
Singing Valley, Bob begins the novel with a vision of himself that is ultimately transformed by
the end of the narrative when he finds himself as much Mexican as he is American.
Although Bob’s return to Hidalgo is prompted by a longing that he identifies as part of
his Mexican heritage, and although his father recognizes only his “Indian” blood, part of him is
still American, and his “American qualities manifest . . . themselves in several ways” (R. Paredes
89). He speaks Spanish, for example, but “some of the words are strange, and the accent is
unfamiliar” (Niggli, Mexican Village 151). And his initial plan to remain in Hidalgo for just a
year is reflective of what Raymund Paredes identifies as the distinctly American quality of
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restlessness: “Webster is impatient and restless and even in his most profound moments of
tranquility in Mexico, he is troubled by an almost inexpressible feeling that his life must
somehow be better still” (89). And Bob’s “irreverence for custom and ritual” (89) belies “an
individualism and an assumption of free choice” that Paredes identifies as one of his “admirable
[…] American traits” (89). When, for example, the quarry foreman warns Bob against
purchasing a white horse for fear that it will anger the ghost of El Caballo Blanco, an infamous
thief who still guards his treasure, Bob resolutely decides to buy a white horse, unconcerned with
who or what he might anger. Thus, his difference from the Mexican villagers in many ways
amplifies his “Americanness,” but the more time he spends in Hidalgo, the more he recovers his
Mexican heritage.
The cultural and ethnic recollections in Bob’s memory begin to stir almost immediately
after his arrival in Hidalgo. He recalls the several employment offers he received to work in
silver mines in the nearby village of Pachuca, but something in “the northern cement quarry [of
Hidalgo] had attracted his fancy” (Niggli, Mexican Village 148). He realizes that, “He did not
want the picturesque softness of the south. The blood that was in him demanded the serene
austerity of the northern mountains, and although he had never seen Saddle Mountain [the
location of the quarry] until this morning, he could have described it minutely from stories told
him in his childhood” (148). This early passage is significant for several reasons. Bob’s
inclination to remain in the northern parts of Mexico suggests a link to the border with the
United States. Symbolically, Bob is perched between these two cultures while he is in Hidalgo.
Although he is in Mexico, America is never too far out of reach; Bob is able to gaze north (so to
speak) and to keep a figurative eye on his American cultural identity while in Hidalgo. But this
early mention of Bob’s blood and of the desires it has for specific parts of Mexico, along with
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the mention of his family stories about the region, also sets the stage for the series of cultural
memories that come to Bob throughout his transformation. Something is stirred in Bob almost
immediately, and even in his first days in Mexico he recognizes these stirrings as an awakening
of sorts. The idea that Bob’s heritage and cultural memory guide him to Saddle Mountain to
quench a specific desire suggests that Bob is not simply discovering the Mexican parts of
himself. Rather, he is beginning to recover these elements of his identity.
Many of the cultural memories in the text come to Bob through the voice of his
grandmother. When he first arrives in Hidalgo, for example, he is reminded of the proper way to
respond when meeting a stranger: “As the young man moved forward to clasp the hand a vague
wisp of memory returned to him in his grandmother’s voice, When meeting strangers it is polite
to speak your name. He said self-consciously, ‘Bob Webster,’ and for the first time the name
which he knew was rightfully his sounded strange and wrong to him” (151). Not only is Bob
guided by memory here, he also displays the first inklings of self-awareness when it comes to his
own identity. The Anglo name “Bob Webster” seems somehow out of place in Hidalgo, and
although Bob is resolute that the name is “rightfully his,” he also senses the sudden
“strangeness” of it. What we see as readers, and what Bob cannot yet see, is that the name
sounds strange because it masks his Mexican heritage. There are parts of Bob’s cultural and
ethnic identity that he has yet to explore, but something in him begins to create feelings of
foreignness attached to his Americanness.
But even after spending a few days in Hidalgo, Bob is still intent on leaving in a year
after he has fulfilled his duties at the quarry. His memory of his grandmother suggests a
different plan for him though, and he experiences a moment of awareness similar to the one Abel
does when he first arrives in Abasolo:
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The village was flowing toward him like a wave, and its first softness had already
touched him. He shut his eyes and sweat was cold and heavy on his face. His
grandmother’s voice stirred faintly in his memory. Once, to every man, comes a
vision of the future . . . For a moment it seemed he could see his life spread out
before him, with the mountains barring his exit on either side, and in front of him
Saddle Mountain refusing him passage to the outside world. As quickly as it
came the feeling dissipated, but it left him trembling, although he laughed at his
own stupidity. As he thought back over that momentary vision he muttered to
himself in English, ‘Stay here until you die? You’re crazy. One year from today
you’ll be on the train, headed for South America. (166).
Bob quickly dismisses the idea of a lifetime in Hidalgo, reminding himself in English that this is
not where he is meant to spend the remainder of his life. Although we might understand Bob’s
“vision of the future” as one in which he emerges with a fully-realized Mexican-American
identity, he is still blind to this possibility, instead seeing himself burdened by his Mexican
heritage. Similar to Lupita’s response in The Singing Valley, Bob initially sees the surrounding
mountains, and the culture they represent, as a prison, as a place he will have to escape as soon
as he can.
But we also have to remember that Bob, unlike Lupita, has made the choice to come to
Mexico in order to reclaim something that he cannot quite articulate, and as time progresses, that
reclamation focuses more and more on his Mexican heritage. He recalls, for example, his Anglo
friends from the war, but as he considers the relationships he develops with the men in Hidalgo,
he realizes that their close bond emerges from a shared ethnic and cultural history: “. . . these
three Mexican young men gave him a feeling of comradeship that grew not so much from a
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meeting of minds as from a relationship of blood. I understand how they think, Bob summed it
up finally for himself, and what actions will follow the lines of their thought. And that’s
because, he added with a slight feeling of surprise, I think and act the same way. We have no
need to explain ourselves to each other” (192). It is their shared cultural identity that connects
them, that binds these men to each other, and as Bob starts to accept this, we see the ways in
which his rediscovery of his Mexican heritage contributes to his transformed self-identity.
The inherited knowledge that reveals itself to Bob through his received memories also
manifests in the presence of ancestral myth or folklore in the text. When he recalls his
grandmother, it is often through the myths he remembers her telling him when he was a child:
For a moment he was a little boy again, and a woman’s voice was recounting
softly in Spanish, “So the great god of winds, Hurukan, transformed his horse into
a mountain to guard his favorite valley. He smoothed down the trembling limbs.
The tail he smoothed down, the fine arching neck and proud head. But in his
haste he forgot the saddle . . .” (144)

Bob recalls his grandmother’s explanation of how Hidalgo’s Saddle Mountain was formed when
he first arrives in the village, thus he is almost immediately steeped in the history of the place
that serves as the site of his cultural reawakening. And because it is his grandmother’s voice that
recounts this history for him as an adult, we see how his own ancestral history propels him
toward this reawakening. The blood he shares with her is what draws him back to Hidalgo, and
the generations of history that her voice represents instructs him and guides him as he slowly
embraces his Mexican identity.
While Bob’s grandmother appears as memory in the text, the character of Tía Magdalena,
his housekeeper, serves as a physical representation of the connection to mythic and folkloric
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history that is as much a part of his identity as is his American tendency to wander, for example.
Magdalena is an eagle witch, and she possesses absolute confidence in her power: “I am a witch
– an eagle witch. Remember that. I do not belong to the stupid clan of town witches. In me
there is power, not simple spells to win a lover or kill an unwanted husband” (168). Magdalena
remains firmly connected to her mythic power, to the history that this represents. And Bob
immediately associates her with his grandmother: “[she] bore a disturbing resemblance to his
grandmother, not in appearance but in manner” (169). As Magdalena cares for Bob, as she feeds
him and cleans for him, she also reinforces the historical presence in the text by serving as a link
to both the mythic and ancestral history represented by his grandmother and representative of his
Mexican heritage. Rafael Pérez-Torres contends that, “Ancestral memory . . . merges with
mythic memory” and forms a “central trope in the articulation of Chicana[/Chicano] culture”
(292). Bob’s connection to both his grandmother and to Magdalena, along with the merging of
memory that their association with each other represents, propels his eventual embrace of his
Mexican ethnicity. Thus, his cultural memories function as a vital force in his transformation.
Despite his continued resistance to the cultural heritage represented by his grandmother,
by his connection to Hidalgo, and by his emerging (or re-emerging) cultural memories, these
forces all prove too strong to deny, and by the end of the novel Bob finds himself ready to accept
his Mexican heritage. He has learned that he has a sister, Sofia, and she surprises Bob with the
information that their grandmother has left him an inheritance. When she seeks him out to
deliver the letter, she offers a particularly apropos Mexican proverb that perfectly encapsulates
Bob’s transformed cultural identity: “‘I like you, Berto [her nickname for Roberto]. For a long
time I have hated you because you ran away from us. But the poet has written, ‘It is just that
man should seek his destiny in the blood of the coming morning’” (541). Bob’s destiny was not
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just in Hidalgo. He had to find his way to Mexico, to his Mexican heritage, with his Anglo-
American identity also present. And once he does, he emerges with a transformed sense of who
he is and where he comes from. After Sofia leaves him, Bob decides to walk home and he finds
himself in a church on Guadalupe Day, which celebrates Mexico’s patron saint. He settles into a
pew to listen to the service just as the choir begins to sing a hymn in honor of Guadalupe, and the
words propel Bob’s decision to finally recognize that he is in fact as much Mexican as he is
American:
Oh, María,
Blessed Mother,
Dear consolation of man.
Aid me,
Guide me,
To the celestial land.

The words sank into him and he sat on, not thinking, little pictures
flashing through his mind of his mother, his grandmother, Sofia […], his
drunken stepfather, his own father […] all the people who had made up his
life in that other time, the time that was now dead. And it was as though
they were pictures that belonged to another person, a person he had once
known but now no longer knew. I’ll change my name back to Ortega.
The valley will like that. They could never pronounce my Yanqui name.
He put his palm against his face in the pale darkness as though he were
meeting a new person, and merging into that person, and becoming that
person. (542)
The idea of “merging” is a useful one as we consider Bob’s newly-realized Mexican-American
identity. Although he sheds his “Yanqui” name, the implication is that Bob’s “Americanness”
has merged with his Mexican heritage, particularly because he has exercised the free will
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Paredes mentions when he makes the choice to adopt his Mexican surname. And by stating that
Bob is going to change his name back to Ortega, Niggli suggests that Bob has simply uncovered
what was already there inside of him.
Raymund Paredes maintains that, “Through Webster, Niggli suggests that few Mexican-
Americans (or few people, for that matter) are truly detached from their origins. Their cultural
memories – as in Bob’s case, often received as folklore – reside in the back of their minds, ready
to emerge” (89). When Bob finally decides to remain in Hidalgo, when he changes his name
“back to Ortega” (Niggli, Mexican Village 542), he fully embraces the identity that his cultural
and familial memories represent. And when he finally “[speaks] with a Mexican, not a North
American mind… [he] truly becomes a part of the valley” (320). Thus, memory, folklore, and
myth serve as generative forces for Bob’s cultural transformation. It is the recovery of this
history, this memory, which prompts Bob to embrace the Mexican identity that extends from his
grandmother to his mother to himself and to allow that identity to merge with the American parts
of him. Although his father refuses Bob, and therefore refuses to acknowledge him as American,
Bob is, in fact, American and Mexican. As Paredes notes, “although Webster comes to
understand that his essential self is Mexican, he knows too that, having been raised in the United
States and inevitably touched by its culture, he cannot be wholly Mexican” (89). So, for
example, when Bob makes the decision to burn the letter from his grandmother that reveals that
he is actually the head of the wealthy and prestigious Castillo family in Hidalgo, he is exercising
the free will that Paredes describes as particularly American. Thus, he is destined to carry within
him both cultures, and it takes a return to Hidalgo, a return to the place that he unknowingly
yearns for, for those Mexican and American cultural memories to merge within him.
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Referring to Mexican Village specifically, Paredes contends that, “In creating Webster,
Niggli was pointing to the Mexican-American as a distinctive type, as someone apart from both
the mexicano and the yanqui who could build his own identity on the foundation of two cultures”
(89). But I would argue that this description applies to Abel and Lupita in The Singing Valley as
well and that, when considered together, these two texts reveal an iteration of Mexican-American
identity that is more about the confluence of ancestral memory and the ways in which one self-
identifies than it is about the nostalgia of which Niggli is often accused. Bob, Abel, and Lupita
all maintain “American” parts of themselves in the face of the recovery of their Mexican
heritage. And although all three of them enact a “return,” both literal and metaphorical, to
Mexico, they do so with their Americanness still intact in many ways. From an historical
perspective, these three characters are representative of a burgeoning Mexican-American
identity, and I would argue that Niggli’s texts are constitutive of this identity rather than
descriptive of it. Niggli is not “looking back” in these texts. Instead, she is looking forward to
what it would mean to be men and women who are both Mexican and American, not Mexican or
American.

Niggli’s Cultural Modernism
When considering American literary modernism, Josefina Niggli does not immediately
come to mind to join the ranks of writers such as Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, and T.S. Eliot.
Indeed, one could argue that her writing displays little of the formal experimentation that
characterizes the American modernist project as we have come to understand it. But I would
argue that Niggli is representative of an alternative modernism that challenges us to reconsider
how and what we deem as modernist literature. Her is a modernism that is historically-
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contextualized rather than stylistically, a modernism that is ethnically and culturally influenced, a
modernism that is as much about modernization as it is about formal modernism (although I
would argue that she does engage in formal modernism in subtle ways).
In Ethnic Modernism, Werner Sollors maintains that by the mid-twentieth century “the
U.S. became virtually identified with the culture of modernism” to the degree that “modernism
now appeared as American as apple pie, the culture of modernism as an American ‘homemade
world,’ and modern art as ‘the great American thing’” (9). The obvious problem with such a
configuration is that it marginalized and in many cases occluded those American writers whose
heritage was not the stuff of “apple pie.” What of the American writers who also had their
metaphorical feet in other countries, other cultures, other ethnic identifications? Sollors asserts
that these writers and intellectuals were as essential to American modernist culture as were their
“apple pie” counterparts: “African Americans, European immigrants, and members of other
minority groups were, as immigrants and ethnics, part of modernity, as they lived through such
experiences of migration, ethnic identification, racialization, and alienation. In many ways, they
also participated in, and significantly advanced, the course of modernism in the United States”
(12). Of course, “modernism” and “modernity” are not interchangeable terms. A concern with
modernity does not necessarily a modernist make. But I believe that Niggli straddles the border
between modernity and modernism in her attempts to correct the Anglo vision of Mexico and
Mexicans as distinctly of the past, in her concern with industrialization, and in her decision to
write in English, resulting in a distinct Mexican-American modernism.
Sollors contends that “ethnic literature of the first half of the twentieth century shows a
remarkable concern for the American world of modernity” and that, “In part, this tendency
reveals itself in fleeting instances when the ethnic group in question is associated with an older,
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premodern […] ethos” (60). Such is the case in both Modern Village and The Singing Valley
when Bob (in the former) and Lupita (in the latter) maintain the consistent viewpoint that
Mexico is backward, that it lacks the ambition and desire for progress that characterize the
United States, that it is a country and culture content to languish in the past. But in ways both
implicit and explicit, Niggli challenges this misguided assumption and asserts that, when
considering a Mexican-American cultural identity that extends into and from both the U.S. and
Mexico, this past/present dichotomy fails to withstand careful scrutiny.
In Mexican Village, Bob’s mere presence in Hidalgo signifies the presence of
modernization in the novel. He is, after all, in Mexico to take control of the cement quarry in
Saddle Rock, the cement an explicit indicator of material progress as it calls to mind the paved
roads and looming buildings that it will help construct. In Mexican Modernity: The Avant-Garde
and the Technological Revolution, Rubén Gallo identifies the advent of cement as a watershed
moment in the modernization of Mexico. He maintains that, “reinforced concrete replaced the
hand-crafted method favored in nineteenth-century architecture with industrially-produced
materials” (170). The shift to industrialized production of concrete impacted architecture as well
as the way in which Mexicans existed within that architecture: “Cement constructions
introduced a completely different spatial logic, and citizens had to learn to exist in new spaces of
modernity” (170). Niggli’s mention of cement is by no means accidental. Cement was an
important symbol of a modern Mexico, and Bob is immediately linked to this symbol of
modernity when he assumes control of the quarry. Furthermore, his resistance to what he
perceives as the outdated and provincial customs, rituals, and folklore that determine much of
Hidalgo’s daily life is configured along the lines of his more “modern” American view of the
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world. But there are more subtle ways in which Niggli’s modernity and modernism emerge
throughout the novel, ways that directly challenge the criticisms so often leveled at her.
The specter of war hovers throughout the narrative in Mexican Village, and the specific
conflicts Niggli includes are important in a discussion of the author as a modernist. Bob arrives
in Hidalgo after fighting in World War I, and he recalls the swiftness with which he became an
expert in explosives: “He joined the French army because he was hungry, and he wanted three
meals a day. They put him in the engineer corps and he learned how to use dynamite. He found
that he was clever at it, and he enjoyed working with explosives because the capped danger
fascinated him. He liked the sense of power the small sticks gave him” (Niggli, Mexican Village
165). Often cited as the war that launched warfare into the modern age, World War I introduced
such “innovations” as trench warfare, the widespread use of explosives, and the use of heavy
artillery, and its memory clings to Bob throughout his adult life. This was modern war at its
worst, and Bob is inextricably linked to it in the novel. But his participation in World War I
precludes his participation in the Mexican Revolution, and it is the latter that occupies the minds
of the people of Hidalgo. And when Bob eventually laments the fact that he was not a soldier of
the Revolution, we see the ways in which Niggli links what Padilla identifies as a truly
transnational conflict to the idea of a Mexican-American cultural identity.
When Bob first arrives at the quarry, he plants himself among the indito workers as they
take a break to eat and he listens carefully to their winding conversations. At first, the discussion
is dominated by the “old ones” and turns predictably to thoughts about the weather, crops, and
the agrarian life that is the subsistence of Hidalgo: “[…] and the jefe listening quietly to the talk
of the wise old ones, not once interrupting to show his superior wisdom, but listening with
humility and silence as the young should listen to the old. There was talk of rain and crops, for
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the quarry people depended on the farms of Hidalgo for their food” (157). Bob seems
remarkably willing to adhere to custom here as he defers to the wisdom of the older generation,
and this is perhaps precisely the type of conversation Bob would expect to hear among the “old
ones.” But talk quickly turns to the Revolution, suggesting that Hidalgo is not as rooted in the
past as Bob might first have imagined: “And after a while there was talk of the Great Revolution
and what it would mean to the inditos, if it meant anything at all, which the old ones doubted;
for, as the wisest said, through all the years there had been so many promises, and so many do-
nothings. Now the Great Revolution was two years finished, and it, too, seemed to end in do-
nothing” (157). The old mens’ commentary on the Mexican Revolution allows for the inclusion
of important historical context. The Revolution was at some point full of promise for the
majority of Mexico’s population who had been exploited and displaced by Porifirio Díiaz’s
capitalist policies. Land reform plans such as the Ayala Plan, which was drafted by Emiliano
Zapata in response to what he deemed as Francisco Madero’s retreat from his pledge to repeal
Díaz’s policies, promised the recognition of communal land deeds and a “restoration of the rights
and legality which the [wealthy] landowners, with government backing, had themselves violated
and subverted” (Gilly 63). Bolstered by the promise of their returned lands, Mexico’s
disenfranchised and dispossessed citizens considered the Revolution as one full of potential. But
as the war raged on, as president after president was replaced, and as Zapata and Villa lost their
strongholds and were eventually defeated, the various land reforms were repealed and the
promise of the Revolution quickly waned. The conversation between the quarry’s older workers
recalls this history, and Bob is almost immediately faced with the looming presence of the
Revolution. This scene presents us with an interesting juxtaposition as the “old ones” transition
seamlessly from talk of the rain and the crops to talk of the war that was in large part about
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capitalism and the encroachment of industrialization. The Revolution was in many ways as
“modern” as was World War I, and Niggli’s inclusion of both conflicts in the early pages of the
novel creates a very “modern” space within which the narrative can unfold. And the Revolution
comes to carry special meaning for Bob as he recovers his Mexican heritage and begins to
emerge as Mexican-American.
After Bob has become “of” the valley and has awakened to his Mexican heritage, he
decides that he fought in the wrong war: “Four years in the Great War, he reflected, and what
had he brought from it? No loyalty to a general, no ripe heroic tales. The Great Revolution
should have been his war, and he had missed it. It was Joaquin [his cousin] who crawled through
Mexican rocks, not Bob Webster” (Niggli). Bob realizes that by crawling through European
rocks - to which he held no loyalty - as opposed to Mexican rocks, he has relinquished
participation in an historical moment that is essential to his hybrid cultural identity.
Padilla writes that, “Although Bob finds in Hidalgo a level of acceptance not possible in the
United States, he views himself as an outsider even in his new home. For even as he embodies
aspects of the histories of both the United States and Mexico as they played out and intertwined
on the border, he lacks the direct experience of the Revolution, now one of the defining moments
of Mexican nationalism” (67-68). Bob experiences the Revolution at a remove – he can only
hear about it from those who were actually a part of it – and his own recognition at the gap this
creates in his identity is essential to an understanding of the historically and culturally mediated
modernism I attribute to Niggli. The Revolution was a defining moment to a generation of
Mexicans, but also to those who were becoming Mexican-American at this precise historical
moment. Bob is the symbol of the merging of these two cultures, and the Revolution is in many
ways representative of a “modern” Mexico in the novel. Thus his cultural identity and ideas of
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modernity are closely intertwined in Mexican Village and this relationship situates Niggli within
what I would identify as an alternative modernist framework that challenges the assumption that
modernism relates only to formal experimentation. Niggli was contributing to a cultural identity
as it was being formed, and her invocation of modernity within the framework of this inchoate
identity is, I would argue, representative of experimentation as well. She is not responding to or
trying to distance herself from her literary predecessors but rather forging new cultural territory
in her writing.
This is not to say that Niggli does not also engage in a degree of formal experimentation,
namely in her decision to write in English. Paredes writes that “Niggli simulated the flavor of
Spanish by reproducing English in its syntactical and idiomatic qualities” (90). He notes her use
of “literal translations such as ‘the family Castillo’ to achieve the effect of Spanish” (90), and
Keresztesi recognizes the “alienating effect” (109) that results from Niggli’s “word for word”
translation of the Mexican proverbs that begin each chapter. She suggests that the literal
translation of a proverb such as, “Rivers rise in flood and destroy, / Brooks water the land and
sing” does little to explain meaning to Niggli’s audience and that, “Her translations mirror and
expose language as an uncanny alienating device: the familiar Mexican proverbs are reflected
back to the English-speaking and –reading audience of the novel as alien” (109). Neither
Paredes nor Keresztesi characterize this stylistic tactic as reflective of modernist
experimentation, but I would argue that the linguistic alienation the latter recognizes is precisely
that. More canonical American modernists often engaged in a verbal assault of the reader by
making the familiar unfamiliar, by challenging the way we read and make meaning of words that
are familiar to us. Niggli achieves a similar result with her syntactical devotion to Spanish. She
“translates” a work that is written in English, and her ability to render English as somehow
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unfamiliar is indeed reflective of her cultural modernism. I make no attempts to suggest
intentionality here, but the result of her innovative use of language is constitutive of a distinct
modernism that embodies cultural hybridism by invoking both American and Mexican cultures
through language.
Examples of modernity and modernism need to be teased out a bit in Mexican Village,
but they are, in some ways, more explicit in The Singing Valley. Niggli’s foreword to the play
invokes a scene of modernity almost immediately when she writes the following: “In the village
of Sabinas Hidalgo on the highway between Monterrey and Laredo, Texas, the passing tourist
sees a powerhouse standing in solitary grandeur on the bank of the Santa Catarina River. To this
tourist it is only another powerhouse. To the valley it is a monument to the dreams and
ambitions of an old man” (The Singing Valley 53). The image of the powerhouse towering over
Sabinas invokes almost immediately the notion of industrialization, and this is a thematic
constant throughout the play. Don Antonio has returned to his home with the sole purpose of
replacing an economy based on goat herding with one that subsists on industrial agriculture, and
he is positioned very clearly as the hero to Don Rufino’s villain, suggesting that the technology
and progress the former brings with him is far less exploitative than is the “old” way of life in the
valley.
Antonio announces his plans almost immediately upon his return to Abasolo when he
asks Don Rufino to share his vision of and for the valley:
DON RUFINO: I see goat country . . . a country that is good for nothing but
goats.

DON ANTONIO: And I see a rose blooming. For the desert shall bloom like a
rose.

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DON RUFINO (laughing sarcastically): All the world knows that roses need
water, and there is no water in the valley . . . only a little river that men need to
keep from dying of thirst.

DON ANTONIO: A powerhouse can turn that stream into a real river . . . […] I
am going to put a powerhouse at the bend of that river, pump water into a spider’s
web of irrigation ditches, plant fields of barley, and above all, orange and lemon
trees. Why, in two years, this could become the finest fruit region in the north!
And when I stand here, I’ll be looking down on gold . . . real gold . . .God’s gold.

FATHER ZACAYA (slowly): This valley would become a miniature California.

DON ANTONIO: The ground is richer than California’s. The climate is even
better for fruit. All we need is water . . . and the powerplant will give us more
water than we can use.

DON RUFINO: That’s all very fine, but what about my goats?

DON ANTONIO (shrugging): I’m sorry. There’ll be no room for goats.
(70-71)

Antonio’s grandiose vision of the gold that will grow out of the soil of the valley links him rather
explicitly with ideas of capitalism and greed, and Orchard and Padilla suggest that, at least
initially, we might view Antonio as the villain in this story: “Don Rufino’s authority in the
community is rooted in his success as a goatherd, and he resists Don Antonio’s plan because it
will destroy the valley’s ideal grazing conditions. As this brief sketch indicates, the Antonio-
Rufino conflict can be read as an example of one of the common themes of American literature:
the intrusion of technology into the pastoral scene” (21). Indeed, it does seem that Antonio’s
plans will denigrate the land at the expense of the economy that so many people depend on for
their livelihood. But when Rufino is exposed as the truly exploitative figure in the valley, a shift
occurs in how Niggli presents the idea of modernization.
It does not take Antonio long to realize the exploitative economic system Rufino has
managed to impose on the people of Abasolo, and he is determined to overthrow it and the man
responsible for it:
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DON ANTONIO (with a wry smile): So you’re trying to save the valley from my
evil influence?

DON RUFINO: You see, you have all misjudged me, Don Antonio. I am really a
very humane man. I think only of my people’s good.

DON ANTONIO: And goats, incidentally! How do you pay your goatherders?

DON RUFINO: In goats. Property means more to these people than money.

DON ANTONIO: But they need money to buy food and clothes, eh?

DON RUFINO: When they need those things they come and sell me back the
goats.

DON ANTONIO: How much do you pay them for their . . . property?

DON RUFINO (virtuously): I pay according to the demands of the shoe factory
in Monterrey.

DON ANTONIO: You mean you pay as little as possible. You were right Don
Rufino. You are a very humane man, and as cunning as an eagle with its shoes
off! (95)

Don Rufino’s economic system amounts to indentured servitude, and as long as the valley
depends on goatherding for its livelihood, there is little chance of escaping the exploitative cycle
of debt in which they find themselves. Don Antonio’s plans for industrial agriculture offer a way
out, and this presents us with an interesting picture of the dichotomy between nature and
technology, between tradition and modernity. Orchard and Padilla assert that, “Although
originally cast as a goatherd – a figure most aligned with nature and land – Rufino is unmasked
[…] as a capitalist exploiter of the goatherds who work for him. Technology, then, is associated
with preservation and tradition, and nature’s agents with the perpetuation of oppression” (22). In
light of this relationship, it seems quite possible to read The Singing Valley as cautionary against
a nostalgia that masks the ways in which its victims can become entrapped. And I would once
again suggest that this also reflects the alternative modernism at work in Niggli’s writing. While
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the focus is indeed on modernity and modernization, there is an interesting comment to be made
about the cultural modernism I attribute to her. Orchard and Padilla maintain that “the valley lies
between and transcends two nation forms – the United States in all its capitalist prosperity and
the Mexico beyond which reformers want to move” (22). The valley to which Antonio brings
Abel and Lupita is no longer a Mexican village opposed to the encroachment of American
progress. It is rather a symbol of the merging of these two ideas into something new –
something both Mexican and American, something both traditional and modern, something both
capitalist and agrarian. This is, I would suggest, constitutive of a modernism that is about
history, culture, and modernity and it reflects Niggli’s intervention in American literary and
cultural modernism.
There is a lot about Josefina Niggli that defies easy categorization. Is she Mexican-
American? Does her writing constitute a contribution to a Mexican-American literary tradition
and aesthetic? Is she a modernist or a traditionalist? How do we identify the role her writing
played in inscribing a nascent cultural identity? But as I have already suggested, I believe these
very questions are what make it necessary for us to consider her when exploring the parameters
of Mexican-American literature. She is as reflective of complicated nuances as is her writing,
and it is this resistance to easily-defined borders that makes her such an important figure. Her
writing suggests a certain resistance to nostalgia as we might normally identify it, but it also
articulates a recognition of cultural memory that is essential to the Mexican-American cultural
identity she develops in her texts. Many of her characters do enact a return to Mexico (both
literal and figurative), but they do so with their “Americanness” still intact. And she complicates
notions of modernity and modernism by linking these ideas to questions of cultural identity and
heritage. The discomfort these nuances create for some scholars and critics is precisely why I
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include her in this study. Cultural hybridism is often an uncomfortable and disconcerting space
in which to reside, and Niggli’s writing articulates this “in-betweenness” in very clear and
important ways.

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Chapter 2

Américo Paredes’s Modernist Poetics

While questions abound regarding where and how Josefina Niggli fits within a Mexican-
American literary tradition, no such questions exist about Américo Paredes. There is perhaps no
figure who looms larger in the study of early twentieth-century Mexican-American literature and
culture. His ethnographic analyses of Mexican-American folklore, music, and dance are
considered foundational to Mexican-American studies, his analysis of the corrido of Gregorio
Cortez entitled With his Pistol in His Hand is lauded by José Limón as his “most important
ethnographic work” (Dancing with the Devil 76), and his novel George Washington Gómez is
considered a breakthrough in literary modernism. But the renowned ethnographer,
anthropologist, and novelist was also a poet, and his poems remain relatively unexamined as
compared to his other work. Paredes published two collections of poetry, Cantos de
adolescencia and Between Two Worlds, and it is the latter that serves as the focus of this chapter.
Paredes began to collect these poems in 1980 when he was sixty-five years old, and they were
finally published in 1989. But the poems were primarily written throughout the 1930’s and
1940’s and thus reflect important contributions to early twentieth-century Mexican-American
literature, both for the formal innovations some of the poems achieve and for the insight they can
offer into literary attempts to articulate a burgeoning Mexican-American identity.
Saldívar extends the assertion he makes in Chicano Narrative about history as a
constitutive element in Mexican-American literature to Paredes’s poetry in his monumental
study The Borderlands of Culture: Américo Paredes and the Transnational Imaginary when he
asserts that “history, memory, and poetics are for Paredes vitally connected” (12) and that the
presence of history in Paredes’s writing reflects an act of resistance located in his attempts to
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“forestall the erasure of history” (15) through his work. For Paredes, “History [is] an act of
remembrance . . . [that] is also a performance” (12); thus, we can understand the presence of the
past in Paredes’s work as “performing” resistance against myriad hegemonic ideologies that seek
to erase the presence of Mexican and Mexican-American cultural and literary interventions.
Paredes himself seems willing to identify this historical presence in the poems of Between Two
Worlds when he writes in the Prologue that he suspects the collection will be of greatest interest
as “a historical document” featuring “the scribblings of a ‘proto-Chicano’ of a half-century ago”
(11). And while many of Paredes’s poems do rest largely on the idea of where Mexican-
Americans have been (so to speak), I would argue that they also reflect the desire to articulate an
inchoate Mexican-American identity that is just as concerned with where Mexican-Americans
are headed. The experiential history of Mexican-Americans does figure in the poems in Between
Two Worlds, but perhaps we can understand the “historical document” the collection represents
as one that documents the emergence of a burgeoning Mexican-American identity in the early
decades of the twentieth-century rather than one that hinges on looking back to the past. In
describing Paredes’s particular notion of modernism, Saldívar maintains that it “revolts against
the normalizing function of tradition; it lives on the experience of rebelling against all that is
normative” (Borderlands 248). And I believe we can trace this resistance in Paredes’s poetics.
The poems in Between Two Worlds reflect the struggles associated with confronting and
understanding what it means to be Mexican and American and, as such, they are as much about
considering what lies ahead as they are about remembering what has come before.
This chapter will examine four poems from Between Two Worlds, all of which serve as
forceful examples of Paredes’s commentary on the notion of Mexican-Americans existing in a
state of “in-betweenness.” “Rio Grande,” “Esquinita de mi Pueblo,” “The Mexico-Texan,” and
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“Tres Faces del Pocho” feature poetic subjects and speakers whose experiences reveal the
difficulties of living on the literal and figurative border between two countries and two cultures.
As the poetic subjects struggle to claim a place for themselves in either Mexico or the United
States, they face resistance from both and are consequently left in a cultural limbo of sorts. But
the poems offer an alternative to the feelings of loss associated with these struggles by
suggesting the idea that a fully-realized Mexican-American identity can emerge from this liminal
state, and as such they also reflect Paredes’s artistic project of inscribing a Mexican-American
cultural identity.
The four poems in this chapter also share a reliance on romantic conventions of poetry in
their expression of the emotional states of their subjects as they confront questions about their
identities. Each poem focuses on a figure who struggles with questions of the “self” and who
does so while trying to imagine a place for himself in which his Mexican and American cultural
identities can co-exist. As these figures encounter and comment on the impediments to a
realization of this dual identity, they do so through a lens that highlights the consistent, day-to-
day struggles they encounter. Additionally, these poems rely on the presence of several cultural
myths, even as they challenge the legitimacy of such myths. For example, the figures of the
Mexico-Texan and the pocho carry with them their own cultural mythology, and although
Paredes in some ways upends this mythology he still counts on these myths to handle the
symbolic work in these four selections. And finally, the long poem “Tres Faces del Pocho,” to
which I dedicate the latter half of this chapter, relies on the figure of the Poet to articulate a
counter-narrative of sorts that challenges received notions of Mexican-American cultural
identity.
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The collection’s opening poem is entitled “Rio Grande.” Written in 1934, it references
the river that serves as the border between the United States and Mexico in south Texas, and it
reflects what Saldívar characterizes as “a good example of [the] process of active remembrance
[…]” (Borderlands 249). But as the poem follows the ebb and flow of the river’s “muddy”
waters, it also confronts the question of moving forward.
The first two stanzas of the poem focus on the river’s urge to return to its place of origin
and they reflect moments of nostalgic longing for a threatened past:
Muddy river, muddy river,
Moving slowly down your track
With your swirls and counter-currents,
As though wanting to turn back

As though wanting to turn back
Towards the place where you were born,
While your currents swirl and eddy,
While you whisper, whimper, mourn; (Paredes 15)

The description of the river as “muddy” suggests a lack of clear definition; the water is not clear,
the border it represents is not clear, and the cultural identification it signifies is not clear. This
literal space between Mexico and the United States is cloudy, as is the symbolic space this
border represents for those who live on its banks. For Mexican-Americans living on the Texas-
Mexico border, the poem suggests, the muddiness in the opening lines points to the complexities
and complications attendant to the convergence of two historically-contentious cultural
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identities. And the slow movement of the river down its path suggests a resistance to this
convergence and a desire to return to an original state.
But the river’s desire to return to its beginnings is impeded by upheaval. Saldívar
suggests that the “swirls and counter-currents” “make [the river] seem to turn on itself, causing it
to return to its origins” (Borderlands 252), and the repetition of the phrase “as though wanting to
turn back” at the end of the first stanza and the beginning of the second emphasizes a moment of
return. But while the river’s “currents swirl and eddy” and thus resist the trajectory of the river’s
flow, we learn at the completion of the second stanza that the river also “whisper[s], whimper[s],
and mourn[s],” implying a sense of deep loss and, ultimately, defeat. And if we consider the
river’s flow and resistance to this flow in the context of cultural identity, we can understand a
certain inevitability as it relates to the convergence of Mexican and American identities on the
border, as well as a degree of loss. As the river struggles to both move forward and
simultaneously maintain an attachment to “the place where [it] was born,” so too does the
burgeoning Mexican-American cultural identity it represents. The convergence is bound to
happen it seems, but not without difficulty. And while the repeated tendency to “turn back”
suggests an historical presence in the poem, the river’s mourning suggests that this historical
presence is in danger of being subsumed by the forward momentum of the river.
As the poem progresses, the sense of loss becomes more acute even as the forward
movement gains momentum. The river “wander[s] down your channel / Always on, since it
must be” (Paredes 15), seemingly unable to halt its path, until it eventually travels to its own
demise: “Till you die so very gently / By the margin of the sea” (15). The Rio Grande literally
“dies” as it reaches and then becomes a part of the Gulf of Mexico, but a symbolic death also
occurs when we consider the river as a symbol of a hybrid cultural identity that emerges along
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the border. This trajectory toward hybridity is, Paredes suggests, as inevitable as the river’s
flow, and while a newly defined Mexican-American cultural identity emerges from the march
forward, these lines suggest that something is lost for both sides in the process. The journey is a
difficult one, both for the river and for the “origins” it represents, and even as it travels toward a
moment of cultural interaction that might be characterized as “progress” for Mexican-Americans,
that progress does not come without casualties that occur at “the margin of the sea,“ at the
“margin” of this shared space. And as “gentle” as this casualty might be, it still reflects a painful
loss.
In the fourth stanza, the poem takes a more personal turn as it addresses the specific
difficulties of the poem’s speaker:
All my pain and all my trouble
In your bosom let me hide,
Drain my soul of all its sorrow
As you drain the countryside, (15)

The diction becomes quite maternal here as the speaker seeks comfort in the “bosom” of the
river’s waters, suggesting once again the “origins” the Rio Grande represents for the speaker.
While we can read the first two lines of the stanza as the speaker’s desire to “hide” his pain in the
river, we might also understand these lines as the speaker’s desire to hide himself (“In your
bosom let me hide”). The notion of hiding suggests an impulse to resist the forward movement
of the river by concealing oneself from its path, by tucking oneself away by burying oneself in
the comforts of the river’s bosom, but even as the speaker asks the river to “drain my soul of all
its sorrow” he foregrounds the river’s movement forward. As it “drains” the countryside by
washing over the land and then moving on, it takes the speaker’s sorrow with it, but not by
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returning to “the place where you were born.” Rather, the river carries the speaker’s sorrow
forward on its inevitable path towards the place at which it will meet and blend with the Gulf, in
essence becoming part of something larger than itself.
We learn in the following stanza that the speaker was born on the border, “beside your
waters,” and as such he has in some way always identified with the river and with its murky
boundaries: “And since very young I knew / That my soul had hidden currents, / That my soul
resembled you” (15). The following lines suggest that this resemblance can be found in the dark
recesses of the river and of the speaker’s soul:
Troubled, dark, its bottom hidden
While its surface mocks the sun,
With its sighs and its rebellions,
Yet compelled to travel on. (15)

The river and the speaker exist in a state of unrest. The façade of acquiescence masks a
“troubled” and “dark” underside, and both the river and the speaker enact subtle “rebellions”
against the movement forward, engaging in the “active remembrance” Saldívar attributes to
Paredes’s poetry. But we also learn that the river continues to travel forward, despite these small
sighs of resistance that exist just under its surface. Both the river and the speaker are “compelled
to travel on,” away from the place “where [they] were born” and towards a new space, towards a
new cultural identity, one that is murky and that lacks clearly-defined boundaries.
The speaker turns his attention to his own mortality and identifies the moment at which
he will be forever joined with the river:

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When the soul must leave the body,
When the wasted flesh must die,
I shall trickle forth to join you,
In your bosom I shall lie: (15-16)

As the speaker’s soul leaves behind his earthly body, it will move slowly toward the river, once
again seeking the comfort of the river’s bosom. The movement will be slow, just a “trickle,” but
it still signifies a forward trajectory in which the speaker’s soul joins the flowing river. Once the
two in essence become one, they travel together “through the country” past lush “banks in green
are clad” (16). And on their path toward the gulf, they pass “the shanties of rancheros” as well
as the “ruins of old Bagdad” (16). Saldívar recognizes in these moments the “archaic relics from
the colonial past of south Texas and of earlier stages in the development of the present mode of
production” (Borderlands 252). As the river travels past what Saldívar recognizes as the
markers of “a pre-capitalist, eighteenth-century Mexico-Texan ranchero community” (252) as
well as “the ghost-town ruins of an early nineteenth-century […] trading center of Bagdad,
Tamaulipas” that was founded before the industrialization of agriculture and before the presence
of Anglo culture in Texas (252), he notes the ways in which these lines “elegize” a culture that
has failed to survive, “the shattered mexicano culture that once persisted but is now gone” (252).
As the river, along with the speaker’s soul, travels passed these relics the poem actively resists
historical erasure by recalling for the reader an historical past that is in danger of being forgotten.
However, we cannot forget that even as the poem recalls this history, it does so as it travels
forward, a reality the speaker realizes in the poem’s final stanza.
As the river continues on toward the “margin of the sea,” carrying the speaker’s soul with
it, the speaker reveals that “at last your dying waters, / Will release their hold on me” (Paredes
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16). This release suggests that whatever inclination the river has had to “turn back” no longer
guides the speaker’s soul, a soul that will, as the final lines of the poem tell us, “sleep forever /
By the margin of the sea” (16). The speaker, a soul born on the border who has been carried
along by the river, finally rests when the river meets the sea. But this resting place is a liminal
space since it is still at “the margin.” The river and the speaker’s soul may have reached a final
destination, and symbolically those living on the border may have emerged with a hybrid cultural
identity as Mexican-Americans, but the marginality represented by this final space suggests that
nothing has been absolutely determined or defined, nothing is fixed or bound. And while this in
some way suggests a certain cultural freedom, it also suggests a degree of cultural uncertainty.
Saldívar writes that, “As courses of history and trajectories of cultural space, Paredes’s rivers
constitute tropes of a liminal state between origin and end, abstraction and concretion”
(Borderlands 255). As such, the river in “Rio Grande,” and the movement toward a Mexican-
American cultural identity it represents, illustrates the ways in which Paredes’s poetry both
actively seeks to “forestall historical erasure” while simultaneously looking forward to and
instantiating a burgeoning Mexican-American cultural identity. While the movement in “Rio
Grande” is at times painful and impeded by a desire to “return,” the speaker ultimately finds an
uneasy release in the forward trajectory of the river’s water as his soul finally rests at the meeting
place of the river and the sea.
Saldívar recognizes in “Rio Grande” the “modernist mode” (255) of other modernists
such as Langston Hughes who express rivers as deeply-symbolic sites. As the river in Hughes’s
poem “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” travels along its winding course, it recalls sites that are
historically and culturally-significant for African-Americans – the Euphrates, the Congo, the
Nile, and perhaps most importantly for an American modernist, the Mississippi River. Hughes
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wrote the poem on a train ride to Mexico, and, “Crossing the Mississippi in the gathering dusk,
the sight of the Mississippi evoked for Hughes the historically-determining effect of life along
other rivers for black and working peoples of America” (Saldívar, Borderlands 255). The
Mississippi River was in many ways the locus of U.S. economic and cultural identity at the time,
and Hughes mythologizes it when he writes: “I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe
Lincoln / went down to New Orleans, and I’ve seen its muddy / bosom turn all golden in the
sunset” (23). Evoking the history of slavery in the United States with the mention of Abraham
Lincoln, as well as the ways in which the presence of history impacts the future lives of African-
Americans, Hughes re-imagines the Mississippi as central to the history of African-Americans,
in much the same way that Paredes situates the Rio Grande as symbolic of both past and future
for Mexican-Americans. Paredes shifts the locus of this identity south to the U.S./Mexico
border, and “he focuses on the ways that [this river …] can express an understanding of the
course of history” (Saldívar, Borderlands 255), even as that course winds its way towards
futurity. Paredes’s inclusion of the terms “muddy” and “bosom” suggest an allusion to Hughes’s
poem, and we can recognize in “The Rio Grande” a similar move to locate within the river’s
water the ways in which the lives of Mexican-Americans are “historically-determined,” as well
as the ways in which that history muddies the borders that define what it means to be of two
cultures.
The Traffic of Identity in “Esquinita de mi Pueblo”
Just as “The Rio Grande” traces the movement toward a liminal space on the border, so
too does the poem “Esquinita de mi Pueblo” (“Little Corner of my Town”), only the latter does
so through the decidedly more modernist trope of a traffic light that starts and stops the speaker’s
movement as he attempts to travel beyond the borders of his town.
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The diminutive “esquinita” in the title creates the sense of a small, restricted space, a
little corner to which the speaker has been confined and, as we will learn, from which he wishes
to travel beyond. And as the poem’s only line written in Spanish, the title suggests that the
speaker’s movement will be one in which he moves from his Mexican origins into a broader
cultural space. In the poem’s first line, Paredes creates a sense of disconnect and otherness as he
places the speaker “At the corner of absolute elsewhere (114),” suggesting that he wishes to be
anywhere but in this little corner of his town. There is a simultaneous sense of impediment and
promise in this first line as the speaker considers the world that extends beyond the borders of his
little corner, and as the stanza progresses the speaker reveals that he is indeed waiting on the
precipice of a movement forward. As he waits “At the corner of absolute elsewhere,” he is met
by the corner of “absolute future,” and this is where he stands at the moment captured in the
poem, hovering between what has been and what might be. And we quickly learn that what
might be is the opportunity to escape his surroundings: “Waiting for a green light / To leave the
neighborhood” (114). The four lines that comprise the poem’s first stanza reflect what I consider
to be the forward trajectory toward a Mexican-American identity in Paredes’s poetry, but as the
poem progresses the speaker encounters the obstacles that plague what he identifies as the
“people in between” (114).
Just as quickly as the poem articulates the speaker’s desire to propel himself forward as if
he is an automobile prompted by a green traffic light, his progress is impeded by a red light
determined to keep him in his place: “but the light was red / Forever and ever / The light was
red” (114). The forward trajectory established in the first stanza is immediately and eternally
halted by the presence of the red light. As the speaker looms on the verge of moving forward, he
encounters what he deems to be an insurmountable barrier to the attainment of his as-yet-
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unnamed goal. The red light glares in front of him, “forever and ever” reminding him that the
space in which he finds himself is the one in which he is destined to remain. Adding to the lack
of clarity this push-and-pull creates is the fact that the speaker is drunk from too much tequila:
“And all that tequila / Was going to my head” (114). The speaker’s admission that tequila also
contributes to his inability to move forward suggests a certain degree of disempowerment. There
is much in his path towards progress, whether it be the red light of cultural identity or the effects
of the alcohol he has ingested. The clarity of purpose with which the poem begins gets
swallowed by the environmental factors that surround and challenge the speaker.
It is not until the final stanza that we learn the destination to which the speaker wishes to
travel. As he laments his state of immobility, he seems resigned to the fact that “That is the
destiny of people in between,” making clear that those who exist at the border are forever caught
in a state of limbo. This is an important declaration in the context of Mexican-American cultural
identity and reflects a different sentiment towards the idea of origins than does “The Rio
Grande.” Rather than articulating an affinity to “return,” the speaker in this poem expresses a
consistent and compelling desire to move forward to a place of cultural balance, to move beyond
the past and into a fully-realized hybrid identity. But his self-identification as one of the “people
in between” reveals that he will be forced to forever “stand on the corner / Waiting for the green”
(114). The possibility of a green light momentarily recalls the promise with which the poem
begins, but the idea that those in a state of “in-betweenness” must always wait for the green light
suggests a state of unrest that is quite similar to that expressed in the collection’s opening poem.
And the fact that much of the poem is written in the past tense, with the speaker recalling his
own truncated journey before switching to the present tense to reveal the future of other “in-
betweeners,” suggests that there is little hope for eventual equilibrium. Just as the speaker in
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“The Rio Grande” finds an uneasy rest at the “margin of the sea,” so too does this speaker as he
waits at the crossroads of a traffic light.
I would also argue that the presence of the traffic light in “Esquinita de mi Pueblo” offers
important commentary on issues related to modernity, and in this way the poem serves as a rich
example of Paredes’s cultural and literary modernism. In his analysis of Paredes’s novel George
Washington Gómez, Christopher Schedler maintains that Paredes is “centrally concerned with
representing a divided Mexican-American identity and responding to the economic, political, and
social developments associated with modernity” (154), and I assert that these same concerns
appear in “Esquinita de mi Pueblo.” It is not a naturally-occurring river that serves as the
primary framework of this poem but rather a traffic light that is ineluctably linked to images of
mobility, technology, and progress symbolized by the automobile. The traffic light functions as
a roadblock in the little corner of the speaker’s pueblo, its presence rendered foreign and
somehow out of step with the traditional surroundings implied by the title. And yet it wields a
great deal of power over the speaker and his identity. The poetic subject must contend with these
issues along with his “divided Mexican-American identity,” and they prove formidable obstacles
to a state of balance. The traffic light keeps him in a constant state of waiting, never knowing if
he will get the green light. And the poem suggests that his Mexican-American identity keeps
him in an eternal state of disequilibrium, relegated to a liminal state of “in-betweenness” that will
never be resolved. He is, therefore, doubly challenged by the burgeoning presence of modernity
and his burgeoning cultural identity. He cannot lay claim to the past or to the future, to being
Mexican or to being American. Rather, he finds himself “in between,” in between tradition and
modernity and in between his dual identities.

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The “Mexico-Texan” and In-Betweenness
The notion of Mexican-Americans existing in a state of in-betweenness is one that
Paredes revisits in the 1935 poem “The Mexico-Texan.” José López Morín maintains that the
poem “suggests how an in-between existence muddles and yet shapes the Mexico-Texan’s
identity” (41), and as Paredes traces the ways in which Mexican-Americans experience what
Saldívar identifies as “dual exclusions” (Borderlands 200), we see both an impulse to document
history as well as an attempt to articulate a possible future for this border figure.
The figure of the Mexico-Texan is one Paredes often considers in his work, no doubt
because he was himself born on the Texas-Mexico border in Brownsville, Texas, and because he
often self-identified as existing in a liminal state. In his authorized biography of Paredes,
Manuel Medrano includes a portion of the preface to Paredes’s unpublished collection of poems
entitled Black Roses in which Paredes addresses the difficulties of being both Mexican and
American. I will quote Paredes at length here since the paragraphs included in Medrano’s text
powerfully articulate the internal conflict of a dual cultural identity:
Happy is he who has one tongue, one country, and one creed. His is a
calm, even existence whose blessings he cannot realize. Consider the Mexico-
Texan. He is a product of two countries that in the near past have been the
bitterest of enemies – Mexico and Texas. Born of Mexican parents, he learns
Spanish even as a bird learns to fly, his cradle is rocked by the sweet songs of the
dark-eyed South; his childish mind is quickened by the folk-lore of Mexico and
Spain; and his breast is stirred by tales of the prowess of his race.
He goes to school and learns English. He learns the tinkling little songs of
the Saxon child; he glories in Mother Goose; with Natty Bumpo, he explores
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virgin wilderness; and he rides with Marion the Fox against the redcoats of King
George.
Thus he passes his early childhood, two persons in one, two individuals
who as yet have not come to grips – a Mexican at home, an American at school.
Then adolescence comes, and at this time, when he is no longer a child and not
yet an adult, the Mexico-Texan realizes for the first time that he is neither
Mexican or American . . . I have witnessed this struggle within myself. (qtd. in
Medrano 21)
As Paredes traces the Mexico-Texan’s journey from early childhood to adolescence, he
highlights the dual histories that impact this border figure. Reared on the folklore of his Mexican
parents, the Mexico-Texan learns Spanish as his first language as if by osmosis and is comforted
by the Mexican traditions he encounters at home. But once he leaves the folds of his Mexican
home and enters an Anglo school he is confronted with and exhilarated by heroes of American
history, learning English in the process. Consequently, he enters a state of cultural upheaval in
which he identifies both cultures within himself and yet cannot fully identify with either. He is,
as Paredes comments, neither fully Mexican nor fully American, and as we see in “The Mexico-
Texan,” he suffers backlash from both sides because of his in-betweenness. But the poem moves
beyond tracing the painful past of the Mexico-Texan to consider what might lie before him.
Saldívar asserts that in his poetry, “Paredes imagines a history and a future (emphasis is mine)
for borderland citizenry from within the lived situation of their double exclusions” (Borderlands
200), thus poems such as “The Mexico-Texan” feature both the impulse to comment on notions
of history while at the same time imagining what the future might be for Mexican-Americans.
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We learn of the Mexico-Texan’s origins in the poem’s first stanza and also learn that
these origins are at times more of a burden than a blessing:
The Mexico-Texan he’s one fonny man
Who leeves in the region that’s north of the Gran’,
Of Mexican father he born in these part,
And sometimes he rues it dip down in his heart. (Paredes 26)

These first four lines impart important information about the poetic subject. Living north of the
Rio Grande he resides in the United States, and although his father is Mexican the implication is
that he was born in the U.S. (“born in these part”), making him an American citizen. And while
the final line of the stanza clearly articulates the Mexico-Texan’s occasional feelings of sorrow,
the source of that sorrow is rather ambiguous. In one sense, he might lament being born from
Mexican origins, but we might also read this line as expressing his dismay at being born north of
the Rio Grande in the United States. Of course, a third possibility is that both contribute to his
feelings of sorrow. Within this context, the combination of being both Mexican and American
within the United States proves a double burden, one that is most certainly amplified by the
Mexico-Texan’s manner of speech.
Paredes’s written replication of the Mexico-Texan’s accented speech suggests one of the
possible reasons the latter “rues it dip down in his heart,” whatever configuration of “it” we
might consider. He clearly speaks English, but his English is tinged with an accent that reveals
his Mexican origins. Recalling Paredes’s description of how young Mexico-Texans move from
speaking Spanish to English, the poem’s subject cannot hide the fact that English is not his first
language, a difficulty the speaker addresses in subsequent stanzas. His accent is, no doubt, an
excuse for discrimination at the hands of Anglos he encounters on the U.S. side of the border,
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and it becomes a factor in his feelings of in-betweenness. He may technically be an American,
but he cannot quite master English and thus “sounds” Mexican. The Mexico-Texan might be
“one fonny man,” but we should understand this “funniness” as reflective of the cultural
difference we get hints of in the first stanza.
As the poem moves into subsequent stanzas, Paredes more directly articulates issues of
dispossession: “For the Mexico-Texan he no gotta lan,’ / He stomped on the neck on both sides
of the Gran’ “(26). The inability to claim land on either side of the border simultaneously recalls
the Mexico-Texan’s history as well as comments on his present and future. As a Mexican, he
was robbed of his land when Mexico ceded Texas to the United States in the Treaty of
Guadalupe-Hidalgo, and we can recognize Paredes’s attempt to recall the history of imperialism
between the United States and Mexico. But he is also without a land as a Mexican-American
since he will never be fully accepted as a true citizen of the United States. Saldívar characterizes
Mexico-Texans as “ciudadanos imaginarios, imaginary ‘cit’zens’ of a mythical country, figured
[…] against both Mexico and Texas, but in reality neither here nor there” (Borderlands 200).
Because they exist in a state of in-betweenness they suffer on both sides of the Rio Grande, their
necks being stomped and their movement forward being impeded by both Mexico and the United
States.
One of the mechanisms by which the Mexico-Texan is held down is his difficulty with
the English language. As “A cit’zen of Texas” (Paredes 26) he struggles to speak the language
of the country in which he was born, but “The dam gringo lingo he no cannot spik, / It twisters
the tong and make you fill sick” (26). His classification of English as the language of “gringos”
suggests a disavowal on the part of the Mexico-Texan. He deems it the language of Anglos, a
point Paredes punctuates by the inclusion of the term “spik.” On the surface this is merely the
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Mexico-Texan’s accented pronunciation of “speak,” but it also recalls the racial slur often aimed
at Mexicans and Mexican-Americans. The sickness the Mexico-Texan feels might well be from
his inability to speak the language, but it might also emerge from the cruelty of having to speak
the very language that functions as a vehicle of racism. And as the second stanza concludes,
Paredes circles back to the idea that the Mexico-Texan has no land to claim as his own. He
wonders why, if he is a citizen of Texas, he is still labeled by Anglos as “the Mexican Grease”
(26) and he “can’t understan’” both the “Soft talk and hard action” (26) that he encounters,
implying that while racial slurs might be painful they are “soft” in comparison to the actions of
Anglos – actions of violence, actions of imperialism, actions of racism. Reminding us that “The
Mexico-Texan he no gotta land,” Paredes makes clear that life on the U.S. side of the border is
one marked by dispossession, struggle, and cultural uneasiness. As the Mexico-Texan struggles
to arrive at a cultural identity with which he can be comfortable, he must contend with a space
that remains unfixed, a place “where national borders [along with the cultures affixed to them]
expanded or contracted and could be respected or ignored” (Saldívar, Borderlands 200).
Paredes does not reserve his criticism for the United States, however. We learn that the
environment in Mexico is just as difficult for the Mexico-Texan: “If he cross the reever, eet ees
just as bad” (Paredes 26). He is, therefore, doubly excluded since neither Mexico nor the United
States offers any refuge for this doubly-excluded figure. His linguistic struggles with English are
replicated with Spanish in Mexico: “On high poleeshed Spanish he break up his had” (26).
Spending time in the United States speaking English has impacted his Spanish, and rather than
speaking colloquial, conversational Spanish he finds himself struggling with “high poleeshed
Spanish” that separates him from other Mexicans and signifies him as Mexican-American, a fact
that Mexicans make clear to him as they demand he return to the United States.
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When the Mexico-Texan realizes “American customs those people no like” (26), we see a
similar disavowal to that in the first stanza. These are not people he can claim as his own; they
are those people who do not like the customs he brings with him from the United States. And
when Paredes tell us that rather than calling the Mexico-Texan who “they hate” by the name
Miguel they will instead refer to him as “El Mike,” it becomes clear that his dual cultural identity
of being Mexican-American is as much a liability for him in Mexico as it is in the United States.
The combination of the Spanish “el” with the decidedly American name “Mike” does not reflect
an attempt at inclusivity. Instead, it serves as a mockery of his Mexican-American identity. The
“Mexican-born” taunt the Mexico-Texan as “they jeer and they hoot,” ordering him to “’Go back
to the gringo! Go lick at hees boot” (26). The power dynamic implied here suggests that those
born in Mexico do not consider the United States a place the Mexico-Texan can claim as his
own. Their demand that he “go back to the gringo” suggests that the United States is very much
the territory of Anglos, revealing once again that the Mexico-Texan is relegated to a liminal
space in which he is neither Miguel nor el Mike. While he is “In Texas he’s Johnny, in Mexico
Juan” (26), thus his cultural identity is constantly in flux. He is, as Saldívar maintains, “a figure
in process, a person to be invented” (Borderlands 200), and while he may have access to the
American identity signified by Johnny and the Mexican identity signified by Juan, he cannot
achieve a symbiotic balance between these competing cultures. He remains a man without a
country, a point Paredes reiterates when he concludes the third stanza with the refrain that “the
Mexico-Texan he no gotta lan” (26). Excluded from full cultural acceptance by both Americans
and Mexicans, the Mexico-Texan must forge a new identity that somehow allows for both.
After recounting the difficulties the Mexico-Texan faces on both sides of the border,
Paredes addresses the issue of Mexican-American political involvement. In Becoming Mexican-
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American, George Sánchez maintains that Americans of Mexican descent that came of age in the
1930’s and 1940’s “demonstrated a greater willingness to participate in American political
institutions” than were their Mexican-born parents in an effort to forge a Mexican-American
identity (229), but as Paredes shows us that desire to participate was often exploited by Anglo
political figures.
The Mexico-Texan offers his account of Anglo border politics when he discusses local
elections. When “Elactions come round and the gringos are loud” (Paredes 26), the Mexico-
Texan suddenly becomes a valuable commodity for the votes he can deliver. Anglo politicians
“pat on he’s back” and “make him feel proud” for participating in the political process, for being
an “American.” They ply him with “mezcal” and “barbacue [sic] meat” in a nod to both his
Mexican and American identities, and refer to him as “amigo” when they assure him that “we
can’t be defeat” (Paredes 26). For a moment, politics seems to offer Mexican-Americans a way
to “integrate themselves into American society” (Sánchez 249), but this cultural inclusion halts
once elections have passed and Mexican-Americans have served their purpose: “But efter
elaction he no gotta fran’, / The Mexico-Texan he no gotta lan’” (Paredes 26). No longer of use
to Anglo politicians, the Mexico-Texan once again becomes a disenfranchised figure relegated to
his liminal state. For a moment it seems he will find refuge by assimilating into American
society through participation in the political process, but his Mexican origins will continue to
serve as impediments in the eyes of Anglos and he once again finds himself without a clearly-
identified cultural space to claim as his own.
As the poem progresses, Paredes engages in an act of historical remembrance as he
comments on the role of Mexican-Americans in the migrant workforce in early twentieth-century
agriculture. Rather than recognizing the Mexico-Texan’s cultural identity as one of value, he is
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labeled as a “burden and drag” on both sides of the border because he “no gotta country, he no
gotta flag” (27). Saldívar maintains that the Mexico-Texan’s “allegiances were yet to be
determined” (Borderlands 200-201), and as such neither country wants to claim him as their own
since “He no gotta voice” (Paredes 27). Of course, his lack of voice is the result of the dual
exclusions Paredes recognizes in Mexican-Americans, but both Mexico and the U.S. use this
silence as a means to distance themselves from the figure they consider neither fully Mexican
nor fully American, rendering him suspect to both countries and cultures. What the Mexico-
Texan does have is his ability to work: “all he got is the han’ / To work like the burro” (27).
Dehumanizing the Mexico-Texan by comparing him to a beast of burden recalls an important
historical and cultural moment for Mexican-Americans. Saldivar asserts that:
The Mexico-Texan: figures the migrant workers, the day laborers, and the
families in transit of the mid-Depression-era borderlands, to be seen everywhere
standing around street corners, hands in pockets, waiting for a day’s work, a
restless population that moved through South Texas, Arizona, California, all over
the Midwest, and across the Rio Grande into Mexico, available to whoever had
work and a few dollars to pay them. (Borderlands 200).
We can recognize in the mention of the Mexico-Texan as a laborer the urge to document his
history, to ensure that his contribution to the economy on both sides of the border is remembered
while the exploitation he suffered is also recognized as a part of that economy. Pairing the image
of the Mexico-Texan working “like the burro” with the mention of land that is not his own
recalls the literal reality of economic dependence that resulted in conditions of near indentured-
servitude, but it also serves as a reminder of the fact that as he wanders the Southwest he
embodies the notion that he is a figure without a “flag,” a man without a country. The Mexico-
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Texan as migrant worker is the physical manifestation of the cultural disavowal he experiences at
the hands of both Mexicans and Anglos.
As the poem reaches its final stanza, the Mexico-Texan appears to be finally defeated by
the burden of his hybrid cultural identity. Wanting to escape his troubles, he decides to drink
them away: “And only one way can his sorrows all drown, / He’ll get drank as hell when next
payday come roun’” (Paredes 27). He seems to have resigned himself to the fact that he will
forever be stuck in a state of in-betweenness, that his undefined cultural identity will impede him
rather than propel him forward. But it is at this moment that we learn the Mexico-Texan “has
one advantage of all other man,” and this advantage actually emerges from being Mexican-
American: “Though the Mexico-Texan he no gotta lan’, / He can get him so drank that he think
he will fly / Both September the Sixteen and Fourth of July” (27). Although it takes the
influence of alcohol, the Mexico-Texan has the ability to celebrate two moments of
independence – that of Mexico from Spain and that of the United States from Britain. Because
he is Mexican-American, both of these historical moments become part of his history, and in turn
this dual history contributes to an emerging cultural identity he can celebrate, one that includes
two flags he can fly. The unfurling of two flags reflects a truly transnational cultural identity in
which Paredes develops a distinct notion of DuBoisian double consciousness as it relates to
Mexican-Americans living on the border. In his discussion of Paredes’s prologue to Cantos de
adolescencia, Saldívar identifies Paredes’s “nascent double consciousness in the context of his
mexico-texano identity” (Borderlands 261), and we see the expression of this double-
consciousness as the poem concludes. The poem takes an important turn in these final lines. Up
to this point the Mexico-Texan has been faced with an either/or decision to make about his
cultural identity. Will he claim himself as American or Mexican? Will he reside north of the
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border or south? Will he speak English or Spanish? However, what this poem ultimately
suggests is that he cannot choose one over the other. The fact that he is doubly excluded forces
him to create a different identity for himself, one that transforms the liminal space to the very
space he can claim as his own land. This is not to suggest that Paredes leaves readers with a
picture of sudden and complete equilibrium for the Mexico-Texan. He will still encounter
dispossession and disavowal, and the fact that alcohol makes him “think” he will fly both flags
does introduce the possibility that his beliefs are transitory or even mere illusions. But Paredes
does characterize the Mexico-Texan’s ability to fly flags on two days of independence as an
advantage, and I would argue that when the poem shifts from an either/or discussion of cultural
identity to an “and” discussion about cultural identity, it reflects the impulse to document the
history of Mexican-Americans while simultaneously “imagin[ing] […] a future for borderland
citizenry” that Saldívar recognizes as Paredes’s “imaginative project” (200). As a Mexican-
American, the Mexico-Texan will continue to be excluded from two nations and two cultures
whose antagonistic histories reside within a single figure, but as a result he will be forced to
imagine a revised identity for himself. When he is labeled as neither Mexican nor American, it
creates the space for him to become Mexican and American.
“Tres Faces del Pocho”
“Tres Faces del Pocho” was written in 1936 and highlights the experiences of a complex
Mexican-American cultural figure – that of the “pocho.” Often used as a pejorative to reflect an
Americanized Mexican, one who has assimilated at the expense of his or her Mexican identity
and who may or may not speak Spanish, the pocho is in many ways the embodiment of cultural
liminality. B.V. Olguín asserts that the early-twentieth century configuration of the pocho
“serves as a Mexican-American model of cultural degeneracy, or more precisely, the purported
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loss of ‘Mexicanness’ resulting from life in the United States” (90). And while I would argue
that Paredes’s poem offers a more nuanced understanding of the pocho than simply that of a
cultural degenerate, it does consistently and forcefully articulate the idea that the Mexican-
American pocho is a figure of cultural “in-betweenness.” In Border Renaissance: The Texas
Centennial and the Emergence of Mexican American Literature, John Morán González classifies
the poem as one of many writings in which Paredes “examined various manifestations of pocho
subjectivity” (135), and he recognizes the ways in which “Paredes highlights the construction of
Mexican American subjectivity through disparate and discontinuous nationalist and
transnationalist discourses and practices” (135). The poem is presented as a play in three acts,
and “Each of the three acts presents a different aspect of the pocho’s dilemma in negotiating his
Mexican heritage and his U.S. citizenship as he encounters Mexico in various guises” (135).
Often relying on romanticized, anachronistic, and unrealistic notions of Mexico, the pocho is
consistently confronted with challenges to his delusions about his homeland, allowing Paredes to
“historicize Mexican American identity and problematize nostalgic models of it” (Olguín 94). In
other words, by articulating the pocho’s misguided attempts to “revisit” a Mexico that no longer
exists, Paredes documents the pocho’s history while simultaneously resisting attempts to
romanticize this history.
Paredes engages in some clever bilingual wordplay in the poem’s title, which Morán
González identifies as key in establishing “the pocho’s interstitial status” (135). The pocho’s
three “faces” might also be read as “phases,” and both “highlight […] the pocho’s multiple,
fragmented identities” (135). His three faces might be his Mexican face, his American face, and
his Mexican-American face, but we might read his three phases as the journey from
“Mexicanness” to “Mexican-Americanness.” In either estimation, the pocho is figure whose
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identities “do not quite add up to a whole nationalist self” (135), at least as far as the United
States and Mexico are concerned. And the poem’s subtitle contributes to this notion of cultural
multiplicity by referencing a piece of iconic American technology in a manner that creates some
ambiguity for the reader. Labeling the poem as a “Comedia en Tres Autos, Modelo T,” the
subtitle can be translated as a “comedy in three automobiles, Model T” (referencing Henry
Ford’s iconic contribution to American technological/industrial progress). However, the word
“autos” might also be translated as “mysteries,” “laws,” or even as “histories,” all of which imply
the cultural fragmentation Morán González recognizes in the poem. And if we consider the
subtitle through the context of the latter translations, the “model” in Model T might represent a
cultural standard that the pocho must confront as he searches for some connection to his history.
The poem’s first act is titled “The Passionate Spaniard” and introduces us to the pocho as
he struggles to make sense of what Morán González characterizes as a “profound temporal or
spatial disconnect between the Mexico of pocho imagination” (135) and the Mexico he actually
encounters. As the scene opens, Paredes writes that it is “announced by a flourish of heraldic
trumpets, which shift into a snappy paso doble as the lights come up” (38). Both the mention of
the pocho as a “Spaniard” and the inclusion of the Spanish “paso doble” reveal that the pocho
has traveled to Mexico in an attempt to claim “ties to a colonial heritage of heroic Eurpoean
ancestors,” to “discover what the conquerors of the Aztec empire […] had wrought in the Valley
of Mexico” (Morán González 136). As Paredes tells us, the pocho “came as a tourist to see La
Gran Tenochtitlan, site of great deeds by his ancestors, los conquistadores,” (Paredes 38), but
rather than enjoying a Mexico that honors his “imagined Spanish heritage” (Morán González
136), the pocho finds himself in the most demeaning of positions. Sitting on a toilet and
suffering the biological consequences of a ”weekend of tacos, whores, and mariachis” (Paredes
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38), the pocho recounts for himself and for readers the various ways in which the Mexicans he
encounters disavow him of his notions of grandeur. Classified as a “tourist,” the pocho is firmly
established as a foreigner and is treated as such. Paredes writes that, “He has been called a
pocho, has paid three or four mordidas [which translates as “bribes,” most likely paid to Mexican
policemen or officials to keep him out of jail], and finally had his wallet stolen” (38). Morán
González asserts the subject “has his roots questioned by Mexicans who call him pocho” (136),
and the implication is that he is deemed far more Anglo than he is Mexican while in Mexico.
Despite his desire to establish some historical connection to the country, (albeit a history of
colonial and imperial exploitation), the pocho is subjected to consistent challenges to his
“Mexicanness.” Instead of finding the Mexico of his dreams, he is left utterly despondent and
dejected, “enthroned on the crapper, spilling out his guts” (Paredes 38). Undermining his
attempts to lay claim to his grand Spanish heritage, Paredes offers the pocho just a toilet as his
throne, and he appears in this opening scene “staring at the floor, head in hands, elbows on
knees” (38). As he prepares to speak, “the trumpets bray out a final flourish and then subside to
a faint background music” (38), the royalty of the trumpets giving way to music more suitable to
his actual position. And as the scene shifts from a narrator’s voice to that of the pocho, Paredes
informs us that the latter “begins to speak, bitter disillusionment in his voice” (38) as he angrily
confronts the disconnect between his expectations of Mexico and the reality of a country and
culture who refuse to recognize his claims of inclusion.
The poem shifts from Spanish to English as the pocho rails against Mexico in the wake of
his disastrous weekend visit, and this important linguistic shift is a key moment in establishing
the pocho’s dual identities. Instead of speaking English to denigrate Mexico and Mexican
culture he speaks Spanish, thereby establishing his cultural ties at the very moment he is most
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critical of that culture. He is, therefore, rendered Mexican in his ability to speak Spanish and, as
we will see, rendered Anglo as he distances himself from Mexican culture.
The pocho begins by addressing his ancestors and recalling their moments of victory in
battle:
Raza gloriosa y real de mis abuelos,
¡oh, mi raza giganta!
que aplastate en el polvo con tu planta
¡cuánto guerrero altivo!
que cruzaste los motes y los mares
llevando dondequiera tus altares,
y en tu lenguaje dulce y expressive
el oro vivo. (Paredes 38)

[Glorious and regal race of my ancestors,
Oh, my giant race!
That crushed in the dust with your sole
How many arrogant warriors!
That crossed the mountains and the seas,
Taking your altars everywhere,
And in your sweet and expressive language
The golden life,]

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As the pocho articulates the heritage to which he imagined he could lay claim in Mexico, he also
articulates a history of war, a history of conquering, and a history of religious imposition. As he
addresses “Leona de los ibéricos castillos, / madre de leones [Lioness of Iberian castles, / mother
of lions]” (38), the pocho pointedly refers to his Spanish forebears, and remembers the might
they once displayed: “sangre de aquellos ínclinitos campeones / de gesto varonil y férreos
brillos, / raza conquistadora [blood of the those illustrious champions, / of manly gestures and
iron brilliance, / conquering race]” ( 38). The cultural history the pocho hopes to recover in
Mexico is one indigenous Mexicans most certainly would not celebrate or honor, and his
inability to understand why this might be so further separates him from the Mexicans he meets.
And as he continues his angry rant, the pocho resorts to what Morán González recognizes as the
“racist discourses of the United States that represented Mexico as poor, filthy, violent, and
degenerate” (136). Far from the brilliant race of conquerors who occupied his imagination, he
shifts to addressing Mexicans as a conquered, bastardized people deserving of his enmity.
Recognizing that “se ha apagado tu flama bienhechora [your beneficent brilliance has gone out]”
(Paredes 39), the pocho bitterly declares Mexicans to be a “degenerate and cursed people”: “un
pueblo degenerado y maldecido!” (39) as he recalls the myth of La Malinche and articulates the
sentiment that in her wake “only the culturally and racially inferior mestizo Mexican survives”
(Morán González 136).
The pocho’s monologue devolves into a swirl of racist insults leveled at Mexicans, but
this litany reflects a productive moment in the attempt to document that history of Mexican and
Mexican-Americans:

Pueblo bastardo que parió Malinche
ciego por el poder, servile al oro,
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pueblo sin tradiciones ni decoro
prendido al presupuesto como chince;
amas más al maguey que al mismo trigo
y para conseguir mejor la vida
tienes como tu lema La Mordida
y es tu blasón la mano del mendigo. (Paredes 39)

[Bastard race to which Malinche gave birth,
Blind to what you can do, servant to gold,
People without traditions nor respect
Tied to the budget like a pin;
Loves agave more than wheat
And to obtain a better life
You have as your motto The Bribe
And your coat of arms is the hand of the beggar.]

Subscribing to the charges against Malinche that she conceived a bastard race when she
procreated with Cortés, the pocho lambasts Mexicans for being the cursed offspring of a ruined
woman. Blinded by alcohol and the desire for easy wealth, the pocho expresses in these lines the
most persistent and painful stereotypes about Mexicans, that they are drunks, thieves, and frauds:
“Gente de intriga: / tus triunfos más brillantes son traiciones / y elevas como héroes a matones
[People of intrigue: your most brilliant triumphs are treacheries / and you raise murderers up as
heroes]” (39).
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Not satisfied with demeaning the origins and honor of Mexicans, the pocho concludes his
rant with the charge that Mexicans are filthy and lazy, a people who let the world pass them by
without concern or contribution:
Vives con la inmundicia cara a cara,
Si el mundo rueda o no qué te importara?
Llena de cualquier modo la barriga,
Te sientas a rascar – ¡Dios te maldiga! (39)

[You live face to face with filth,
If the world spins or not – what do you care?
You fill your stomach anywhere
You sit to scratch – God curse you!]

Disavowing himself from his Mexican culture, the pocho tries to “reaffirm his subject position as
a privileged citizen of a more civilized, developed nation” (Morán González 136) by aligning
himself with both Spain and the United States, but the irony is, of course, that as a Mexican-
American he is, as Paredes asserts, doubly-excluded and therefore in no position to claim
racial/cultural superiority. Morán González asserts that “his identification with Spanish colonial
cultural […] only confirms his own subordinated status in the United States and in no way
protects him from the racial discrimination he experiences in the country of his formal
citizenship” (136). Laying claim to his Spanish heritage only serves to reinforce his inferiority
within the United States, thus in his attempts to malign contemporary Mexican culture he
succeeds in doing this same work as it relates to himself. And although the pocho’s bitter
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outburst in some ways gives a voice to racist, imperialist attitudes toward Mexicans, I would
argue that we can recognize in these lines Paredes’s impulse to document moments of Mexican-
American cultural history. Tracing that history from Spain to Mexico to the United States enacts
the historical remembrance Saldívar recognizes as key to Paredes’s poetics, but Paredes is
careful to counter the romanticized and ultimately racist views of the pocho by setting his
monologue in a place that serves to ridicule this misguided figure. Switching back to English,
the scene concludes with the following line: “With shaking hand he reaches for the roll of toilet
paper, as the lights fade” (Paredes 39). Reminding us that the pocho is stuck on a toilet after a
weekend of too much alcohol and too many prostitutes, his dreams of locating his regal Spanish
heritage are rendered ridiculous, and in these final moments “Paredes suggests that the audience
should regard what spews from the Passionate Spaniard’s mouth with at least as much disgust as
what emerges from the other end” (Morán González 136). The Passionate Spaniard may
function as a part of Mexican and Mexican-American cultural history, but it is not a history
Paredes wishes to propagate. He might document this history, but he certainly does not
legitimize it.
As the poem shifts away from the Passionate Spaniard who ultimately comes to despise
Mexico, it shifts to a scene entitled “The Second-Generation Exiliado” (Paredes 39). Set in a
Chicago apartment, the “exiled” pocho in this scene longs for the country in which his father was
born but that he has never seen himself. This scene also opens with a flourish of music, but
rather than featuring the Spanish paso doble that accompanied the Passionate Spaniard, this
Exiliado listens to “La Zandunga,” a traditional Mexican waltz. The poem catches him in a
moment of reverie, “leaning his elbows on the sill, his dreamy gazed fixed on the distance” (40).
He has just returned from a date with a “gringa,” and left sexually unsatisfied “he tries to take his
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mind off her by thinking of his beloved Mexico, a country he has never visited” (40). Since he
cannot satisfy his romantic impulses with his date he turns his romantic attention to his father’s
country, and succeeds in “forging […] an idealized identification with his father’s homeland”
(Morán González 136) that molds his desire for a place on which he has never laid eyes. We
learn that the exiliado is the son of a former Mexican consul who was forced into exile in the
United States. Growing up amidst his family members who do have actual memories of Mexico
he often hears talk of returning, but “they never even go for a visit” (Paredes 40). Since he has
no actual experience on which to base his vision of Mexico, this iteration of the pocho relies on
nostalgia that is not his own as a means to create a notion of Mexico to which he can cling
amidst “the exhaust fumes and the faint smell that reaches his neighborhood from Chicago’s
famous stockyard” (40). As he gazes out of his apartment window, “he fantasizes that the slight
breeze that plays over his face comes directly from Mexico. He even imagines he can smell the
flowers from the jardin de flores that is Mexico” (40). The poem once again shifts to Spanish as
the exiliado speaks lovingly to his father’s country and creates an image of Mexico that he
cannot confirm as real but that he dreams of as the locus of his identity.
The exiliado embarks on a “weepy soliloquy” (Morán González 137) to Mexico that
features images of lush, fertile land whose natural beauty inspires artistic creation and intense
emotion:
Déjame que te cante, patria amada
un canto de esperanza y de tristeza
que lleve sueños de oro del mañana
y místicos anhelos de poeta; (Paredes 40)

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[Let me sing to you beloved adopted country,
A song of hope and of sadness
That carries dreams of golden mornings
And mystical longings of poets]

Claiming Mexico as his, the exiliado longs for the country he has never seen, certainly
influenced by his father’s memories of a pre-Revolution nation that was the land of “golden
mornings.” And as he declares Mexico as his “holy land,” the exiliado creates a hierarchy
between Mexico and the United States in which the former always bests the latter:
México, eres tú la tierra santa,
la tierra prometida,
hacia la cual he vuelto yo los ojos
desde mis primeros días
donde las flores tienen más perfume
donde las aquas son más cristalinas,
y donde son más grandes los racimos
que cuelgan en las viñas; (40-41)

[Mexico, you are the holy land,
The promised land,
To which I have turned my eyes
Since my first days,
Where the flowers have more perfume
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Where the waters are more clear,
And where the clusters of grapes
That hang from the vines are bigger.]

Turning to Mexico as the land of promise, the pocho imagines a near-Edenic place to which he
has aspired to reach since his days as a young boy. He imagines stepping foot on Mexican soil,
experiencing Mexico’s unmatched beauty, and proudly declaring to all who will listen that this is
true home:
feliz si un día mis ardientes ojos
por fin te miran
y estos mis pies, a tu terruño extraños,
tu tierra pisan
para pasar por todos tus praderas
como la golondrina
y beberme tus múltiples bellezas
con las lágrimas mías
para poder erguirme bajo el cielo,
dando la voz bravía,
y gritar para que oiga el mundo entero:
- ¡Esta es la tierra mía! (41)

[happy if one day my ardent eyes
at last see you
and these feet of mine, on your foreign native soil
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tread on your land
to pass through all your meadows
like the swallows
and drink of your many beauties
with my tears,
to be able to stand under the sky,
giving the brave voice,
and to shout for the entire world to hear:
- This is my land!]

Desperate to see Mexico with his own eyes, to feel it and smell it, to luxuriate in its natural
beauty, the exiliado seeks to claim his Mexicanness rather than to disavow it as the Passionate
Spaniard does. And yet history tells us that for many, this Mexico was never their reality.
Where the pocho imagines abundance and promise, the majority of Mexicans and indigenous
Indians endured dispossession, disenfranchisement, and exploitation. Morán Gonzáez contends
that:
In casting Mexico as unspoiled tropical paradise, the Exiliado reverses the U.S.
immigrant narrative in that the immigrant has not reached the land of milk and
honey but rather has left it for a reduced existence in exile. [This narrative was
one] most often cultivated by conservative Mexican elites fleeing the Mexican
Revolution [… who often] excoriated what they believed to be agringado
Mexican Americans. (137)
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As the son of an exiled former consul, the pocho adopts his father’s view of the land he was
forced to leave, a land he has most certainly idealized in his absence. At some point, Mexico
was the land of milk and honey for those who enjoyed some degree of power and wealth, but this
image is illusory at best. Underneath the ripe, lush land and the “natural” fecundity of its soil
lies Mexico’s history of violent exploitation, of forced labor, of socioeconomic disparity. And
the pocho’s image of Mexico also fails to account for the modernization Mexico encountered
during the Porfiriato. No longer a pastoral landscape untouched by manmade intrusions, Mexico
had become an industrialized nation, a nation forced to contend with modernity as railroads and
paved roads cut through the countryside. But the pocho does not or perhaps cannot know this
since this is not reflective of his own experiences. As Morán González writes, “Mexico can
remain ‘la tierra santa’ only at a distance for the Second-Generation Exiliado; its tropicalized
physical and spiritual virtues grow in proportion to the distance to the U.S.-Mexican border,
beyond actual pocho experience” (137). And just as the Passionate Spaniard reveals his “deep
embeddedness in U.S. mass culture and equally profound embodiment of Mexican American
identity” in his attempt to claim his Spanish heritage, so too does the Second-Generation
Exiliado in his romantic visions of Mexico (137). Both pocho figures reveal themselves to be
woefully disconnected from the actualities of their Mexican heritage, and in the process they
articulate their Mexican-American identities.
As the scene featuring the Second-Generation Exiliado comes to a close, and at the point
at which Paredes seems to be lauding a romanticized vision of Mexico, the pocho snaps out of
his reverie and reveals just how quickly his dreams about Mexico can recede. He expresses his
wishes for future glory for Mexico, and once again compares his father’s country to a woman,
but he becomes distracted by the sounds of a decidedly “American” piece of popular culture:
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pienso otra vez en ti, tierra soñada,
sueño en porvenir lleno de gloria
como se sueña en la mujer que se ama,
y bajo el embozo negro de la noche
se me hacen otra vez los ojos lágrimas. (Paredes 42)

[I think of you again, famous land,
I dream of a future full of glory
Like one dreams of the woman he loves,
And beneath the black mask of night
My eyes tear once again.]

The exiliado imagines a glorious future for Mexico and for himself, and in doing so he once
again aligns himself with his Mexican culture (at the expense of his Anglo identity, it would
seem). But at the moment in which he appears to be most fervent in his adoration of Mexico, he
turns his attention away from his window, away from his wistful longings for his adopted
country, and rifles through his bedroom for a jazz record. Paredes writes that while the exiliado
hunts for a copy of “St. Louis Blues,” “the background music switches from ‘La Zundunga’ to
‘Cancion Mixteca’” (42), José López Alvarez’s 1915 song that became an anthem of
homesickness for Mexicans living outside of Mexico. And when the exiliado finally locates the
jazz record and “Cancion Mixteca” “is abruptly cut off” (42), we see a turning away from the
Mexico he has dreamt of a turning toward the country in which he was born. As he sings, “Now
if it weren’t for powder, and for store-bought hair” (42), the pocho who idealized Mexico reveals
himself to be more immediately familiar with the Anglo identity symbolized by what is perhaps
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one of the most well-known jazz songs of the early twentieth-century, and his symbolic tossing
aside of ‘La Zundunga’ and ‘Cancion Mixteca’ suggests that the nationalistic pride he displays
for Mexico is subject to pressure from his life as an American citizen. He is ultimately, Paredes
tells us, an American of Mexican descent, and his idealization of Mexico only serves to
punctuate his hybrid cultural identity.
As the poem shifts to its third and final scene, Paredes offers an alternative to the
Passionate Spaniard and the Second-Generation Exiliado in the figure of El Poeta Pocho, a
Mexican-American who lives on the Texas-Mexico border. His identification as a poet suggests
that his account of Mexican-American cultural identity is the one to which we should pay
attention, and Morán González maintains that “he knows both nations well enough not to
mistake either U.S. racism or Mexican exilic nostalgia for an appropriate rendition of his lived
experience as a Texas Mexican” (138). What he offers instead is a narrative about Mexican-
Americans that accounts for a space somewhere in-between the first two pocho figures, a
narrative that more realistically reflects what it means to be Mexican and American as opposed
to choosing one over the other. What the Poeta Pocho represents is a rejection of the Passionate
Spaniard or the Second-Generation Exiliado in favor of a more fully-realized hybrid identity.
As this final scene unfolds, Paredes presents the pocho sitting in a bar on the border
between Texas and Mexico. In a very literal sense he is at the locus of Mexican-American
culture, not in a Tijuana bathroom or staring out of the windows in his Midwest apartment. In
the background, polka music from Tex-Mex musicians plays as the pocho sits at the bar, facing
away from the audience until he “abruptly” turns to face them, and what emerges from his
monologue is a declaration of his Mexican-American history and identity that features not
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Spanish conquerors, not Aztec warriors, but rather Mexican-American heroes whose feats were
carried out along the border.
In a speech that seems squarely aimed at the figures idealized by the pochos in the first
two scenes, the poet angrily addresses the histories of racism and imperialism expressed by the
Passionate Spaniard and the Exiliado:
Canto al coraje heroico, a la ira de una raza,
a la altivez que abraza y que enciende el corazón;
canto al odio titánico de hazañas mil pletórico,
ese rencor histórico que es casi religión.
Bajo su acerbo látigo los pueblos se han formado,
sus fauces han desgarrado cadáveres sin fin;
está su voz en la trompa, estridente, bronco y
brusca (Paredes 43)

[I sing to the heroic courage, to the anger of a race,
To the arrogance that embraces and inflames the heart:
I sing to the titanic hatred of the plethora of thousands exploited,
That historic rancor that is practically religious.
Beneath its bitter whip the villages have gathered,
Their jaws have torn apart dead bodies without end:
Your voice is in the horn, raucous, rowdy and brusque
From the leader who looks for rights and booty.]

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Addressing a history of racism in the United States with the mention of hatred and exploitation
along with a history of imperialism and exploitation in Mexico with the mention of the gathered
villages littered with dead bodies, the Poet identifies the “historic rancor” that resides within
Mexican-Americans as descendants of dual nations and cultures. These are not the histories the
Poet wants to claim for himself, and while he acknowledges their existence he also offers an
alternative identity that is focused squarely on the literal and symbolic border at which he exists.
After urging Mexican-Americans to “Get Up! Wake Up!” (“¡De pie! ¡Despierta!), the
Poet rages at the blood spilled in the name of national pride: “que olor a sangre y no perfume a
rosas / cubra la tierra [what smells of blood and not the perfume of roses / cover the land]”
(Paredes 44), and it is at this moment that he begins to more directly articulate the history that is
both Mexican and American, the history of those who reside at the border:
No le canto a Cuauhtémoc, no le canto a Pelayo,
Al Cid y a Moctezuma no les he cantado yo;
El Cortez de quien hablo en Tejas nació.

Yo le canto a Pizaña, yo le canto a Cortina,
a Jacinto Treviño y a Gregorio Cortez,
los virile campeones de una raza transida
que aungue triste y caída no se deja vencer. (44)

[I do not sing to Cuauhtémoc, I do not sing to Pelayo,
I have not sung to el Cid and Moctezuma;
The Cortez of whom I speak was born in Texas.
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I sing to Pizaña, I sing to Cortina,
To Jacinto Treviño and Gregorio Cortez,
The manly champions of an anxious race
Who although sad and fallen did not allow themselves to be conquered.]

Rather than glorifying ancient Aztec heroes or Spanish conquistadors, the heroes the pocho sings
of are those of the Mexican Revolution, those who resisted and challenged the violent power of
los rinches along the border, and those who were “born in Texas.” These are the men of
Mexican-American corridos, the men who live along the border, the men who have fought back
against exploitation and dispossession at the hands of Mexican and Anglo elites, heroes of the
Revolution and creators of El Plan de San Diego. When the pocho declares “éstos son los
hidalgos / a los que canto yo [these are the heroes to whom I sing]” (44), he resists received
historical narratives about Mexico and the U.S. while at the same time creating a Mexican-
American historical narrative that contributes to a Mexican-American cultural identity. And
when a backstage voice “repeats mockingly ‘¡Yo! ¡Yo! ¡Yo! ¡Yo!” (44), as if to challenge the
Poet’s glorification of such men, he replies with an emphatic “¡Sí! ¡Yo! [Yes! Me!]” (44),
thereby including himself in the race of Mexican-Americans about which he has been singing.
He retorts by recalling the Alamo, the Spanish conquer of the Aztecs, and the U.S. occupation of
Veracruz during the Mexican Revolution, and he declares that the cultural pain wrought by each
of these events is an integral part of his cultural identity, signifying a “reaffirmation of his Texas-
Mexican identity” (Morán González 138). Resisting the need to resort to Anglo racist attitudes
toward Mexicans or to second-generation idealizations of Mexico, the Poeta Pocho offers an
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antidote to these insufficient positions. Paredes identified “Tres Faces del Pocho” as “an early
attempt to satirize Mexican nationalism and its failings” (qtd. in Saldívar, Borderlands 91), and
the final pocho figure succeeds in addressing those failings by articulating a different cultural
possibility. He actively dismisses notions of a romantic Mexico just as he critiques U.S.
imperialist tendencies toward Mexico, and as a result he signifies a shift toward transnationalism
and cosmopolitanism that resists the “failed nationalism” Paredes mentions. The Poeta Pocho’s
identity is that of the conquered Mexican, the exploited Texan, the victim of imperialism, and the
border hero and because he is in some ways all of these he resists being any one of these. He is
the poem’s embodiment of the possibility of a fully-realized cultural identity that allows for the
transnationality of his citizenship and his heritage, and as such he reflects what Olguín identifies
as the “complicated history and oppositional potential” (93) of the Mexican-American pocho.

Paredes’s Modernism
Paredes’s poetry is remarkable for its attempt to inscribe notions of Mexican-American
identity through poetic form. The cultural contribution it makes lies in its articulation of and
resistance to nationalist narratives that in many ways erased a specifically Mexican-American
history. But I would argue that these poems also achieve aesthetic innovations that are reflective
of Paredes’s modernism and are worthy of mention as I situate him within the context of early
twentieth-century literature. Schedler writes that in the years between the “decline of the heroic
corrido tradition” and the advent of the Chicano El Movimiento, “Mexican-American literary
expression developed […] toward a hybrid form of Mexican-American modernism, which
inscribed and adapted aesthetic features of both the corrido tradition and Anglo-American
modernism” (154). Focusing specifically on George Washington Gómez, Schedler recognizes in
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Paredes’s writing a “concern[…] with representing a divided Mexican-American identity and
responding to the economic, political, and social developments associated with modernity”
(154). He classifies Paredes as a “border modernist” dedicated to “questioning received
traditions and developing new forms to represent the modern world and to express modern
identities” (155), and I would argue that “The Mexico-Texan” and “Tres Faces del Pocho” are
particularly rich examples of Paredes’s modernist project.
Saldívar characterizes Paredes’s “theory of history and his poetics as anamnesis, a praxis
against forgetting” (Borderlands 12), and as such his poems make important interventions in
dominant narratives that actively and passively erase Mexican-American history and culture.
But his poetic aesthetics also enact these interventions, particularly in his use of language and in
his poetic form. Both “The Mexico-Texan” and “Tres Faces del Pocho” play with language as a
way to articulate Mexican-American identity. The former relies on the Mexico-Texan’s
accented English to reflect his dual identities, and Mexican and Anglo names and phrases are
positioned in opposition to each other as a means of expressing his competing cultures (Johnny
and Juan, Miguel and El Mike). Referencing border politics and the experiences of a migrant
workforce during the Depression through the language of the Mexico-Texan, Paredes offers a
revised voice through which readers hear of the modern condition throughout the Southwest and
along the U.S./Mexico border. Similarly, the free flow between English and Spanish in “Tres
Faces del Pocho” along with the wordplay that occurs when Paredes incorporates words that
might hold several relevant meanings, reflect what I consider to be decidedly modernist moments
in his writing. In Accented America: The Cultural Politics of Multilingual Modernism, Joshua
Miller discusses the linguistic interplay in George Washington Gómez, a discussion that I believe
is equally relevant to “Tres Faces del Pocho.” Miller comments on the appearance of Spanish
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words throughout the novel and on the fact that, “Context provides only partial meanings for
readers who do not understand the words” (289). Unwilling to relieve the linguistic irony this
might create, “in most instances the text refuses to translate or provide definitive meaning for
non-English terms” (289). Of course, the same can be said for “Tres Faces del Pocho.” The
“stage directions” are written in English, as are the notes pertaining to the setting, but when the
pochos actually speak they do so in Spanish, rendering large portions of the poem indecipherable
to those who do not speak or read fluent Spanish. But rather than kicking these readers out of the
text, I would argue that these linguistic barriers actually reflect their experiences back to them.
Miller asserts that, “Multilinguism [reflects] the experience of lingual confusion [that is]
common to both individuals and cultures juggling a number of languages at once” (295), and for
Mexican-Americans whose English might be accented or whose Spanish has been lost, the
transitions between English and Spanish in the poem enact the linguistic duality that is a key
marker of Mexican-American cultural identity. In both poems, Paredes does indeed engage in
acts of historical remembrance that Saldívar identifies as so vital to his artistic project, but the
poems also offer examples of the aesthetic innovations that signify Paredes’s modernism. A
notion of history is certainly part of that modernism, but so too is the utilization of language to
enact the experiences of Mexican-Americans as they confronted issues of modernity.
In Mexican Ballads, Chicano Poems, José Limón comments on the significance of the
corrido to Mexican-Americans, “who had been told that [they] had no history, or worse still, a
history of social deviance” (74). He maintains that, “for many Mexican-Americans, […] any
record of the events of their history was of great political significance” (74). Although I would
not classify Paredes’s poems as corridos, I do attribute this same cultural significance to them as
it relates to Mexican-American culture. As they recount histories of imperialism, dispossession,
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and disavowal, Paredes’s poems simultaneously document these histories while inscribing a
distinctly Mexican-American cultural history that occupies a space of resistance to them. His
poems imagine a cultural space that is indeed liminal, but they also inscribe a culture that claims
that liminality as culturally-generative. Rather than enacting historical erasure, the notion of
being somehow “in-between” offers a space of possibility.
This is not to say that Paredes imagines this space to be without its hardships. As both
“The Rio Grande” and “Esquinita de mi Pueblo” illustrate, the path to a fully-realized cultural
identity that is both Mexican and American is laden with impediments. Whether it be the intense
desire to return to one’s ancestral origins or the determination to maintain a power dynamic in
which Mexican-Americans might never see the “green light,” Paredes’s poetry makes very clear
that the journey toward a dual cultural identity is a painful one. Additionally, a poem such as
“The Mexico-Texan” foregrounds the notion that resistance to cultural acceptance emerges from
both sides of the border, leaving Mexican-Americans to wonder if they are “Johnny or Juan.”
And “Tres Faces del Pocho” illustrates that the competing ideas of racism and romanticization
can be tempting corners in which to retreat when the pocho’s lived experiences fail to live up to
his expectations.
And yet, I think it is vital to recognize the cultural potential in Paredes’s poems. John
Michael Rivera maintains that “Paredes’s cultural work [and I would include his poetry in this
category] at this time attempted to come to terms with the contradictory formation of Mexican
peoplehood and the debates of its very meaning in the United States” (142). While I would
argue that Paredes was actually concerned with Mexican-American peoplehood, Rivera’s idea of
a coming-to-terms in Paredes’s work reflects a conscious move to inscribe a burgeoning
Mexican-American cultural identity that we see reflected in his poetry. “The Rio Grande” and
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“Esquinita de mi Pueblo” might foreground the hardships associated with the journey towards a
dual cultural identity, but they also articulate the progress that journey represents. And while
“The Mexico-Texan” and “Tres Faces del Pocho” document the painful histories Mexican-
Americans must confront, both poems feature cultural figures who ultimately carve out a
uniquely-defined space and identity for themselves in the face of those histories. As such,
Paredes’s poems succeed in addressing the question of what it means to be Mexican and
American, even if the answers he provides are still murky and resistant to clearly-defined
borders.
As so much scholarship about Paredes illustrates, it is vital to address the impact of
history on his work, be it ethnographic, sociological, novelistic, or poetic. His artistic theories
are so completely entwined with his notions of history that it is fair to say one does not exist
separate from the other. But the recognition of Paredes’s impulse to document history in order to
counteract the forces of historical erasure should not preclude us from recognizing the equally
compelling drive to work through a Mexican-American identity that was still inchoate when
Paredes wrote the poems in Between Two Worlds. They do indeed account for the history of
their poetic subjects, but in doing so they also try to transcend that history in an attempt to
understand what Mexican-American culture might mean as it moves forward. I do not suggest
that the poems highlighted in this chapter reflect a desire on Paredes’s part to leave that history
behind, so to speak, but I do suggest that these poems reflect a desire to situate that history in a
way that allows Mexican-Americans to acknowledge it, to remember it, and to move beyond it.

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Chapter 3
Anita Brenner’s Transnational Documentary
By the 1930’s, with the United States in the throes of the Great Depression, the impulse
to document the social, cultural, and economic irruptions ravaging the country manifested in a
distinct documentary aesthetic that was initially the purview of leftist writers, artists, and
intellectuals and was eventually appropriated by governmental institutions through programs
such as the WPA Federal Writers’ Program. Erskine Caldwell and Margaret Bourke-White’s
You Have Seen Their Faces and James Agee and Walker Evans’s Let Us Now Praise Famous
Men were published to great public and critical acclaim, and photographers such as Dorothea
Lange traveled the country capturing now-iconic images of the disenfranchised Americans most
impacted by the economic downturn. American documentary became focused on specific
geographic lines that still predominate. The real struggles of Southern sharecroppers,
agricultural workers, migrant laborers, and tenant farmers came to symbolize the very worst
effects of the Depression as documentary texts opened the eyes of the rest of the country to the
plight of the South, and the lexicon surrounding American documentary became one dominated
by a dichotomy in which the Southern U.S. existed as distinct from the rest of the country;
however, this dichotomy occluded the transnational origins of documentary in favor of an
American nationalist perspective. In addition to projects aimed at documenting conditions
within the United States, American documentarians were also engaged in transnational
documentary projects, including those related to Latin America, and Anita Brenner was one such
figure. Her personal and cultural ties to both Mexico and the United States positioned her to
consider the relationship between the two nations from a unique perspective, and in doing so she
also addressed the complications associated with self-representation in American documentary.
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Beyond the rather narrow view of “America” disseminated through American documentary texts,
these are further problematized when we consider issues of self-representation since the now-
canonical documentary texts that emerged in the 1930’s and 1940’s offered the perspective of an
outsider looking in, a trespasser (or even a voyeur, as some critics have argued) trying to give
voice to a culture and plight of which he was not a part. Since that culture was so often that of
white, Southern, sharecroppers, Mexicans and Mexican-Americans were virtually absent from
the documentary texts that most influenced the American cultural landscape as it related to
images of the Great Depression.
While the lens through which we view American documentary in many ways represents
an understandable turning inward that was prompted by a need to examine the state of the
country, it also reflects an isolationist tendency to think within particular borders that limits our
understanding of the literature and images that can and should be considered part of the
American documentary tradition. More specifically, I would argue that there is a traceable
transnationalism in early twentieth-century American documentary, one that challenges us to
think beyond the North U.S./South U.S. border to include Mexico, and I offer Anita Brenner as a
unique antidote of sorts to the problem of thinking about American documentary within the
confines of the United States since, in her documentary text The Wind that Swept Mexico, she
represents those with whom she self-identifies culturally/ethnically and also expresses concerns
that extend beyond Southern tenant farmers and the impact of the Great Depression on their
literal and cultural survival. Brenner, a Mexican-born Jew who self-identified as Mexican,
American, and Jewish, offers an ideal example of transnational American documentary in her
account of the Mexican Revolution told through photographs and written text and aimed at a
predominantly American audience. This text reflects Brenner’s adaptation of documentary
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techniques to focus on the Mexican Revolution, modernization and industrialization, and the
transnational links between Mexico and the United States, and in doing so it also allows us to
consider issues of self-representation as they relate to the subjects of documentary texts. The
Wind That Swept Mexico offers Brenner’s account of the Mexican Revolution in which she
discusses issues ranging from Porfirio Díaz’s dictatorial reign to the influence of American
politics on the Mexican government (and, by extension, on its people), and she engages in
pointed discussion of the necessity to foster a truly transnational perspective on the issues
impacting both countries. And what makes this text of particular interest in terms of my project
is the fact that Brenner was a Mexican-American documenting and commenting on the cultural,
economic, and social issues that impacted both nations with which she identified.

Mexican Influence and Early Twentieth-Century U.S. Culture
The Mexican influence on early twentieth century American culture is well-documented
and multi-faceted. In The Enormous Vogue of Things Mexican, Helen Delpar suggests that the
“cultural interchange between Mexico and the United States reached its apogee in the years after
1927” (55), and she refers to the American thirst for Mexican culture when she asserts that “the
Mexican vogue attained its greatest strength in the Depression years of the early 1930’s” (55). In
addition to “the writings of […] admirers of Mexican culture [that] helped to disseminate
information about Mexico in the United States and contributed to the Mexican ‘vogue’” (62), she
also credits the positive shift in diplomacy between the two nations at the hands of Ambassador
Dwight W. Morrow (who assumed the post in 1927) with the increased transnational cultural
exchange.
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Perhaps the most recognizable faces of the Mexican artistic presence in the United States
are those of los tres grandes: the Mexican muralists José Clemente Orozco, Diego Rivera, and
David Alfaro Siqueiros. In his account of these three artists and their time in the United States,
Laurance Hurlburt writes that, “During the 1930’s – the decade of the ‘Mexican craze’ or
‘Mexican invasion,’ as contemporary art critics termed it – these artists created masterworks
[within the United States] and enjoyed immense critical and popular acclaim” (4). Indeed,
Orozco’s Prometheus and Rivera’s Detroit Industry, as well as his Rockefeller Center mural,
have reached mythic status both for their subject matter and for the striking, and at times
controversial, visual images they presented to the American public. And Siqueiros created for
some American artists a new lens through which to view the upheavals of the Depression. New
Deal muralist Anton Refregier credited Siqueiros with what seems a necessary upheaval in
American art: “‘[…] his art had a tremendous impact on us in the United States during the 30s
when we were seeking a new language in order to state the reality […] brought about by the
Depression, the suffering of the people, and the growing threat of war. We were shaken by the
first contact with [his] paintings’” (qtd. in Hurlburt 8). But the muralists’ influence extended
beyond the individual murals they created. Hurlburt credits the muralists’ Mexican murals, and
the support they received from the Mexican government, as “the impetus for the public support
of United States’ artists through the various New Deal art projects” (4) and he contends that “the
federally sponsored art projects of [the 1930’s] can be traced directly to the model of the murals
of los tres grandes and others created in Mexico in the 1920’s” (8). American artists and
wealthy patrons such as the Rockefellers wanted to emulate the public art programs already in
place in Mexico, and these three muralists emerged as icons in the Depression-era United States.
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While ideas of early twentieth-century Mexican influence on the American cultural
landscape are dominated by the muralists, there are additional artists and intellectuals who
figured prominently in the years just prior to and during the Depression, among them Mexican
caricaturist and writer Miguel Covarrubias. Covarrubias left Mexico for New York City in 1923
and, “by all accounts, he took the city by storm” (Heinzelman 4). Almost immediately, his
images and writings were featured in Vogue, Vanity Fair, and the New Yorker and he enjoyed
great commercial success (4). Wendy Wick Reaves maintains that while still in Mexico,
“Covarrubias joined [other Mexican artists] in reviving interest in indigenous Mexican art,
dance, and craft. In Mexico, the renaissance of the arts in the 1920s had a strong nationalistic
element, which affected [him] profoundly. His own art reflected the graphic patterning of
ancient and native cultures and the influence of contemporary political caricature” (65). He
carried this artistic influence with him to the United States where he reached a wide audience,
and his “various activities promoted Mexican culture in America” (79). Among these artistic
endeavors were the murals he painted for the 1939 World’s Fair in San Francisco as well as his
“collaboration […] in the massive ‘Twenty Centuries of Mexican Art’ exhibition that opened at
the Museum of Modern Art in 1940” (80). By all accounts, Covarrubias was a prolific and
highly influential example of the Mexican presence in American art and culture.
While his own artistic output certainly impacted the American artistic landscape, his
influence can also be traced in the artists he gathered around himself, the men and women who
would become known as the Covarrubias Circle. Key among these were Hungarian
photographer Nickolas Muray, Mexican artist Frida Kahlo (along with Diego Rivera), and
photographers Tina Modotti and Edward Weston. But various other luminaries also claimed a
spot in this remarkable circle. Heinzelman lists figures such as Nelson Rockefeller, D.H.
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Lawrence, Langston Hughes, Orson Welles, Dolores del Rio, Ethel Waters, Georgia O’Keefe ,
Zora Neale Hurston, John Huston, and Carl Van Vechten as just some of the faces one was likely
to encounter at Covarrubias’s gatherings (7). In many ways, Covarrubias became the locus of
New York intellectual and artistic life in the early decades of the twentieth century, so much so
that his influence is characterized as an artistic reign by cultural critics. As Heinzelman writes,
“Turning to Covarrubias in particular, one is tempted to speak of this period immediately
following the Agrarian Revolution in Mexico as the ‘Mexican Decades.’ Certainly Covarrubias
participated and presided over the cultural scene in that thirty-year span from the mid-twenties to
the mid-fifties as few others did, whether Mexican or not” (5). Although not as well-known as
the muralists, it is perhaps fair to characterize Covarrubias’s influence as more far-reaching since
his own work reached a broader audience and since he created a remarkable forum for the
exchange of ideas among those within his rather large “circle.”
Anthropologist Manuel Gamio also emerged as a key figure in the transnational cultural
exchange between Mexico and the United States. Gamio studied anthropology at Columbia
University under the guidance of Franz Boas (who was also Anita Brenner’s mentor), and “he
returned to Mexico to make major contributions to the indigentsia effort” in which “Mexicans
turned to revalue their own people, their indigenous roots, art, and customs” (Glusker 37). But
his influence within the United States comes from his influential studies on the immigration
patterns from Mexico to United States in the early twentieth century. In Mexican Immigration to
the United States: A Study of Human Migration and Adjustment, Gamio engages in a
sociological and anthropological study of Mexican immigrants to the United States by examining
such wide ranging issues as “The Songs of the Immigrant,” “Religion,” Interracial Relations,”
and “The Mentality of the Immigrant,” to name just a few. After presenting his findings, Gamio
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offers some guidance in the final chapter entitled “The Control of Immigration: Some
Suggestions.” In it, he suggests that Mexico “restrict permanent emigration directly and
encourage temporary emigration [for the purposes of work] through legal or administrative
measures” and that Mexico “gradually repatriate the Mexican immigrants who are established in
the United States” (181). With regard to U.S. policy, he suggests “permitting unlimited entry of
temporary labor that has been contracted for, provided that in these contracts the employers
furnish transportation,” as well as “permitting the entry of temporary laborers who cannot read or
write” and “fixing a maximum or quota with respect to immigrants intending to remain
permanently” (185). Ultimately, Gamio sought to prevent the mass exodus of Mexico’s citizens
while also allowing for the fact that, for some, the United States presented more promising
opportunities. His work was highly influential to both the American and Mexican governments,
and his influence also extended into artistic circles, particularly with Brenner, who served as his
translator.
The free flow of ideas did not just move from South to North. Numerous American
writers, photographers, and cultural intellectuals traveled to Mexico as “cultural pilgrims”
(Delpar 55). Among them were writers Carleton Beals, Katherine Anne Porter, Francis Toor,
Ernest Gruening, John dos Passos, and Anita Brenner. Martha Graham and Aaron Copland also
visited Mexico during these years. Photographers Tina Modotti and Edward Weston headed
south and decamped in Mexico for a number of years while joining an artistic and intellectual
circle that included Brenner, Rivera, Orozco, and painter Rufino Tamayo. Thus, there developed
an expatriate community within Mexico that, although not organized in any traditional sense,
was still key in disseminating favorable images of Mexico within the United States.
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It was also during these years that U.S. documentarians turned their attention to Latin
America and adapted documentary techniques to reflect their growing interest in Mexico. John
Steinbeck, for example, spent the early years of the 1930’s traveling throughout Mexico and
conducting research for Zapata, his account of Emiliano Zapata’s exploits during the Mexican
Revolution, primarily through interviews with survivors of the initial conflicts of the war.
Compiling what Robert Morsberger characterizes as “an oral history that […] was invaluable
both for the immediacy of its eyewitness recollections and for the fact that it was not available in
other written record” (5), Steinbeck turned a documentary eye towards “the struggles of the
dispossessed and landless poor farm workers, whose problems were all too much like those of
their counterparts in the United States” (5). The narrative is equal parts national history and
dramatic play, and it focuses squarely on the political causes of the Revolution as well as the
impact of the conflict on the nation’s majority.
Carleton Beals also penned documentary texts about the Revolution. Mexico: An
Interpretation (1923) offers his account of the Revolution and the complexities of the Mexican
government before and during the conflict. Having spent over a decade traveling to Mexico,
Beals developed an acute sense of the nation’s political, economic, and cultural climate, and his
text addresses such wide-ranging issues as the mestizo culture, the cientificos who surrounded
Díaz, education, religion, and American involvement in Mexico’s economy and politics.
Mexican Maze was published in 1930 and is less journalistic than is Mexico: An Interpretation in
that it features several short narratives along with illustrations by Diego Rivera, but we can
recognize in it the desire to document the history and culture of Mexico as it confronted issues of
internal political strife, modernization, economic depression, and cultural conflict. Both
Steinbeck and Beals exemplify the ways in which U.S. documentary had begun to shift its
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attention to Mexico even while the plight of the American South predominated in U.S.
documentary texts. Their concern with Mexico, and the ways in which they delineated that
concern, reflect the transnationality of documentary representation that is so often absent from
discussions of American documentary of the early twentieth century.
Wendy Wick Reaves discusses the cultural exchange between the two countries in her
essay “Miguel Covarrubias and the Vogue for Things Mexican.” She encapsulates the spirit of
mutual discovery as follows: “When the 1920s ushered in a period of prosperity in the United
States and relative calm in Mexico after a decade of revolutionary turmoil, the scene was set for
an explosion of interest in cross-cultural exchange. Artists, intellectuals, writers, musicians,
entertainers, and scholars flowed across the border in both directions, creating an unprecedented
awareness of cultural differences and affinities” (65). And yet, when American documentary
began to emerge as a viable form of political and artistic expression, the view seemed to extend
only as far south as Georgia, Alabama, or Texas. American documentary texts honed in on
particular geographic boundaries that reflected a very insular view of “America” and of
documentary itself, and in the process they occluded the genre’s transnational origins.
In his seminal study Documentary: A History of the Non-Fiction Film, Erik Barnouw
traces the development of visual documentary from early 19
th
-century figures such as French
astronomer Pierre Jules César Janssen, French camera inventor Louis Lumière, and American
inventor Thomas Edison to the use of documentary during the Russian Revolution, both World
Wars, and the Vietnam War. He examines the ways in which leftists in Nazi Germany employed
documentary as a means of protest while the Nazis simultaneously used the medium as a tool of
propaganda. And he devotes a great deal of his text to a discussion of Soviet documentary films,
particularly those of Dziga Vertrov, who believed that the “task of Soviet films […] was to
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document socialist reality” (Barnouw 54). Vertov argued vociferously for filmmakers to “‘come
to life’” (qtd. in Barnouw 54) and to recognize in the “‘prose of life’” (54) subjects that would
make for truly meaningful film. Barnouw writes that “the emphasis [in such films] was on
action caught on the run, from any revealing vantage,” and that “concealed camera positions
were used to catch moments in marketplaces, factories, schools, taverns, streets” (57). What
emerged was a “reporter-documentarian” (61) that relied on journalistic techniques to document
his subjects, and as Barnouw shifts his discussion into that of the American documentarians and
of their adaptation of early documentary techniques, he does so having reminded his readers that
documentary began as a transnational genre, a transnationality that Brenner figures along a
North-South/South-North Axes that extends beyond the American South and into Mexico.

American Documentary and Self-Representation
In the foreword to 1939’s American Exodus, Dorothea Lange and Paul Taylor trace the
migration of American workers from farm to factory and back again with the onset of the Great
Depression. They suggest that after “boys from the farms” (5) flocked to industrialized, urban
regions of the country, where “the doors of […] factories were open wide [to them]” (5), the
catastrophic events of 1929 drove them back to the farm: “Indeed, in the face of industrial
collapse in 1929 millions of Americans sought refuge in recoil to the land from which they had
sprung” (5). However, as the effects of industrialized agriculture ravaged the soil upon which
these Americans depended for their survival, yet another forced migration occurred as families
once again sought relief in industrial areas of the United States. Lange and Taylor identify this
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“contemporary exodus” as the “theme” of their “record of human erosion” (5), and they aim their
camera and pen squarely at the American South:
Now our people are leaving the soil again. They are being expelled by powerful
forces of man and of Nature. […] This contemporary exodus is our theme. It
attains its most dramatic form on the deltas, the prairies, and the plains of the
South, and in the tide of people which moves to the Pacific Coast. But this time
the cities and towns are already burdened with unemployed, and opportunity upon
the land is sharply restricted. (5)
The photographic images in American Exodus follow a geographic trajectory from the Southern
United States to the West, and they create a picture of the decimated Southern plains that
continues to predominate even today. Indeed, Lange’s iconic photographs are largely
responsible for the idea that American documentary of the 1930’s was concerned only with
making visible to the rest of the country the plight of their Southern neighbors.
A photograph of barren, dusty fields taken in the Oklahoma Panhandle in 1938 mirrors
countless similar images with which Americans were confronted as documentary texts began to
enter the public consciousness. The land is devoid of life – a corral holds no animals, a
dilapidated shack holds no people, and the soil holds no crops. An empty barrel tipped on its
side implies a lack of water and irrigation, and the dry, dusty landscape seems primed for attack
by the strong winds that created the dust storms that gave the “Dust Bowl” its name. A lone
fencepost in the far right corner is attached to nothing and there is nothing that it needs to keep
fenced in. An entry gate in the middle right of the frame still stands, but it offers an entry to a
no-man’s land. It is the gateway to a particularly hellish landscape that, thanks to the wide angle
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of the shot, extends into seeming eternity. The monotony of the flat land is interrupted only by
the occasional unmoving weed or rock, reminders that this once-fertile land is now violently still.
Lange and Taylor also documented the human tragedy of the Depression. Figure 3.1 is
accompanied by the caption, “‘If you die, you’re dead – That’s all’” (101), and this 1938
photograph of a woman in the Texas Panhandle speaks volumes by saying so little. Lange and
Taylor are careful to inform their readers that they “adhere to the standards of documentary
photography as [they] have conceived them. Quotations which accompany photographs report
what the photographed said, not what [Lange and Taylor] think might be their unspoken
thoughts” (6). If we are inclined to believe Lange and Taylor, then the expression on the
woman’s face – one that could be a smile or a painful grimace – reveals an acute sorrow about
the circumstances of her life. The position of her head resting in her hand suggests a degree of
exasperation that contradicts the acceptance articulated in the caption. Death may be death and
“that’s all,” but the image reveals a struggle to make sense of this. The woman’s muscular left
arm and the way in which her left hand grasps her neck implies physical pain (or at the very
least, discomfort) that we can infer results from the backbreaking labor that comes with
agricultural work and child-
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Figure 3.1 “If you die, you’re dead - That’s all.” Photograph from Lange and Weston’s
American Exodus (1938).

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rearing. And looming in the background like a specter that haunts the photographic subject is the
ubiquitous flat, barren landscape. The lone woman is the only sign of life, but her pained
expression suggests that this life is one diminished by the hardships of the Depression. Her
clothing is tattered and she looks exhausted and defeated. Although she does not invite death,
she does seem resigned to the fact that it will come sooner rather than later – perhaps for her, but
almost certainly for those like her.
This collection of Lange’s images is just one of several representative texts that emerged
in the 1930’s and early 1940’s. In 1937, Erskine Caldwell and Margaret Bourke-White
published You Have Seen Their Faces, and this photographic and written account of the
Depression enjoys, along with Walker Evans and James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous
Men, monolithic status among American documentary texts. Caldwell and Bourke-White spent
eighteen months traveling through and documenting the American South, and the resulting
record is often cited as the most influential documentary text to emerge from an era in which
writers, visual artists, photographers, and intellectuals were clamoring to expose urban America
to the abject poverty and suffering that was proliferating within its own national borders.
Figure 3.2, taken in Peterson, Alabama, is accompanied by the caption, “‘I suppose there
is plenty to eat somewhere if you can find it; the cat always does.’” The image contains the
markers of rural poverty that would, for the rest of the country, come to symbolize both the
tragedy and the aesthetic of the Great Depression. The ramshackle room looks miniscule and
creates a feeling of oppression and constraint, a lack of freedom and movement. There are
boards missing from the wall, the shelves are bare save for a few, conspicuously empty plates,
and the stove in the far right corner of the image seems an almost cruel reminder of the fact that
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there is nothing to cook on or in it. The mother and her children are barefoot, their clothes as
dirty and tattered as those in Lange’s images, and there exists the same sense of hopelessness and

Figure 3.2 Peterson, Alabama. Photograph from Caldwell and Bourke-White’s You Have Seen
Their Faces.

exasperation. Although the older child appears to be eating, the tiny plate and his own skeletal
frame suggest that this is not true sustenance. And while the baby is of an age at which he might
still be breastfeeding, his tiny hand raised to his eye, accompanied by his mother’s downward
glance, suggest that he also wants and needs more than he can get. We do not see the mother’s
eyes (in fact all three figures look down, away from the camera), and the effect is a feeling of
both defeat and shame. She clutches her baby but, according to the caption, cannot provide for
him, and so he cries. Only the kitten in the bottom of the image exhibits a degree of liveliness,
perhaps because it can live on the scraps that the mother seems close to finally resorting to as
food.
The degree to which Caldwell and Bourke-White manipulated their subjects is well-
documented and is an issue that I will address at a later point, but the key here is that this is the
type of image confronting the American public during the Depression. This mother and her
children, along with countless others just like them, occupied the public imagination and became,
for American readers, the symbols of documentary expression during the 1930’s and early
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1940’s. In his seminal text Documentary Expression and Thirties America , William Stott
proclaims You Have Seen their Faces as “the decade’s most influential protest against farm
tenancy” (216), and in his foreword to the 1995 republication of Caldwell and Bourke-White’s
text, Alan Tracthtenberg argues that it “helped shape a public discourse, a consensus in the
1930’s regarding rural poverty, race relations in the South, and how artists should speak publicly
of these issues in words and images” (vi). He declares it as “the first of a prominent group of
documentary picture-texts to appear in the following years” (vi). And although he concedes that
we might question, “Whether it is the best picture-text integration of the lot” (vi), he also
maintains that “there is no doubt that it gives a vivid example of the social passion invested in
aesthetic experimentation by engaged artists during the Depression decade” (vi). The impact of
You Have Seen Their Faces on an American documentary aesthetic cannot be overstated. It
provided a schematics of sorts for Depression-era art that was concerned with social justice, and
the fact that it did so through the lens of the American South did much to solidify the idea that
American documentary expression of the early twentieth century was dominated by specific
regional concerns, concerns echoed in James Agee’s and Walker Evans’s Let Us Now Praise
Famous Men.
In 1936, Fortune magazine sent Agee and Evans on assignment on what Agee describes
in the preface as “rather a curious piece of work” (ix). They were instructed to “prepare […] an
article on cotton tenantry in the United States, in the form of a photographic and verbal record of
the daily living and environment of an average white family of tenant farmers” (ix). The two
men became acquainted with three families and spent one month living with what they deemed
“the most nearly representative of the three” (ix), after which they compiled their images and
notes into what would eventually become Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Although the
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Fortune article was never published (due in large part to the publication of Caldwell and Bourke-
White’s text), Agee and Evans eventually found a publisher and expanded the article into a book-
length record of their time in the South that contributed greatly to the already well-developed
American documentary tradition of looking to the Southern United States for photographic and
sociological material.
The photographs in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men do not represent much of a
departure from those of Lange or Bourke-White. They feature the same images of decimated
Southern fields and the decimated Southern families who once depended on these fields for their
livelihoods, the same barely-standing shacks offering little shelter to the men, women, and
children whose pained expressions tell the reader as much as any words the authors could write.
But several of these images refer more directly and explicitly to death and in some ways “say”
what Caldwell and Bourke-White could only imply.
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Figure 3.3 Photograph from Agee and Evans’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
It is difficult to ascertain if the baby in Figure 3.3, whose face we do not get to see but
whose figure is disturbing in its stillness, is dead or merely sleeping. The tiny body is dirty and
bandaged (just barely), and the white cloth draped over the baby’s face and body could be a
makeshift blanket to protect her while she sleeps or a sheet to cover her lifeless body. She rests
on top of an equally-tattered blanket that in turn rests on a hard porch. Nothing in this
photograph suggests the peacefulness often associated with a child’s sleep, and the implication is
that even if she is alive, her life is one profoundly impacted by the abject poverty leveled at her
family by the Great Depression. She is injured and swaddled in dirty cloths. She does not have
the luxury of a crib to sleep in but instead must rest on the gnarled wood of her family’s front
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porch. And there is little room for misunderstanding the visual markers of death in this
photograph. The symbolism is quite heavy-handed if we read the faceless child as the figurative
future of Southern tenant farmers and the rural, agricultural way of life they represent.
William Stott suggests that Evans and Agee’s text, along with Caldwell and Bourke-
White’s, Lange’s, and others’ contributed to a specific and powerful perception of the Great
Depression years in the United States. He contends that, by the time Let Us Now Praise Famous
Men was published, “the economic weakness of Southern agriculture and the inhumanity of the
tenant system, [along with] related problems were already well known” (216) and had been the
fodder of questionable and legitimate journalism for some time. He relates the fact that the
plight of the Southern sharecropper “had been treated in a score of books and hundreds of
articles” and that “the word ‘sharecropper’ was appearing regularly in lurid newspaper headlines
in cities where neither the editors nor the readers had a very clear understanding of what a
sharecropper really was” (217). Media outlets regularly reported on a series of violent
confrontations between plantation owners, large industrial powers, and exploited and defeated
agricultural workers and their families, and the parties involved became familiar to the rest of the
country through “report[ing] by the press services, by the Scripps-Howard chain, by the New
York Times, and by magazines, including Time, The New Republic, The Nation, Survey Graphic,
and New Masses. They were also reported in the newsreels” (217). He maintains that “the
sharecropper remained in the spotlight throughout 1935, 1936, and beyond,” and that by
“November 1937, when You Have Seen Their Faces appeared, the problem it treated was known
to virtually everyone who read the book” (218). What these historical facts suggest is that the
American public was not only acutely familiar with the Southern sharecropper, but that
numerous documentary texts about the problems associated with the Great Depression (along
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with other more “popular” media accounts) chose the diminished state of Southern tenant
farming as a symbol of the upheavals facing the country. The images and stories of barren land,
angry and destitute farmers and their families, and the financial and industrial powers responsible
for the exploitation of these families became synonymous with the literal and figurative
American landscape in the early twentieth century, and this rather myopic view of the concerns
facing the United States in the 1920’s, 30’s, and 40’s still in many ways occupies our
understanding of American documentary. What this view does not allow for is the inclusion of
transnational concerns within the realm of early twentieth-century American documentary, but
these texts do exist and represent an important and unexplored component of what is often
identified as the most recognizable form of artistic expression in Depression-era United States.
Before considering one such text, Brenner’s account of the Mexican Revolution, however, there
are some additional complexities associated with those such as Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
and You Have Seen Their Faces that warrant discussion, particularly issues associated with self-
representation (or the lack thereof) in documentary.
Lange and Taylor’s disclaimer in the foreword to American Exodus that they “adhere to
the standards of documentary” by including “quotations […that] report what the persons
photographed said, [and] not what we think might be their unspoken thoughts” (6) suggests a
level of self-consciousness and perhaps discomfort about the fact that they are representing a
culture and the plight of a culture of which they are not themselves members. Margaret Bourke-
White and Erskine Caldwell, as well as James Agee and Walker Evans, have all in some way
also confronted this discomfort, with Agee directly accusing Bourke-White of a malicious and
inexcusable level of manipulation while at the same time wrestling with his own participation in
the exploitation he perceives in documenting human tragedy.
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In They Must Be Represented, Paula Rabinowitz identifies the power structures inherent
in documentary. She asserts that, “Voyeurism and its attendant sadism is at the heart of the
documentary narrative, which depends on the power of the gaze to construct meanings for the
writer and the reader of ‘the people’” (51), and she recognizes the precarious and problematic
position of those who enact the “representing” referred to in her title: “Documentary
performance and address is always about crossing boundaries – racial, sexual, class, gender,
regional, temporal –as outsiders to a subculture enter into it, or as insiders from a subculture
project it outward” (9). Although she allows here for the possibility of self-representation in
certain circumstances, the implication for the Southern tenant farmers of Caldwell/Bourke-White
and Evans/Agee’s studies is that they are suffering a violation at the hands of the outsiders
attempting to articulate their experience to a wider audience.
Raboniwitz and Stott are both critical of Bourke-White in particular, taking up the mantle
of outrage expressed by Agee and Evans. Rabinowitz classifies the photographer “as a voyeur,
as a middle-class tourist among the neediest people, sending dispatches back to the comfortable
living rooms of Life magazine’s readers” (69), and Stott maintains that in You Have Seen Their
Faces, “Bourke-White made her subjects’ faces and gestures say what she wanted them to. And
what she wanted them to say is blatant on every page” (220). He roundly castigates her for
negating what little dignity these families have left by laying bare their misery:
Faces of defeat, their eyes wizened with pain – or large, puzzled, dazzled,
plaintive; people at their most abject: a ragged woman photographed on her
rotted mattress, a palsied child, a woman with goiter the size of a grapefruit;
twisted mouths (ten of them), eyes full of tears. These people are bare,
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defenseless before the camera. […] No dignity seems left them: we see their
meager fly-infested meals, their soiled linen […] (220)
The implications of these criticisms are that Bourke-White is a hypocrite, that she is simply
unaware that her role as an outsider looking in creates a power structure in which she determines
how these families are presented and represented (thereby negating the possibility for self-
representation), and that her fault lies in making public what should be the private distress of the
South’s rural poor in a way that is dishonest and manipulated/manipulative.
Of course the irony of the original critique of Bourke-White from Agee and Evans is that
they themselves engage in precisely the same act of presenting to the rest of the country the
“nakedness, disadvantage and humiliation” (Agee and Evans 5) of these same tenant farmers and
families, a fact that Agee articulates himself when he expresses the “fear” and “confusion” with
which he approaches the problem of documenting the plight of the rural South (8). Although
Agee recognizes the camera as “the central instrument of our time” (9), he also recognizes the
damage it can cause and this is what makes him “feel such rage at it misuse” (9). But his self-
reflection does not rescue him or Evans from the same critiques leveled at Bourke-White and
Caldwell. Although Evans and Agee believed that the self-awareness of their presence in their
narrative distinguished them from Caldwell and Bourke-White (Stott 123), the fact of the matter
is that they still produced and published a text that contributed to and in many ways solidified the
image of the denigrated Southern farmer.
Rabinowitz identifies the “twisted pose Agee and Evans must assume within the cotton
culture” (47) in their attempt to document the rural South. She suggests that “Agee tries to
dislodge the meaning and effects of his class and race and gender (many of the book’s subjects
were African-American), desperately trying to communicate through looks and slight gestures
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that he is not like the white Southerner male landowners who represent power and authority for
the poor white and black tenant farmers” (47). But of course, he and Evans do wield
considerable power over these men and women and they are outsiders. Evans must make the
same decisions about what to frame in his images as Bourke-White does, and Agee, who is the
primary voice in the text, does ventriloquize the men, women, and children represented in
Evans’s images by not letting them speak for themselves. When he writes that “Years ago the
Ricketts were, relatively speaking, almost prosperous. Besides their cotton farming they had ten
cows and sold the milk, and they lived near a good stream and had all the fish they wanted”
(105), one cannot help but hear the bourgeois undertones of his calculation of their “relative’
wealth. And his initial description of the “ignorant and helpless rural family” (5) in the Preamble
suggests a level of socioeconomic and cultural detachment that he and Evans simply cannot wish
away. Whatever their intentions might be in documenting the lives of these families, however
they feel they might be different from Bourke-White and Caldwell, they still exist as outsiders.
As such, they impede the opportunity for self-representation that this documentary project might
otherwise offer, a charge that can be fairly leveled at most of the American documentary texts
published in the early decades of the twentieth century. Brenner, however, offers what I would
argue is an example of documentary that is both invested in self-representation and in ideas of
transnationality.
Brenner’s Transnational Perspective
Anita Brenner, a Mexican-born Jew who self-identified as Mexican, American, and
Jewish offers an interesting counterpoint to figures such as Agee, Evans, Bourke-White, and
Caldwell. Her documentary text, The Wind That Swept Mexico, chronicles the Mexican
Revolution through photographs and written text, and it challenges notions about American
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documentary in important ways. As a Mexican-American presenting the Mexican Revolution to
a largely American audience, she engages in a level of self-representation that is lacking in the
monographs of her better-known counterparts. And the subject matter of her text suggests that
American documentary writers were aware of and concerned with issues that extended beyond
the plight of the Southern tenant farmer. Brenner represents a key transnational voice in
American documentary, and The Wind That Swept Mexico, although often ignored in favor of her
better-known texts, represents an important transnational intervention. Ultimately, Brenner’s
text reminds us that documentary was a transnational/international genre and that American
documentarians had a keen eye turned towards Mexico.
Brenner was born in 1905 in Aguascalientes, Mexico, to Latvian Jewish parents who had
moved from Chicago to Mexico shortly after they married. But, as Brenner’s daughter Susannah
Glusker notes in her biography of her mother, the family was forced to leave Mexico on several
occasions as the Mexican Revolution became increasingly violent (26). The Brenners often
returned to Aguascalientes, only to be forced out by the Revolution again and again, and their
final departure occurred in 1916, as the family “drove through town to the railroad station
waving a large German Imperial flag, which no one recognized. It served as a disguise,
identifying them as something other than U.S. citizens” (26). But Brenner loved Mexico and
was, it seemed, destined to return. In 1923, after spending the intervening years in San Antonio,
Texas, Brenner moved back to Mexico at the age of eighteen to attend university. Through a
series of fortunate contacts and meetings, Brenner gained quick “entrée to the world of writers,
artists, and intellectuals” (33), including Carleton Beals, a figure with whom she would enjoy a
lasting professional and personal relationship. In fact, “Beals was the first writer to read her
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work and help her publish” (40), and he would remain an influential presence throughout her
adult life.
In time, Brenner created her own diverse intellectual and artistic circle and she became a
key figure in the movement to counteract negative representations of Mexico in the United
States. Rivera, Orozco, and Siquieros were all close acquaintances, as were photographers Tina
Modotti and Edward Weston. Brenner helped Manuel Gamio translate his sociological work into
English, and she enjoyed close relationships with artists Jean Charlot and Rufino Tamayo. She
was also instrumental in securing political asylum in Mexico for Leon Trotsky. Although
Brenner never proclaimed herself a member of the Communist party, either in Mexico or in the
United States, her leftist politics emerged in large part from her concern for the politically and
economically exploited Mexicans and Americans she encountered.
In 1927, she returned to the United States to study anthropology at Columbia University,
where she became a devoted follower of and friend to her mentor Franz Boas. She received her
Ph.D. in 1930, and eventually became one of the “hordes of writers and intellectuals […]
travel[ing] around the United States in the 1930’s” (Stott 241). She described this time in her life
as one in which she learned by listening:
“there were quiet a lot of us riding around the country at about the same time, in
search of the same information. We pulled in and out of industrial centers, spent
many days in small towns, hung around CCC camps and other federal projects,
stared appalled at shanty settlements and cabin villages of our pariahs – Negroes,
Mexicans, poor whites . . . picked up all sorts of people constantly, and listened
and listened and listened” (qtd. in Stott 241).
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Brenner’s use of the word “our” to describe the discarded outcasts in the United States is a
significant statement about her own identity. Glusker writers that, “Anita was both a Mexican
and American citizen during her lifetime, legally and figuratively. She was born a Mexican and
died a Mexican” (16). But her willingness to include herself in the possessive “our” suggests
that she also viewed herself as distinctly American. The disenfranchised American “pariahs” she
mentions are as much a part of her identity as are the disenfranchised Mexicans she highlights in
The Wind That Swept Mexico. She was truly a child of Mexico and of America; as such, she was
uniquely equipped to comment on the Mexican Revolution and on the impact it would have on
the United States. Carlos Monsivais suggests that Brenner’s myriad cultural and ethnic identities
“allowed her to accept from within and from without the complexity of what is Mexican” (xiv),
and her hybrid cultural identity also created for her a unique space in which she could present
that understanding to an English-speaking audience.
Brenner was a strong proponent of socially-responsible art and artists. She did not
believe that art existed for purely aesthetic purposes, and she “agreed with those who felt that art
was part of social expression” (176). Her artistic views are especially relevant when considering
The Wind That Swept Mexico as a documentary text. Rabinowitz maintains that, “Documentary
forms often claim to occupy the neutral position of document. However, [they are ultimately
defined] by insisting on advocacy rather than objectivity” (7). Brenner’s characterization of The
Wind That Swept Mexico as a “history of the Mexican Revolution” (this is the book’s subtitle),
suggests a certain degree of impartiality, suggests that his text merely chronicles the details of
the Revolution in an attempt to remember them. But of course, the idea of “history” comes with
its own set of values and biases. In discussing the links between history and memory, Ramón
Saldívar writes that, “History as an act of remembrance is thus not obviously an objective reality;
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it is also a performance. History is not the official documents and records of the deeds of an age
only; it is also the emplotment of those deeds as story in official and unofficial forms, conveying
the conscious and unconscious desires, hopes, prejudices of the story’s emplotter” (Borderlands
12). And Brenner makes very clear in the opening lines of her text that her hopes involve the
United States recognizing the importance of Mexico as a political, cultural, and economic ally.
What she has created in The Wind That Swept Mexico is what Stott characterizes as the “social
documentary” – documentary that “shows man at grips with conditions neither permanent nor
necessary, conditions of a certain time and place” (20). He asserts that the purview of social
documentary is “man-made phenomena” (20) with all of the possibilities for corruption,
exploitation, and destruction that that phenomena implies. Social documentary, he declares, is
acutely concerned with “social improvement” and with “the things to be corrected” (21). It does
not merely document, then; it employs documents in the spirit of advocacy, and this is as true for
Brenner’s account of the Mexican Revolution as it is for Agee and Evan’s and Bourke-White and
Caldwell’s accounts of the Depression-era plight of the southern United States.

The Wind That Swept Mexico
Brenner wrote The Wind That Swept Mexico over a period of nine years (from 1934 to
1943), and “the groundwork was done in the thirties, especially in 1934, in a series of articles
published in the New York Post and several radio broadcasts on WEVD” (Glusker 201). Her
work on the book coincided with her travels throughout the United States during the Great
Depression and reflects an aesthetic similar to You Have Seen Their Faces and Let Us Now
Praise Famous Men. Comprised of Brenner’s written text and nearly two hundred photographs,
the book chronicles the history of the Mexican Revolution from the days of the Porfirio Díaz up
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to 1942 when General Manuel Ávila Camacho was Mexico’s president. Published in 1943,
Brenner’s book emerged in the midst of World War II and was the product of layers of historical
and cultural concerns. Brenner was deeply concerned that “Mexico […] could become
embroiled in a situation like the Spanish Civil War” (202) and she worried about what the
implications were for the United States if this conflict actually erupted in Mexico and if a
“Mexican ‘Franco’” (Brenner qtd. in Glusker 205) destroyed the political and economic
relationship between the U.S. and Mexico. She was also profoundly impacted by the poverty
and exploitation she witnessed in the United States during the Depression and in Mexico during
the Revolution. Her sympathies lied with the destitute and discarded laborers, the working class,
the agricultural workers who were forced to till wealthy landowners’ soil without any hope of
possession for themselves. And finally, she was certainly concerned about World War II and the
need of the United States to recognize Mexico as a powerful ally. The Wind That Swept Mexico
reflects Brenner’s transnational concerns as a Mexican and as an American, and it strongly
advocates for a change in how the United States viewed Mexico. It also offers a unique
expansion of the subject matter of American documentary texts. It is as much about economic
exploitation as it is about the Revolution, as much about the Spanish Civil War as it is about the
Great Depression, as much about World War II as it is about U.S./Mexico relations. It is a truly
transnational documentary text from an author who had genuine ties to the communities about
which she was reporting.
The first line of The Wind That Swept Mexico reveals much about both Brenner’s cultural
identification and about her intended audience. She warns Americans in the United States that
Mexico can no longer be relegated to the periphery of transnational concerns, and she does so
while also clearly identifying herself as American: “We are not safe in the United States, now,
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and henceforth without taking Mexico into account; nor is Mexico safe disregarding us. This is
something that Mexicans have long known, with dread, but that few Americans have had to look
at” (Brenner 3). As she outlines the geographic and economic ties that exist between the two
countries, she also argues for Mexico’s influence on the world stage and suggests that Mexico
offers a glimpse into how the rest of Latin America regarded the United States: “What the
Mexican people think and feel about us is a sort of lens through which the rest of Latin America
regards us. For them Mexico is a central stage on which they see their own struggles going
forward. Our relations with Mexico are seen as a test of our intentions toward other peoples of
this continent. Thus Mexico connects or disconnects inter-American solidarity” (4). Brenner’s
repeated use of “we” and “our” when discussing the United States clearly articulates her
“American” identity, but in describing U.S./Mexico relations as “inter-American,” she also
creates an expanded notion of “America” that allows for her Mexican identity to be part of this
configuration. Her concerns transcend the boundary between America and Mexico, as does her
own cultural identity. When Brenner draws parallels between the Mexican Revolution and the
political climate within the United States, she is careful to employ the term “American” to
identify the peoples of both countries:
The story of the Mexican Revolution throws up, violently, the issues being fought
inside each land, within the war. It puts questions to us our government will have
to meet, and is already in the midst of; questions which the American people
cannot leave safely to deals and power-barters and accident and intrigue. Policies
shaped for export have their internal consequences. For we are not safe either
from the inner struggles tearing other peoples. What led to the Mexican
Revolution, economically, is happening to us now. The Wind That Swept Mexico
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is the story of what followed. It is the most dramatic experience lived by an
American people [my emphasis] of our time. (5-6).
Brenner draws a distinct connection between the deplorable economic conditions in Mexico in
the early decade of the twentieth century (conditions that eventually expressed themselves
through revolutionary activity) to those that existed in the United States during the Great
Depression, and she is deliberate in characterizing those conditions and the people they impacted
as “American.” And because she herself identifies as the transnational American she creates in
the early pages of The Wind That Swept Mexico, the history she embarks on in some ways offers
an antidote to the issues of self-representation that are so often raised in discussions about Let Us
Now Praise Famous Men and You Have Seen Their Faces.
If we recall Stott’s assertion that social documentary subverts its own notions of
neutrality, we can quickly recognize this tendency in Brenner’s book. The title of her first
chapter about Porfirio Díaz, “The Fall of a Dictator,” leaves little room to question her views of
the Mexican president. She describes him as a “Strong Man of the Americas” and suggests that
“Each time he reassumed his dictatorial position the Kaiser, the Mikado, all important potentates
flashed messages of joy” (7). Revealing her sardonic wit, Brenner sarcastically describes Diaz’s
aversion to democracy by describing the majority of Mexico’s population, “more than three-
fourths […] nearly pure Indian,” as “subhuman, degenerate, apathetic, irresponsible, lazy
treacherous, superstitious – destined to be a slave race” (10). Operating as the voice of Díaz
(with the clear intent of deriding the elitist, authoritarian tendencies he barely tried to conceal)
she declares: “But in a land where not even fifteen percent could read, how absurd to spend
money on open elections!” (10). “No,” she ironically declares – “the government must be an
aristocracy, an aristocracy of brains, technicians, wise and upright elders, scientists” (10). And if
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the common Mexican disagreed with these views, Diaz had “organizations [in place that] worked
smoothly toward the disappearance of malcontents and people suspected of dangerous thoughts.
The methods: pan – a job, a few pesos, social flatteries; pulo – blackmail; and the final
alternative of the ley fuga (fugitive law) – ‘shot while attempting to escape’” (10).
Brenner offers a series of striking photographs that illustrate the stark contrast between
Diaz and his aristocracy and the conditions that existed for most of the citizens of Mexico.
Figure 3.4 is an official photograph of Díaz that presents the Strong Man in all his military glory.
His lavish military uniform, covered in medals and what appear to be gold sashes, projects the
image of Mexican might and prosperity that was the cornerstone of his campaign to increase
foreign investment in Mexico. Although his white hair and mustache reflect his age, they do not
detract from the steady strength he projects. His steely gaze suggests that he is prepared to
squash dissent and that he has the security of his country firmly under control. But as Brenner
illustrates in the Figure 3.5, this security exists for a precious few of Mexico’s people.
The image of a poverty-stricken woman and child reveals the conditions that existed for
most of Mexico and recall Bourke-White’s and Evans’s photographers of southern tenant
farmers. The woman’s weathered skin and rough hands suggest a life of hard labor, and the fact
that her face is concealed by her hat implies that she is one of the nameless, faceless, and
voiceless masses. The young boy beside her wears no shoes and stands amongst dirt. Both his
clothes and hers are tattered, dirty, utilitarian. They feature none of the decoration we see on
Díaz, the cooking pan in the woman’s hand the only “accessory” in this shot. And as Brenner’s
caption reveals, these are some of the “90 % of the population [who enjoyed] the blessings of
poverty.” These are the conditions that Brenner recognizes as the ammunition for the Mexican
Revolution, and they are strikingly similar to those in the United States during the Depression.
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We should be warned, this photograph suggests, about allowing such poverty to proliferate in the
U.S.

Figure 3.4 Photograph #1 from Brenner’s The Wind That Swept Mexico

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Figure 3.5 Photograph #15 from Brenner’s The Wind That Swept Mexico

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However, Brenner does not reserve her criticism for Díaz alone. An important element of
the transnational voice in this text is her willingness to cast a critical eye on the United States and
its economic involvement in Mexico, and she charges both nations with their complicity in
widening the socio-economic divide. Brenner notes that during the Pofiriato “foreign investors
[…] were cherished” and enjoyed the benefits of “tax-free concessions for ample years; customs-
free machinery and supplies, subsidies, right of way in the courts, useful laws, […] and above all
the essential, the quintessential guarantee, cheap and docile labor” (15). She refigures the
“American invasion” of Mexico along industrialized economic lines when she asserts that “the
invasion dreams of the nineteenth century were no longer necessary, for American industrial and
agricultural enterprises were spread peacefully over the whole earth and ran deep southward
along both coasts” (16-17). The transnational history of imperialism between the U.S. and
Mexico becomes one reconfigured through the lens of modern industry, and Brenner writes that
during Díaz’s presidency, American companies “dominated the mines, holding over ninety
percent of Mexico’s most important industry” (17). Of course, American companies (such as
Guggenheim’s U.S. Smelting) depended on the “cheap and docile labor” of Mexicans and
Indians, who became increasingly poverty stricken while American investors and the Mexican
upper class became ever wealthier. Skilled Mexican workers were rendered obsolete and
Mexican laborers faced intense discrimination because they were Mexican. Brenner notes that it
was common practice for Mexicans within Mexico to receive lower wages from American
companies since “Mexican labor was considered inferior, biologically” (26). She writes that,
“though a Mexican might learn from Americans how to run a locomotive or handle smelting or
oil machinery, he could never hope for more than a semi-skilled position, because of the fact that
he was Mexican” (26). Brenner makes clear that the transnational economic relationship
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between the two nations was one that benefitted a select few, and while some of this rarified
group were Mexicans (roughly three percent), “the bulk was held by less than one percent; and
most of that was in absentee foreign hands” (24). Industrialization was not the panacea it had
once appeared to be, at least for the majority of Mexicans, and Brenner clearly understood this as
a primary factor in the eventual uprising against the Mexican government:
The economic pump was making wealth flow outward, leaving behind a sediment
only; and what came in, to multiply, again flowed outward. The dangerously
unbalanced distribution of means to live and produce – which wherever it occurs
has always led to oppression and social explosion – had again for at least ninety-
five per cent of the people of Mexico an extra taste of wormwood. There was this
byword: “Mexico – mother of foreigners, stepmother of Mexicans.” (24)
Such imbalance and exploitation was bound to breed dissent. The Mexican “stepchildren” were,
according to Brenner, primed to “explode,” and she includes clear images of that explosion as
well as the disturbing violence that emerged as a result of the governmental desire to stamp out
those dissenting voices.
The pile of bodies in Figure 3.6, victims of Díaz’s methods of law enforcement, offers a
striking visual articulation of the path Brenner believes the U.S. could be headed down. The
men have no shoes to cover their feet; they are piled in the dirt and discarded as if they were
animals. Their faceless corpses have been left in the open, as if to warn others who might
consider challenging Díaz’s power. Their clothing reveals them to be Mexican peasants, and
Brenner views their willingness to question the absolute “right” with which Diaz rules as the sign
of a “rising […] wind” in Mexico.” The accompanying caption describes:
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the gathering of the little bands [of armed citizens as] the beginning of the great
storm that was about to sweep Mexico. The Diaz regime […] had crushed the
hopes of so many for so long that, as the regime began to totter, thousands, rich

Figure 3.6 Photograph #58 from Brenner’s The Wind That Swept Mexico
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and poor, sniffed the wind and looked about them. Who would lead? Which way
to success? Some wanted a full meal, some a new pair of pants; some wanted
only a gun to blow to pieces a hated master. The ominous rumbling increased.
There were a series of small risings in the towns, mercilessly suppressed.
Although small chinks in the armor of Díaz’s power began to emerge in the early 1900’s as the
Mexican majority started to actively question and resist economic disparity, Díaz was certainly
not going to relinquish this power willingly. As the chasm between the haves and the have-nots
increased, so too did his willingness to employ outright violence and terror. Such violence was
sure to increase attempts to subvert his power, as the Revolution shows us. But we must also
consider the historical moment in which Brenner was writing The Wind That Swept Mexico. She
was concerned that these same conditions still existed in Mexico and might lead to a civil war,
and she was intimately familiar with the degree to which these conditions existed in the United
States. Her impulse to document the Revolution and to explain the social/economic/political
phenomena that fomented the uprising extends beyond this specific moment in Mexico and
includes concerns about the U.S. during the Depression and, eventually, during World War II.
Although about the Mexican Revolution, Brenner’s text is about the United States as well as it
documents conditions that she sees being replicated in the U.S. As she traveled the United States
with the WPA, Brenner witnessed the same exploited and disenfranchised laborers that she
discusses in The Wind That Swept Mexico, and she understands that the same economic
conditions that existed in Mexico also existed in the U.S., leading to a flow of ideas that she
positions as an important transnational exchange between the countries. She notes that as
Mexican workers returned to Mexico after laboring in the United States, “they were startled by
what they had seen” and “they got behind union drives, demanding that Mexicans receive in
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Mexico the same pay and opportunities as foreigners” (28). Bolstered by the union activity they
witnessed in the United States, Mexican workers carried home with them the knowledge that
labor and economic disparities also existed in the United States and returned to Mexico with the
desire to confront those disparities, and Brenner offers this as an important link between the two
nations. Industrialization in the early years of the twentieth century widened the gap between the
small upper classes and the rest of the population in both countries, and Brenner’s text makes
clear the connections between the economic and social climates in Mexico and in the United
States. As Brenner outlines these connections in broad terms in the text’s opening pages, she
reminds us that Mexico’s “story is the closest to us [the United States] of the winds sweeping the
world” (6), and she knows firsthand how violent and destructive those winds can be, even if they
are ultimately necessary in combatting inequality.
While her castigation of the agents of economic exploitation would seem to imply
Brenner’s antipathy towards modernization, such was not the case. She did recognize that both
Mexico and the United States were entering an era of modern industry, and she comments on the
changing attitudes toward modernization in Mexico as power shifted away from Díaz. As
Brenner moves through the Revolution, she traces the shift of power from Díaz to Madero to
Huerta to Carranza to Obregón, noting that while each leader declares the Revolution “over,” the
conditions that led to the Revolution never really disappeared. It is not until Obregón comes to
power in the early 1920’s that, “There was a lift, a stirring feeling in Mexico” (62). Obregón, it
seems, imbued in the Mexican people a sense of hope and idealism. She notes that, “Young
people saw their lives ahead through open doors” (62), and that as Mexican peasants were
granted land rights they begin to look at modernization with favorable eyes. Brenner notes that
military “chiefs had chucked their uniforms and were embracing mechanization and struggling
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through pages on crop improvement and pest control, expecting with fierce pride to make the
land bear as it had never borne before” (63). The literal and symbolic landscape had changed,
and now “Poets wrote lyrics about high-tension cables. Peasants hung necklaces of flowers on
tractors and invented Indian nicknames for steam shovels” (62). The advent of Obregón’s
presidency enacted a momentary but noticeable shift, and Brenner comments on this shift
through the inclusion of agricultural images that reveal the benefits of modernization.

Figure 3.7 Photograph #121 from Brenner’s The Wind That Swept Mexico
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As Figure 3.7 shows, the changes in the Mexican landscape were subtle but important.
The image implies the introduction of irrigation to land that would now be “divided up at last”
(as the caption reads), and it suggests a literal and figurative abundance that had long been
offered to a rarified circle of political leaders but would be accessible to the majority now that
land was being redistributed. Brenner describes distribution days as reminiscent of a “solemn
ritual” (68). She notes that:
The peasants gazed at the blueprints long and incredulously, letting happiness
show only in their eyes. They went through the proceedings with religious
dignity […]. The agrarian engineer, officiating, took on the aura of respect up to
now reserved for priests. And as more and more peasants grew to know the word
ingenerio (engineer) in terms of distributions, irrigation projects, crop knowledge,
pest control, their distrust receded and they said it deferentially, like a title of
honor. (69)
Mexican agriculture was on the precipice of modernization, a shift that John Britton suggests is
one Brenner favored. He maintains that she recognized “the need to bring the country into the
modern world” (152), and I would add to this assertion the idea that Brenner also recognized the
need to balance Mexico’s present culture with the modernization toward which it was headed, a
perspective she offers in Figure 3.8 – a photograph of a peasant using a “plow with steel points”
as opposed to “only wooden plows.”
Although the tools in this image still appear rather rudimentary (there are no tractors, for
example), the peasant’s job has been made easier by the steel of the plow. He must still follow
behind a team of horses who provide the power, but the shift from wood to steel implies a certain
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degree of “progress” that came on the heels of Obregon’s rise to power. The photograph also
implies that a balance between Mexican agriculture as it has been and as it will be can be

Figure 3.8 Photograph #163 from Brenner’s The Wind That Swept Mexico

achieved. The peasant has not been replaced by mechanized labor (at least not at this point), but
his work is impacted by the presence of steel. He still works the land, but he does so with
modernized tools. This photograph presents a striking image of Mexico as it teeters between two
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epochs, and it reveals much about Brenner’s cultural perspective. As a Mexican-American who
spent her life traveling in and between both countries, she was acutely familiar with and
concerned about the workers in both Mexico and the U.S. This photograph could just as easily
be one of a Southern sharecropper plowing land in Georgia or Alabama, and the image along
with its caption exemplifies the ways in which Brenner adapted documentary techniques to
express her transnational concerns.
Although Obregón’s presidency fostered a sense of hope in Mexico, as with most of
Mexico’s presidents during the Revolution years his time in office was short-lived. Just after
being re-elected, Obregón was killed and was eventually succeeded by Plutarco Calles. Brenner
notes that Calles declared that “the revolution was achieved” and that, “A new era was dawning”
(86). He “went ahead full blast” with the “prosperity program – salvation through capitalism”
(87). According to Brenner, “Industrialization sped and business flourished, and prices climbed,
and climbed” (87). Mexico was, according to Calles, destined to be rescued by the benefits of
capitalism and industry.
Calles built roads and constructed dams, such as the massive Calles Dam pictured In
Figure 3.9. Mexico was, it seemed, about to enter its most prosperous period in decades. But the
country would soon experience the devastating economic downturn affecting the rest of the
world. Brenner writes that, “the full effects of the world depression struck Mexico belatedly in
1932, choking exports. Jobs and wages dropped, there were no takers for peasant products, and
there were some currency panics and runs for metallic coin on the national bank” (87). And just
as it was in the United States, the working class endured the very worst of the Depression.
Brenner outlines a governmental study of “wages and living standards” whose “results [were]
embodied in a minimum wage” (87). But this wage fell far from being able to sustain a basic
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level of survival: “For the peasants, the list of essentials to life, beginning with eighteen hundred
calories and four vitamins, and including a pair of blankets and perhaps one medical visit a year,
added up, against what they had, to sheer fantasy” (87). Mexican peasants were forced to endure
living conditions that sound strikingly similar to those of the southern tenant farmers in the

Figure 3.9 Photograph #129 from Brenner’s The Wind That Swept Mexico
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Figure 3.10 Photograph #123 from Brenner’s The Wind That Swept Mexico

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United States, and like the tenant farmers, Mexican peasants were surrounded by cruel reminders
of class and economic distinctions. As Brenner notes, “Few of them had to travel far to see the
landed and cattled benefits of revolution, for the chiefs” (88). Just as southern tenant farmers
faced consistent reminders that the land they worked was not their own, so too did Mexican
peasants face the disparities that existed between the progress that was supposed to “save” them
and the realities of that progress as it related to their lived experiences.
In contrast to the images of prosperity and industry attached to Calles, the average
Mexican still had to endure life without basics such as clean, running water, as exemplified in
Figure 3.10. The irony cannot be ignored here. As the Calles Dam shored up massive stores of
water, Mexican villagers had to wait in line to get what little water they could from a shared
spigot. When all was said and done, little was left for the Mexican peasant. No amount of
industrialization and modernization could change the fact that most of Mexico still lived in abject
poverty. Industrialization, it seemed, did more harm than good in the early years of the twentieth
century, just as it did for the rural south in the United States.
Glusker writes that Brenner “presented the Mexican Revolution as an ongoing vigorous
drive. The Wind is not limited to the period of armed struggle between 1910 and 1920; it carries
the reader through 1942, unraveling forces and outcomes” (208). I would add to this that
Brenner also carries the reader beyond Mexico, as she herself clearly states in the final lines of
the book. Repeating her early warnings that the United States must not ignore the conditions
within its own borders or the impact it has on the rest of “America,” Brenner carefully delineates
the stance the United States must adopt:
Our standing, influence toward the kind of world we want to live in, and even our
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safety, depend on how many of us clearly grasp the question put in the Mexican
story, and how honestly we apply its meaning. In the history of the American
Revolution, there was a flag, much like the Mexican flag, with a serpent on it, and
four living words that tell the record of both peoples: Don’t Tread on Me” (106).
Mexico, she warns, is not a nation to be ignored. As the country that “holds the center of the
Latin American stage” (106), it is a powerful ally whose international influence should not be
minimized. From a decidedly transnational perspective, she asserts that, “Independence,
complete isolation of any country’s affairs from all others, is now recognizably everywhere a
fiction” (106), and as such it is imperative that the United States include Mexico in its
conception of “America.” But there is another message to be located in Mexico’s Revolutionary
history. The economic conditions that created the fervor for Revolution are those that existed in
the United States in the 1930’s, and Brenner offers the Mexican Revolution as a lens through
which we might understand the impact of these conditions. She offers a truly transnational
understanding of “America” in the early twentieth century through a truly transnational voice.
Although she positions herself as an American of the United States, she was also clearly
Mexican and as such she offers us a documentary text that extends beyond the borders of the
American south in an act of self-representation that is quite anomalous in American
documentary. I would argue that Brenner was not an outsider looking in, not a voyeuristic
presence representing and speaking for a culture of which she was not a part. She combats some
of the difficulties associated with representation in American documentary as she aligns herself
with both Mexico and the United States, as she declares herself to be both Mexican and
American. And as Brenner employs documentary techniques for the purposes of a transnational
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argument, she exemplifies the ways in which U.S. documentary could and was being adapted to
address interests in Mexico.

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Chapter 4

Mexican-American Self-Representation in Film

“It is amazing, how their minds leap ahead. It is a quality we lack, for we live in the past and
the present and see the future with our emotions only.”

When wealthy Californio landowner Don Gabriel del Lago utters this statement in Jovita
González and Eve Raleigh’s Caballero, he encapsulates a stereotype that plagued Mexicans and
Mexican-Americans well into the twentieth century. The idea that Mexicans and, by extension,
Mexican-Americans, were inherently rooted in the past and that they consequently fostered an
incessant need to always “look back” manifested in a multitude of cultural texts, including film.
As the United States emerged from the 1930’s and as film became a more popular and accessible
form of entertainment, the stereotypes about Mexicans and Mexican-Americans circulating in
literature and other artistic representations gained traction in film. And as Mexican-Americans
continued to combat these stereotypes through artistic self-representation, film proved to be a
rich battle ground for the impulse to document Mexican-American cultural identity. This chapter
focuses on two films, The Forgotten Village (1941) and Salt of the Earth (1954), as emblematic
of the factions in this cultural battle. The former in many ways perpetuates stereotypes about
“backward” Mexicans by focusing on a Mexican border village’s unwillingness to accept
modern technology into its fold. Conversely, the latter, which tells the story of Mexican-
American miners in New Mexico, makes an important statement about Mexican-American
cultural identity and about how those who self-identify as such reflect a desire to “look forward”
that impacts everything from labor practices to what it means to be “American.” Additionally,
the stories surrounding the production of each of these films, from conception to release, warrant
attention for the conversation about self-representation they themselves invite.
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In The Enormous Vogue of Things Mexican, Helen Delpar’s study of the early twentieth-
century cultural exchange between Mexico and the United States, Delpar comments on the
infrequency with which films with “Mexican subjects” were being produced. From 1921-1925,
a total of eighty such films were produced, but that number dropped drastically from 1926-1930
to a total of fifty-five films (171). She suggests that the negative portrayal of Mexicans in
American films in many ways accounts for this dearth of Mexican characters and subjects:
American motion pictures usually portrayed Mexican characters much as they
were depicted in theatrical productions, the Mexican “greaser” being a popular
villain among early scenario writers. Because these offensive portrayals
provoked a strong reaction from the Mexican government in the early 1920’s,
American filmmakers shunned Mexican characters and settings in the mid- and
late 1920’s. (169)
The strong reaction Delpar mentions refers to a February 1922 ban enacted by the Mexican
government on “films derogatory to Mexico” as well as the move to “forbid the entry of all other
pictures made or distributed by the offending company” (170).
Although Will Hays, the head of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of
America (MPPDA), passed a resolution that attempted to ameliorate the conditions that so
angered the Mexican government by criticizing filmmakers who perpetuated negative
stereotypes of Mexicans, “the resolution failed to placate the Mexican government, which
proceeded to ban the entry of Famous Player – Lasky and Metro pictures” (170). Recognizing
that the success of Hollywood films depended on reaching as large an audience as possible, Hays
continued to negotiate with Mexican officials by sending an emissary to Mexico. The result of
these negotiations was an agreement reached in November 1922 in which “the MPPDA pledged
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that it would avoid the production of films that might be offensive to Mexico, [… and that], in
return the government [would lift] the bans on the pictures of Famous Players, Metro, and other
companies affiliated with the MPPDA” (170). As part of the terms of this agreement, “a list of
fourteen films objectionable to Mexico was prepared” (170) including a film entitled I Can
Explain, which starred Tina Modotti and was likely deemed unfavorable because of the inclusion
of a Mexican outlaw character named “El Pavor” (170). Mexico continued to ban some films
after the 1922 agreement “because of derogatory portrayals of Mexico and its people” (171), one
of which was the 1923 film The Broken Wing (170), a film about an American pilot who crashes
on the Mexican border, falls in love with a Mexican woman, and outwits her Mexican fiancé.
When silent movies gave way to sound, new concerns arose in both countries – Mexico worried
“that the exhibition of films spoken in English would adversely affect the national language and
culture [which in turn] aroused fears among American companies that the Mexican government
would impede the showing of English-language films” (172). But it seems that by 1928, the
“practice of imposing official bans on offensive films and the companies that produced them had
fallen into abeyance” (172), and with a July 1929 promise from Mexican ambassador Manuel
Téllez that Mexico had no intention of limiting English-language films in Mexico, “by 1930
American moviemakers, presumably less fearful of bans, were more willing to make films with
Mexican characters and settings” (172). Thus, the door was open for an increase in Mexican
characters and subjects in American films, but rather than avoiding stereotypes altogether,
filmmakers often just shifted the stereotypes presented in their films.
In the introduction to The Chicano/Hispanic Image in American Film, Frank Javier
Garcia Berumen maintains that the history of American film in the first half of the twentieth
century as it relates to people of color is one marked by discrimination and a degree of historical
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erasure: “If art reflects life, then the American film reflected the prevailing images of people of
color within the context of the times, periodically racist and frequently stereotypical. Thus, the
Hispanic was inevitably portrayed as lazy, unintelligent, greasy, criminal, and ‘foreign.’ Their
contributions culturally, economically, and historically were never properly documented or
appreciated” (xiii). Because Mexicans and Mexican-Americans had little chance for self-
representation in American film, the images disseminated by filmmakers both perpetuated racist
stereotypes and occluded Mexican-American cultural identity as a viable contributor to
American culture.
Charles Ramírez Berg further classifies these racist stereotypes as falling into six
categories: “el bandido,” “the harlot,” “the male buffoon,” “the female clown,” “the Latin
lover,” and “the dark lady” (68-76). What these stereotypes all have in common, and the ways in
which they relate to the two films discussed in this chapter, is a degree of ethnic/cultural
essentialism that denigrates Mexican-Americans to the level of mere caricature. Rather than
accounting for the complexities of Mexican-American cultural identity, the stereotypes presented
to American audiences the kind of one-dimensional characters that Mexican-American writers,
artists, journalists, photographers, and sociologists wanted to combat in their own work. And
while the characters in The Forgotten Village actually do not fall into one of Berg’s six
categories, they do contribute to an equally damaging stereotype, that of Mexicans as innately
backward-thinking people. The film, written by John Steinbeck and directed by Herbert Kline,
offers little in the way of self-representation, and because it is set in Mexico and focuses on
Mexican characters, it offers an important counterpoint to the Salt of the Earth.
Steinbeck’s film Viva Zapata is perhaps his best known foray into film, but 1941’s The
Forgotten Village was his first movie script, and while the latter receives little critical attention, I
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believe it serves as an important example of the images of Mexicans that were being cultivated
by American filmmakers. The movie was filmed in the small village of Santiago, Mexico, and
features actual villagers as well as doctors and nurses from Mexico City. Steinbeck published
the script, accompanied by still shots from the film, when the film was released, and despite the
use of non-actors, his preface to this text reveals the degree to which the “Mexican subjects” of
the film (to borrow Delpar’s term), were denied the opportunity for self-representation.
The film was billed as a documentary, and Steinbeck engages in the same justification of
his methods that Agee, Evans, and Lange were so careful to include in their documentary texts.
He begins by outlining the “many problems” he and his crew encountered, the most pressing
being the “generalized method” that most documentary films use to present their subjects.
Steinbeck found the practice of “showing a condition or an event as it affects a group of people”
to be ineffective, and he maintains that, “It means very little [to an audience] to know that a
million Chinese are starving unless you know one Chinese who is starving” (Steinbeck). In
order to elicit a more “personalized reaction” from his audience, Steinbeck chose to focus on a
single family as a way to comment on the experiences of an entire village and, essentially, an
entire culture:
We wished our audience to know this family very well, and incidentally, to like it,
as we did. Then, from association with this little personalized group, the larger
conclusion concerning the group could be drawn with something like
participation. Birth and death, joy and sorrow, are constants, experiences
common to the whole species. If one participates first in these constants, one is
able to go from them to variables of customs, practices, mores, taboos, and
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foreign social patterns. That, at any rate, was our theory and the pattern in which
we worked.
Although we can recognize in this statement a desire to be inclusive and in some ways
egalitarian, Steinbeck engages in problematic racial and cultural essentialism by allowing for a
single family to serve as symbols of an entire culture. From a filmmaker’s viewpoint, perhaps
this strategy is more effective in terms of connecting to one’s audience, but as a cultural text
Steinbeck’s film stumbles into the same predicament that plagued American documentarians
who focused on the American south during the Depression. By focusing on a small group as a
way to comment on the tendencies of an entire culture, Steinbeck cannot help but to generalize
Mexicans and to deny the complexities and differences that individuate any one person. Just as a
single sharecropper family became the symbol for the effects of agricultural industrialization,
exploitative sharecropping practices, and the ravages of the Great Depression, so too does the
single Mexican family come to symbolize a Mexican culture rooted firmly in the past. And we
can recognize in Steinbeck’s opening statements about the film a recognition of his position as
an outsider looking in. When he declares that he and his fellow filmmakers “did not editorialize,
attack, or defend anything,” and that “[they] put on film what [they] found, only arranging it to
make a coherent story,” we are reminded of the rather defensive stance Agee and Evans, and
Lange to a degree, adopt with respect to their own documentary texts. Steinbeck is not a
member of the group he presents in this film. He is quite literally a foreigner telling a story that
is not his (despite his statements otherwise), and as such the film engages in the same
ventriloquism of which Agee, Evans, and Lange are often accused. And Steinbeck clearly finds
it necessary to proclaim his neutrality as a way of combatting this criticism. However, despite
Steinbeck’s protestations, I would argue that The Forgotten Village actively editorializes when it
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denies its subjects the possibility for self-representation in everything from the choice of narrator
to the film’s “message” about modernization.
Representation is an issue about which Steinbeck seems acutely aware of and concerned
about in his preface to the published script. He states that, “The most difficult problem of all was
the method of telling the story to an American audience.” He outlines the difficulties associated
with sound in the film; everything from a lack of sound equipment to the problems associated
with dialogue stemming from the villagers’ use of “the Indian language of their ancestors”
negatively impacted the storytelling methods available to the filmmakers. Because of these
difficulties, Steinbeck decided that, “The usual narrative method did not seem quite adequate,”
so he decided to include a narrator (or what he terms “the old story-teller”). This story-teller
would serve as “a voice which interpolated dialogue without trying to imitate it, a very quiet
voice to carry the story only when the picture and the music could not carry it; and, above all, a
spoken story so natural and unobtrusive that an audience would not even be conscious of it.” But
rather than choose a Mexican narrator, Cleveland-born actor Burgess Meredith was chosen as the
film’s “quiet voice,” a voice that never really disappears into the background the way Steinbeck
had hoped. While Meredith certainly does not imitate the dialogue spoken between the Mexican
villagers, his interspersed commentary feels like an intrusion in many ways. For example, in an
early scene in the film in which young Juan Diego takes his pregnant mother, Esperanza, to see
the village Wise Woman, it is Meredith’s voice we hear as it is superimposed on the
conversation between the two Mexican women. Esperanza wishes to know the sex of her unborn
child, and the Wise Woman offers her prophecy about the baby by reading corn. Meredith tells
us that the woman chants while blessing the corn, offering the following prayer: “Corn of our
lives, gift and giver, food of the body, feed thou now the mind and the memory. Speak to this
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mother” (The Forgotten Village). But we do not hear this chant from the Wise Woman herself.
Instead, Meredith is the one who articulates the chant, resulting in a sense of disconnect between
the content of the prayer and the way the audience hears it. For Esperanza and the Wise Woman,
corn is gift and giver, food of the body and food of the mind. But Meredith’s voice sounds like
an intruder on this intimate scene between two villagers. He does not relaying to the audience
sentiments that apply to his own experience; instead he tries to express to the audience an idea
and a practice that are “foreign” to him. In reality, his mere presence in this scene distracts from
the authentic representation of an important exchange between two residents of Santiago. Their
conversation, and many others in the film, is mediated by the presence of Meredith’s Midwest
American voice. In quite literal ways, the Mexican subjects are prevented from speaking for
themselves, from representing themselves in their own voices, and this distance between those
being represented and the representation of them extends to nearly every aspect of the film.
The first screen shot of the film after the opening credits includes a disclaimer of sorts in
which Steinbeck attempts to authenticate the documentary. It reads: “None of the people in this
film are actors. They are peasants, doctors, teachers, etc. in real life. Most of the peasants have
never seen a movie, but they understood our story well. It was part of their lives.” There is an
interesting contradiction to be found in this statement. By assuring the audience that actual
Mexican villagers, doctors, and teachers appear in the film, Steinbeck makes this a film about
them. As he says in the preface to the printed script, he and the other filmmakers simply
documented what they saw without intervening, editorializing, or influencing. But his use of the
possessive pronoun in describing the film as “our story” reveals a level of involvement that
subverts his claims of neutrality and distance. The very fact that the film was scripted and that
accommodations needed to be made to appeal to an American audience suggest that the film is as
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much the filmmakers’ story as it is the villagers’ story. The Forgotten Village may not feature
actors, but it certainly does more than merely document what the filmmakers saw. It represents
their vision of rural Mexico and of the Mexicans who reside in a place they deem as resistant to
progress.
The film’s story centers on “the little pueblo of Santiago on the skirts of a hill in the
mountains of Mexico” (The Forgotten Village). Juan Diego is a young Mexican villager whose
mother is expecting her next child. Upon learning that the child will be a boy, Juan Diego’s
father is overjoyed that he will have another son to help him work in the cornfields. The
villagers are sharecroppers and must surrender much of the harvested crop to the landowners for
whom they work, often leaving them with little to feed themselves and their families. Trini, the
village Wise Woman, wields a great deal of power within the village as the resident healer, and
she depends on the ancient practices passed down from her ancestors, practices that Steinbeck
identifies as “herbology and magic.” Shortly after Esperanza delivers her baby, the village
children start falling ill from an unidentifiable disease. While the majority of the villagers feel
confident that Trini can cure the children, Juan Diego’s young teacher believes that more modern
medical practices are necessary to combat the rapidly spreading sickness, which he identifies as a
water-borne bacteria coming from the unsanitary water supply in the village. He tries to
convince the villagers that they should invite scientists from Mexico City to come cure the
children, but the villagers prove to be frustratingly resistant to and distrustful of outsiders who
want to modernize Santiago. The remainder of the film focuses on the tug-of-war between the
few in Santiago who want to invite modern medicine into the village and the majority who want
to honor the way of life that has always guided their existence.
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As the film begins, it sets in motion a metaphorical battle between progress and tradition
that centers specifically on Santiago but also serves as commentary on Mexican culture in
general in the early 20
th
century. The film employs a combination of Meredith’s narration and
printed dialogue similar to that in silent films, and just after the disclaimer about the authenticity
of the film’s subjects, the following statement appears onscreen:
Among the tall mountains of Mexico the ancient life goes on, sometimes little
changing in a thousand years. But now from the cities of the valley, from the
schools and laboratories, new thinking and new techniques reach out to the
remote villages. The old and the new meet and sometimes clash, but from the
meetings a gradual change is taking place in the village.
We learn almost immediately that Santiago is a place rooted firmly in the past, and as the film
focuses in on Juan Diego we also learn that the “gradual change” coming to the village is not one
the villagers will accept without resistance. We read that, “This is the story of the little pueblo of
Santiago on the skirts of a hill in the mountains of Mexico. And this is the story of Juan Diego
and of his family and of his people, who live in the long moment when the past slips reluctantly
into the future.” Although this is Juan Diego’s story, this is also the story of the people he
symbolizes. He is the vehicle through which Steinbeck comments on rural Mexican culture and
its fierce rejection of progress and modernization. His “people” are, in essence, symbols of
backward Mexicans who prefer to maintain their ancient life rather than leaping into the modern
age.
The first image that appears onscreen is that of Juan Diego leading his pregnant mother
on a donkey to visit Trini, the village Wise Woman, or curandera. Esperanza is barefoot and
draped in a shawl and Juan Diego is dressed in traditional campesino attire. His serape and straw
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hat cover the loose cotton clothes that were the most practical for farming, and we first see them
in a long shot in which they are surrounded by a few straggling cows, a flat lake, and the
mountains that metaphorically protect them from outside influence. The scene expresses the
insular environment in which Santiago exists, and as soon as the characters start interacting with
one another the audience is faced with an onslaught of details about the ancient practices that
guide the villagers’ lives.
As mentioned above, Esperanza visits Trini to get news about her unborn child. In
addition to wanting to know the baby’s sex she also wishes to know if the child will be “beautiful
or ugly, fortunate or damned.” She and Juan Diego eventually reach Trini in her “little stone
house where she merchandised in herbs and amulets and magic.” She invites Esperanza in so
that she can “cast [the future] in the black and white corn.” Everything about this exchange
between the two women serves to remind the audience that this is no modernized culture. The
use of the term “merchandised” suggests the presence of capitalism, but we quickly learn that
Trini’s currency is plants and herbs and the intangible element of magic. She accepts chickens
for payment and she uses corn as the way to provide her services. As the Wise Woman of the
village Trini enjoys a great deal of power and influence, and her own powers stem from her
knowledge of and ability to harness ancient magic. It comes as little surprise then, that Trini will
eventually become the most stalwart resister to the modern medical practices that eventually
infiltrate Santiago.
Once Esperanza learns that she will give birth to a healthy baby boy, she and Juan Diego
return to the village to share the good news and this is when the audience gets its first actual
view of Santiago. The villagers live in small stone huts with dirt floors, the children are
barefoot, and animals roam freely. As two women pull water up from the village well, we see a
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small child standing in in the top of the well in the very water the villagers must drink. There are
no markers of industrialization in the village, no signs that it has been touched by modernization.
As Esperanza parades through the village on the donkey and waves the “magic [hummingbird] of
luck” Trini gave her as a sign of her child’s good fortune, the rest of the villagers congratulate
her on her good luck, Trini’s bird enough of a sign to convince them that all will be well with
Esperanza and her baby boy.
The scene shifts as Juan Diego runs to the cornfields to find his father and to share the
good news about the baby. We see his father, Ventura, harvesting corn in the blistering sun with
hand tools. He is surrounded by crops and the flat lands that extend beyond the fields. There are
no large buildings, nothing to interrupt the rural landscape that eventually gives way to the same
mountains that flanked Esperanza and Juan Diego in the opening shots of the film. When he
learns that he will be father to a fourth son, he is elated because, “It is good to have sons who can
work in the corn.” As he praises God for giving him “little Paco, Juan Diego, and Carlos,” we
see the youngest son, maybe six years old with two front teeth missing, carrying a bundle of
corn. Juan Diego’s father reacts to the news in a manner that says much about the culture of this
village. Because they must subsist on corn, because it “is life itself, holy and clean,” male
children become a commodity of sorts in that they can provide labor. Their purpose extends
beyond just being children since they can eventually contribute to the harvest that is so necessary
to the lives of the villagers. A son is happy news not just because he appeals to a father’s sense
of masculine accomplishment but also because he represents another pair of working hands.
Although this is the early twentieth century, Santiago still views the role of children through an
ancient lens. As soon as children are physically capable of doing so, they must contribute to the
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family harvest, and we learn that, “Even little Paco [must carry] as much [corn] as he can” since
“everyone must eat and everyone must have his burden.”
We also learn from Juan Diego’s father an important detail about how Santiago functions
and survives. He tells us that, “With corn they rent the land the corn grows on. With corn they
buy clothing and salt and chilies.” Corn is the village’s staple crop, and it impacts every man
and woman, every child, every aspect of village life. Corn feeds the animals, families “will eat,
will sell, will live – the corn.” The corn is “loved and prayed for,” and “when there is corn there
is life. When the corn is gone – only hunger and sorrow. For corn is life itself.” As the narrator
reveals the absolute necessity of corn to Santiago’s survival, we see Ventura and his three sons
loaded down with cornstalks on their backs, struggling to withstand the weight of the heavy
stalks. They have no machines to help them transport the corn - not even wheelbarrows to make
the harvest a little easier. Their harvesting tools and methods are decidedly rudimentary, but this
is the way they have always done things in Santiago. This village, and according to Steinbeck’s
logic, these people are stuck in a past that seems destined to rule their future. It is not technology
that guides their existence; it is non-industrialized agriculture, the same agriculture that likely
guided the lives of their ancient ancestors.
And yet, in a moment that recalls the labor disputes in The Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck
comments on the sharecropping system that seems to have developed in Santiago. Ventura’s
first stop is at the home of the man who owns the land he harvests since the landowners are
entitled to half of the crop. They congratulate Ventura on the impending arrival of another son,
but Ventura and Juan Diego are more concerned about the injustice of how the crops are divided.
We learn that Ventura often “protests the division” of the crop, and Juan Diego exclaims to his
father that they “should have more of our own corn now! There will be one more mouth to feed.
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We should have more of our own corn now.” Juan Diego echoes the sentiments of Tom Joad in
Steinbeck’s 1939 seminal novel about the ravages of industrialized agriculture on the Dust Bowl.
Although Santiago has not been industrialized, Joad’s views about fair labor practices are
deemed quite progressive and they are views momentarily replicated in this film. And Juan
Diego will eventually become the catalyst for change in the village. However, just as quickly as
Juan Diego’s progressive views emerge they are squashed by the landowners’ insistence that the
men share a drink in celebration of Ventura’s son and to the “many more” he will likely produce.
After all, they remind him, “that is how men do. You are a great man.” Ventura accepts the
congratulatory offer of a drink, he and the men all take sips from a jug of liquor, and nothing is
ever mentioned about the division of crops again. Ventura, it seems, is willing to accept that
what makes him great is the children he can produce to help him with the harvest.
The action of the film shifts at this point, and this is when Steinbeck begins to engage in
more direct commentary on the push and pull between progress and tradition. We next see Juan
Diego and his young brothers in their school yard where they are greeted by a young male
teacher who will eventually emerge as the village’s most staunch advocate for modernization.
Although the schoolhouse consists of a single room with dirt floors, wooden benches, and a
single chalk board, it eventually becomes the entryway for the outside influence of
modernization, a fact the film hints at when the teacher insists on cleaning his students’ faces and
ears. Hygiene becomes the central issue as the film progresses, and it is in this first scene at the
schoolyard that the audience can connect hygiene to the figure of the schoolteacher.
Another shift in action occurs when we see the villagers of Santiago preparing for Market
Day during which people from all the surrounding villages travel to exchange their crops and
goods. As the Ventura family prepares their corn for market, we see Esperanza cooking their
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dinner by hand. As she hunches over the mortar and pestle and cooks tortillas on what appears
to be a slab of hot stone, the rest of her family gathers in the small hut and sits on straw mats
while chickens roam in and out. That evening, Santiago brims with excitement at the promise of
“music,” “shows and sweets,” “gossip,” and the promise of “a little money.” As the villagers
stream to the nearby market the next morning, we see them travel through a barren landscape
covered in dirt, cactus, and unpaved roads. There are no modern buildings, and men, women and
children carry their wares on their backs or on the donkeys that accompany them. Once they
arrive at the market, it is bristling with activity as the camera pans over the goods available.
Chilies, beans, and corn are laid out on straw mats, and straw hats and straw “toys of the
country” hang from various market stalls. We also see a stream of images that show mothers
working in the market with their babies strapped to their backs and that show old Mexican
women sitting on straw mats covered in shawls and straw hats trying to sell their crops. In every
way possible we are reminded that this is a marketplace not as early twentieth-century urbanites
would envision it but one that is decidedly rural and decidedly “un-modern.” Staple crops and
handmade goods are the objects of exchange at this market. Although money does change
hands, a scene in which market-goers delight in a show in which a young child imitates a
bullfight suggests that the market is as much about a communal gathering as it is about earning a
profit. The scene in the marketplace features one brief shot of a man offering Esperanza a gold
coin for her corn, but it is dominated by images of women sitting together and conversing, of
men and their sons walking excitedly from stall to stall to catch up with their neighbors, and of
everyone present enjoying the entertainment the market brings. Money is an afterthought in this
gathering; what this market offers is something far more important to rural Mexicans – the
opportunity to connect with other rural communities.
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During the market scene we also learn that Paco has become ill with stomach cramps.
Instead of exploring the market with his father and brothers he is forced to remain by his
mother’s side where he becomes increasingly lethargic and he eventually doubles over from the
pain. Once back at home Juan Diego settles in for a night of watching over his young brother,
and the camera closes in on a sleeping and frail-looking Paco covered to his chin with a blanket
to combat the chills he experiences. The family determines that it is necessary to send for Trini
so that she can cure the young boy, and when she arrives the next morning she comes laden with
herbs and a chalice that emits smoke. She “examines” Paco by looking into his eyes, after which
she declares that “the bitter airs […] have gone to live in his stomach.” She tells the worried
family that she will treat Paco with “an ancient cure, [one her] grandfather had from his
grandfather and he from his.” We get a close-up shot of Trini preparing the cure in which she
burns several types of herbs and plants and then touches Paco with an egg at various points on
his body. As she does so she explains that “the evil airs love the egg” and that she “will draw
them, trap them with it.” She places the egg on Paco’s aching stomach and appears to suck on
the egg in an attempt to draw the evil airs out. Paco writhes in pain, but with complete trust in
Trini’s ability to cure him Esperanza asks him to be patient and assures him that he “will soon be
well.” After completing the ritual Trini declares that she has trapped the evil airs in the egg, at
which point she cracks it into a bowl the show the family. Although Paco is still in obvious pain,
Trini declares that, “Now he will be well.” Her confident declaration, along with the family’s
absolute belief that she has cured Paco, serves as yet another reminder of how firmly rooted in
ancient practices Santiago is. It is an ancient that evil that plagues him, and as such it is an
ancient ritual that will cure him. Paco’s sickness introduces yet another example of the folklore
and folk practices that continue to guide this rural Mexican village and the rural Mexicans in it.
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Just after the depiction of this ancient healing ritual, the camera shifts to a shot of the
village well and we see Juan Diego walking through the village listening to the accounts of other
sick children with the same symptoms as Paco’s. We see numerous shots of mothers cradling
their sick babies and close-ups of ill children who can barely lift their heads. We also learn that
great fear has started to spread throughout Santiago. In need of solace, Juan Diego finds his way
to the schoolhouse and to “his friend the schoolteacher, the only man in Santiago who had been
to the outside world.” Juan Diego discusses the fact that most in the village attribute the sickness
to “evil little spirits in the air,” but the teacher counters this idea with his own belief that germs
in the village’s water supply are the true culprits. As he gathers medicine, a thermometer, and
his medical books he accompanies Juan Diego to his home where we learn that, despite Trini’s
cure, Paco is “stiff with pain.” The teacher takes his temperature and tries to show Esperanza
how to do so as well. He opens a small tin containing a syringe with some unidentified medicine
in it, but when he offers it to Esperanza she declines and reminds him that “Trini is curing him.
She has an ancient cure.” Frustrated by Esperanza’s unwillingness to consider modern
alternatives to Trini’s cures, he cries out that Trini’s “cures are not good,” but Esperanza is
unyielding and she tells him that they “do not like these new things. Trini will cure him if God
permits.” Paco is as exasperated by his mother as his teacher is, and he tries to explain to her
that the medical books say that germs, “the little animals” in the water, are causing the epidemic
in the village. But she will not hear of it. She has absolute faith in Trini and in the ancient ways
she symbolizes when she declares that “Trini knows. She will cure it. She has an ancient cure.
Here she is now. Paco will soon be well.”
The teacher and Trini encounter each other as he prepares to leave and as she enters, and
he tries to make her see that something more tangible and curable than evil spirits is responsible
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for the sickness circulating amongst the children. He informs her that “it is the water. The well
is contaminated.” Juan Diego’s father echoes his wife’s sentiments, and in a key scene Trini
responds angrily to what she deems as the young schoolteacher’s insolence: “What is this
nonsense – these new things – these young men who tell their elders? You will kill the people
with your new foolishness. This is for your nonsense!” The next shot is of the teacher’s medical
tools and medicine smashed in the dirt, the victims of Trini’s anger. Despite Steinbeck’s
protestations that the film is a neutral document of what he and the filmmakers saw, I would
argue that the smashed tools are yet another example of the deliberate editorializing he so
adamantly denies. The contradictory images of modern medical tools smashed to pieces in the
dirt floor are blatant comments on the obsolescence of ancient practices in the face of modern
problems. As Juan Diego squats to pick up the pieces, we see his straw hat in one hand and the
shiny remnants of the medical tools in the other, and we come to understand him as caught in the
middle of the battle being waged in his village. Trini’s ironic accusation that the teacher will kill
the villagers with his modern “nonsense” is rendered all the more disturbing by the fact that a
still-ailing Paco rests in the house behind her. Undeterred by the fact that her previous cure did
not heal the young boy, she declares that she has “another cure, a better one.” We see her
administer yet another healing ritual on Paco in which she attempts to “draw the pains downward
to his feet.” As she wraps his feet in herbs and bandages, his despondent family looks on, fear
and sadness gripping their faces. Trini chews some herbs and spits them on Paco’s stomach in
an effort to “suck the pains from his belly.” After placing some of the chewed herbs on his
temples and wrapping his head in cloth, the Wise Woman declares that, “Now he will be well
again.” As Trini utters this proclamation the camera zooms in on the pain and agony in Paco’s
face. Rather than being calmed by Trini’s presence, he becomes more disturbed. The next shot
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is of a man measuring a coffin for a child, and we learn that Paco has died and “become a little
saint – gone straight to heaven without sin or sorrow; without shame or burden.” The
progression of this scene suggests that, at the very least, Trini’s beliefs and practices are
misguided and ultimately dangerous. But the fact that those around her subscribe so
wholeheartedly to those same beliefs offers what I would consider more biting commentary.
Unwilling or unable to welcome modern medical practices into their home, Juan Diego’s family
is rendered foolish and culpable in the wake of Paco’s death. Their tendency to rely firmly on
ancient practices leads to the death of their child, and the message becomes quite clear that, had
they only been willing to see the benefits of modernization and progress their youngest son
might still be alive. The suggestion that this family’s unwillingness to look forward rather than
back becomes more problematic when we recall Steinbeck’s statements in the preface to the
printed script that they should serve as the means by which his audience could understand an
entire culture. This is Steinbeck’s representation of rural Mexicans, not their own representation
of themselves, and it is a representation clouded with stereotypes about Mexicans as innately
backward-thinking and provincial. Although Juan Diego eventually manages to disassociate
himself with this stereotype, he proves to be an anomaly, and he suffers greatly for his
progressive views.
As if Paco’s death were not evidence enough of Trini’s misinformed healing practices,
the scene in which Esperanza delivers her baby also reveals the lack of knowledge this powerful
curandera has about basic biological and medical functions. The shock of Paco’s death sends
the grieving mother into early labor, and Trini is once again called to the Ventura home so she
can assist with the birth. To help the delivery progress, Esperanza stands between two wooden
poles, her hands tied in place. Soon after, Trini cradles Esperanza in her lap, rocking her back
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and forth and chanting. As she “worked her magic,” she describes the baby as being formed at
that very moment: “Now he is forming. Now he is ready. Now he has hands. Now he has eyes.
Now he is forming.” Esperanza is finally ready to deliver the baby boy and Trini continues to
chant: “Now he is formed, now he is ready […] he is formed – he is born! He is here!” The
Wise Woman’s explanation of the unborn child’s development at the moment of his birth reveals
a startling lack of basic biological knowledge about gestation, once again rendering Trini and
those who believe in her curative powers as foolish. Although Esperanza delivers a healthy boy,
what is most striking about this scene is the fact that the woman who is responsible for the health
of Santiago believes, in the twentieth century, that the child’s development occurs just as he is
being born. Rather than simply showing that as one life ends another begins, when considered
within the context of the rest of the film the birth scene functions as blatant commentary on the
degree to which modernization has passed over this Mexican village.
After the birth of the baby boy, who his parents name Santiago, the film shifts its focus
back to the illness and fear running rampant in the village. During the celebration of Santiago’s
birth, the camera cuts to shots of young children whose heads are wrapped in “the white
headbands of the Wise Woman,” and we learn that the disease that killed Paco has reached
epidemic proportions within the village. In an effort to combat the evil spirits that they believe
are responsible for the illness, the village turns to its religious faith and the villagers march in a
saints’ procession for protection. They plead to Christ to “show [them] the sin [they] have
committed, that [they] may repent,” and as they march through the center of Santiago the camera
focuses in on the faces of sick children, wrapped in serapes and clinging to their mothers’ chests.
Their heads are wrapped in Trini’s white bandages, and the children appear to be covered in dirt.
As the village adults plead for the safety of their children and relief from their sorrow, this is the
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only moment in the film in which we hear their actual voices. Singing religious folk songs as
they carry their sick children through the village, the adults in Santiago finally get the chance to
speak on camera, but Meredith quickly intervenes as he translates the song into English over the
actual singing and then informs the audience that despite the procession, “the children sickened
and new sorrow fell upon the people.” Although in this moment the villagers are granted a
voice, any power that voice might carry disappears when Meredith’s voice overrides theirs and
when he reveals that their pleas to God have been ineffective. They are, in a sense, rendered
mute since their songs do little to ease their pain.
With the religious songs still being sung in the background, the shot shifts to Juan Diego
and the teacher in the schoolhouse assembling film for a projector, “a strange and wonderful
object to them.” The camera stays focused on the projector as Juan Diego and the teacher roll
the film, attach the lens, and adjust the light source, and the narrator informs the audience that
they intend to use the film to show the rest of the village “what caused the sickness and how it
could be cured.” The introduction of the projector creates a direct connection between modern
technology, education, and prevention of disease. The village’s educator hopes that visual
evidence of bacteria and viruses will convince the rest of Santiago’s residents that what is killing
their children is something they can prevent, and he depends on a modern machine to help him
mount his case. When we learn that he has also drafted a petition to medical authorities in the
capital city, we can also identify the suggestion that what this rural village needs is the modern
technology that comes from urban centers.
When the teacher assembles the villagers to watch his film, they react with predictable
resistance and outrage. Although not included in the final cut of the film, Steinbeck writes in his
script that before showing his film about bacteria, the teacher “amused them first with cartoons
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so that they might not be against him” (Steinbeck). Not only does Steinbeck depict Santiago’s
residents as completely unfamiliar with this modern technology, they are also infantilized when
he writes that they must be pacified with cartoons. The condescension is appalling and it sets the
stage for the frustrating reaction the villagers have to the teacher’s pleas for common sense.
As Juan Diego and the teacher operate the projector, an image appears onscreen of a
doctor removing blood from what we learn is an infected horse. The teacher informs the
villagers that serum from an infected horse can combat the bacteria proliferating in the village
well, but one of the landowners protests immediately: “Horses’ blood! Are we animals? Are
we horses or dogs or rats? What is this horses’ blood? What is this new nonsense?” (The
Forgotten Village). The teacher tries to reason with him, and with a poster about viruses hanging
behind him he assures the people that “men of science are working to cure the children.” He
then places the burden of responsibility back on the villagers when he tells them that they must
be willing to accept the help that modern medicine can bring: “Now you have seen the cause of
the sickness and you have seen the cure. The men of science work to help you, but first you
must help yourselves. If you, the people of the village, will sign this petition, the doctors will
come and cure the children and help us clean the water.” As the teacher attempts to convince the
villagers of the need for them to invite modernization into their fold, the camera pans around the
room to show residents of all ages nodding in disagreement, and it is a young man who tells the
teacher that, “We do not like these new things.” Juan Diego feels compelled to intervene, and
tries to appeal to their sense of logic when he declares, ”The children are dying. The Wise
Woman cannot cure them. Listen to the teacher. He knows.” Angered by the perceived hubris
of young Juan Diego, the landowner lunges across a table and slaps him, yelling that he is “tired
of babies telling their elders! I am tired of these new things – this horse blood.” As he is pulled
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away from Juan Diego, the landowner knocks the projector over and storms out of the
schoolhouse. The final shot of the scene, and one that recalls Trini’s destruction of the teacher’s
medical tools, is of the projector smashed to bits on the floor, the film reel splayed all over, and
villagers stepping on the pieces as they leave. As they trample the machine that symbolizes the
“newness” to which they are so averse, it becomes clear that what they resist is not the specific
technology of the projector or the modern medicine of the horse serum. Rather, it is the
departure from tradition that seems so disturbing. The repeated expression of anger at “these
new things” suggests a general resistance to anything that reflects a challenge to their traditional
way of life, but the revelation that Juan Diego’s younger sister Maria has also fallen ill and that
Trini is once again trying to heal a child with an ancient cure suggests that this steadfast
adherence to tradition, while perhaps comforting to the villagers, is also acutely dangerous.
With his sister’s life hanging in the balance, Juan Diego decides he must personally
deliver a petition for assistance to medical doctors in the capital. As he departs Santiago,
entering “a strange new world, among people he did not know,” the camera follows a
“frightened” but determined Juan Diego traversing the barren landscape surrounding his village.
With a straw mat strapped to his back, he walks and walks, at one point shrouded in dust kicked
up from vicious winds, and it as at this moment, when Juan Diego stands on the precipice of a
“new world” that the camera focuses in on train tracks. In a proliferation of images depicting
modern technology, we next see Juan Diego in car traveling on a paved road towards the city.
As he exits rural Mexico, the camera pans to a single building in the distance, that of a church,
and the shot fades into overlapping images of electrical towers, skyscrapers, busy streets filled
with traffic that prevent Juan Diego from crossing. He marvels at “buildings fantastic and
unbelievable. People whose lives he could not imagine.” As he attempts to navigate the city
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streets, men and women dressed in suits and fashionable dresses rush passed him. He decides
that “the city was terrible to him,” but the sick children of Santiago propel him forward. He
stops to ask directions to the hospital from a woman looking at a shop window, and as he make
his way across the city, images of automobiles and street cars swallow Juan Diego as harrowing,
chaotic music plays in the background. He finally nears his destination, but he cannot find a
break in the traffic and we see him in shots through car windows, his farmer’s clothes and straw
mat conspicuous markers of his rural origins. Everything about the composition of these scenes
suggests danger for Juan Diego. His peril seems imminent as the city closes in on him and
threatens to devour him with its crowds, cars, and skyscrapers. He is the foreigner here and the
strangeness of the city terrifies him, but he knows that the letter he carries with him must be
delivered if he wants to save Santiago’s sick children.
Once he arrives at the hospital, the enormous building looms ominously above him, its
mirrored windows gleaming in the sunlight, and when he finally gains entry into the building we
see Juan Diego in a long shot, flanked by two nurses as they walk down a sterile-looking
hallway, its walls and floors blank and shiny. The nurse deposits Juan Diego in a waiting room
decorated with art deco furniture and iron work on the windows, and he takes a seat amongst the
well-dressed men and woman who also wait for the doctor. He finally enters the doctor’s office
and explains the disease ravaging the children of his village. He frantically explains that while
he knows it is bacteria in the water killing them, the rest of the village thinks evil spirits are
responsible for the deaths and they continue to rely on the Wise Woman to cure their children.
Although the doctor initially informs Juan Diego that all of the medical trucks have already been
dispatched to other villages, he is moved by Juan Diego’s impassioned cries: “The children are
dying – more every day. And we can do nothing! You can save the children. You must come to
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Santiago.” The doctor relents, and as he picks up the phone to order “an intern, a nurse,
equipment for water-test, serums,” the shot fades into a close-up of an automobile tire and then
pans out to show Juan Diego, the doctor, nurse, and intern speeding toward Santiago, the car
struggling on the unpaved, bumpy roads. The image of the automobile bouncing violently on the
dirt is an effective symbol for the clash that is about to occur in Santiago. The automobile is the
literal and symbolic vehicle for modernization as it carries the medical technology the villagers
view as an affront to their traditions. Just as it struggles to traverse the dirt roads so too, it
seems, will Juan Diego and the medical team struggle with the villagers so deeply rooted in the
ancient ways. Tradition and progress are about to meet face-to-face, and the rural Mexicans of
Santiago react swiftly and angrily to the intrusion.
As the men unload the medical equipment and carry it into the center of town, the camera
pans to two pigs standing in and drinking from the village well. The muddy animals, clearly
meant to show the unhygienic conditions that have led to the deadly bacteria, scurry away in one
direction as they pass the medical team heading in the other, and the audience is once again faced
with a visual expression of the degree to which Santiago suffers because of its lack of
modernization. Trini is one of the first to see the medical team, and in an effort to protect her
business she calls out to the villagers that “the horse-blood men are here.” Frightened by the
foreign presence, we see mothers and fathers grab their sick children in order to hide them from
the doctors.
The team visits Juan Diego’s home first and as the doctor removes his stethoscope from
Maria’s chest he discovers the snake skin Trini has wrapped around her stomach to cure her
stomach pains. He shakes his head in disbelief and declares to Esperanza that “this will never
cure her.” After palpating Maria’s stomach and declaring that “she is very ill,” the nurse pulls
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some medicine from the doctor’s bag, which he feeds Maria with a spoon. He tells Esperanza
that all the medicine can do is reduce the fever, but he feels confident that he knows what is
sickening the children. However, he wants to examine the other sick children before offering a
diagnosis. When the doctor tells Esperanza that he will return to Maria once he can identify the
cause of the sickness, she nods in acquiescence and seems to have accepted modern medicine
into her home. But once he and Juan Diego leave, Esperanza places Trini’s snakeskin back on
her daughter’s stomach, clearly unwilling to abandon the Wise Woman’s practices.
Juan Diego and the medical team travel from house to house, but they are consistently
denied entry. It seems that “the warning of Trini had gone through the village” and the people
hide their sick children from the doctors. They insist that there are no sick children in their
homes, and as they lie to the doctors the camera pans to babies and toddlers tucked in bed, their
heads wrapped in the bandages that signal Trini has been there to cure them. Although the
doctors assure the village mothers that they “want to help [them], not hurt [them],” they refuse
treatment for the children and we see door after door closed on the doctors, closed on the
technology that could so easily save them. A few families allow the doctors into their homes,
and we see them administering medicine and serums to the children while telling the mothers
that these children can be saved. But when the team returns to Juan Diego’s home, they must
confront his father who is distrustful of the serums. The doctor tries to convince him that the
Wise Woman cannot cure the dying children, and as he does so he shows Ventura a jar
containing the serums. Although Ventura is “courteous,” he reiterates the fact that they “do not
like these new things,” and he physically bars the doctor from entering his home, even after the
doctor tells him that he knows what causes Maria’s illness and how he can cure it. Ventura
declares that he does not want his daughter to receive horses’ blood and that he will not allow the
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doctor to “enter [his] house nor poison his children.” The doctor pleads, telling him that Maria
will die without the serum, but Ventura refuses to yield and he closes the door on Juan Diego and
the doctors. Another Ventura child, it seems, is destined to fall victim to the distrust of
modernization that plagues Santiago. Bacteria that the doctor can easily identify and cure proves
an insurmountable obstacle that Trini’s ancient cures cannot overcome, and the close proximity
of the cure makes the villagers’ reactions to the doctors all the more frustrating and easy to
criticize. They are victims of their own myopic vision of how life should be lived, and it should
not be lived with the infiltration of “new things.” Hardly presenting a neutral document, the film
repeatedly positions itself in opposition to the backward-looking and thinking rural Mexicans
that are its subject.
Dejected and frustrated, Juan Diego and the doctor return to the medical tent in which the
intern shows the doctor on a microscope a slide of the bacteria taken from the well. We see a
shot of the bacteria on the slide – small black dots that cover the plate and reveal the well’s
contaminants. The doctor invites Juan Diego to look at the “little murderers” that live in “the
water of your well,” and Juan Diego is as intrigued by the microscope as he is by what it shows
him. As the medical team exits the tent and walks to the well, we see yet another pig, as well as
several chickens, wading in the village’s water source. The doctor pours a decontaminant into
the well and instructs Juan Diego to do the same every day until the children stop falling ill.
Peering from behind a tree, Trini sees the decontaminant, tastes the water, and quickly gathers
the villagers to inform them that the well has been poisoned by the doctors. The angry villagers
confront the doctors, accusing them of killing a baby who has just died with their poisonous
water. The doctor tries to reassure them that they have made the water safe, that “the little
animals are dead,” but Trini strikes him in the chest declaring that Santiago does not want
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“poisoners” in their midst. She then turns her attention to Juan Diego, slapping him in the face
as she declares him a “traitor to his people” for bringing the poisoners to the village. He does not
react and instead faces the angry woman with a stoic expression on his face as she continues to
berate him. Trini rallies the villagers to drive the doctors out, and once they depart Juan Diego
faces his angry father who chastises him for his actions: “You are disgracing me with our own
people.” Rather than recognize the lifesaving technology Juan Diego brings to the village, the
residents of Santiago view his actions as treacherous since he challenges the very foundation of
their existence by introducing the force of progress. Their reactions to the doctors are illogical,
unreasonable, and uneducated and they cannot see beyond their hatred for “new things” to accept
the assistance they so desperately need. The people of Santiago, and the culture they represent,
are depicted as hopelessly stuck in a past that cannot carry them into the modern world that is
developing around them. However, Juan Diego emerges as the sole dissenting voice and he
refuses to accept another dead child when he knows that help is within reach. He eventually
frees himself from the adherence to tradition that proves to be so harmful, and the film concludes
with the prospect of a rural Mexico that perhaps can be saved from itself.
Unwilling to leave his sister’s fate up to Trini, Juan Diego sneaks Maria out of their home
under the cover of night and carries her to the doctors waiting just outside of the village. As the
doctor strokes her head and as Maria looks on, barely able to move, the doctor vaccinates her and
declares that “She will be well again. She will be well.” The nurse packs a box of medicine for
Juan Diego to take back to the village and the doctor reminds Juan Diego that he must continue
to disinfect the well, even if he must do so in secret. They send Juan Diego and Maria back to the
village where Juan Diego encounters his infuriated father. Enraged at his son’s complicity with
the doctors, Ventura condemns him as a traitor and disowns him: “You are against your village
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and your family. You are a friend of the poisoners. You do not belong to us. Go back to your
friends.” As he clutches Maria in his arms, Ventura strikes his son to the ground and Juan Diego
flees to the teacher. When he informs the teacher that he has been disowned, the teacher reminds
him that this is what they expected since he has “broken the law of [his] father [and] hurt his
pride in the village.” The teacher informs Juan Diego that the doctors have agreed “to place
[him] in school in the city,” and he assures him that he will continue to disinfect the well and to
dispense the medication in Juan Diego’s absence. As he sends Juan Diego off to meet the
waiting doctors, he tries to comfort him with the idea that he “will come back to [his] own
people later, when [he] knows enough.” Although Juan Diego has saved his sister, his
willingness to abandon tradition, to challenge his father’s beliefs, is such an affront that he is
essentially exiled from his home. Too blind to see that Juan Diego and the doctors have saved
his dying daughter, Ventura can only see the ways in which his son has become a conspirator
with the doctors wanting to poison Santiago with their “new things.” His son pays dearly for his
willingness to accept progress and modernization, and although the teacher’s decree that he will
return to Santiago suggests the possibility for change, it is clear that this will be a protracted
battle between what the film presents as the outdated beliefs of Santiago and the common sense
offered by modern medical practices. As Juan Diego rushes to meet the doctors, Meredith’s
voice beckons him to “hurry, hurry,” and we know that Juan Diego is being implored to learn as
much as he can so he can return to Santiago and rescue the village from its own archaic
existence.
As the doctor drives Juan Diego to the city, he reminds Juan Diego that he cannot blame
the villagers for their distrust of progress and as he declares that “it is the young people who will
change them,” the image fades into a shot of young men and women sitting at a long desk with
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their books in front of them. Speaking for the doctor, Meredith tells Juan Diego and the
audience that these young people “come from the villages to learn, boys like you, Juan Diego,
and girls.” As the scene shifts to a laboratory in which the students look into microscopes and
mix medicine in beakers, we are told that, “They learn not for themselves, but for their people”
and that the change they will enact will be slow since “learning and teaching are slow, patient
things.” We then see students crowded around an ironworker who teaches them to forge modern
tools and the scene then shifts to medical students watching an autopsy being performed on a
corpse. Meredith’s voice reminds us that, while “Changes in people are never quick. […] boys
from the villages are being given a chance by a nation that believes in them. From the
government schools, the boys and girls from the villages will carry knowledge back to their own
people.” Meredith describes this change as “the long climb out of darkness,” and we hear that
“already the people are learning, changing their lives, learning, working, living in new ways.”
As the scene shifts back to Juan Diego and the doctor driving toward Juan Diego’s new life in
the city, the doctor assures him that “the change will come, is coming, as surely as there are
thousands of Juan Diegos in the villages of Mexico.” Juan Diego sits silently for a moment, and
then Meredith declares for him, “I am Juan Diego” as the camera fades to black.
We can sense that Steinbeck attempts to offer a glimmer of hope in the final lines of the
film. Progress, it seems, is coming to rural Mexico as its sons and daughters stream into the city
and then return to their homes with knowledge of modern technology. And although we hear
that “already the people are learning, changing,” we do not see evidence of this transformation in
the representative village of Santiago. The villagers are so resolute in their need to stay rooted in
tradition and ancient practices that they are willing to risk the lives of children in order to do so.
Juan Diego may return as the savior to his village, suggesting that Santiago will eventually find
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its ground in the modern age, but we know they will be dragged into modernization rather than
willingly embrace it. Perhaps Juan Diego symbolizes the direction in which Mexico is headed,
but in a sense the damage has already been done. The majority of the film depicts Mexicans as
backward-thinking, illogical, and unable to speak for themselves. If the villagers of Santiago
are, as Steinbeck suggests, supposed to function as a symbol for the broader culture to which
they belong, The Forgotten Village does little more than articulate for its American audience the
very worst stereotypes about Mexicans. Despite Steinbeck’s preemptive declaration that the film
is a documentary that merely seeks to present details of Mexican life without “editorializ[ing],
attack[ing], or defend[ing] anything” (The Forgotten Village, script), the film simply cannot
maintain the neutrality Steinbeck claims for it. It may indeed be a documentary, but
documentarians such as Lange, Agee, and Evans have shown that documentary reflects the
motives, artistic and aesthetic choices, and influence of its creators. The film does not simply
detail the cycle of life and death that is part of the common human condition as Steinbeck
suggests it does in his preface. It does not simply detail the ancient practices and rituals that
dominated rural Mexico in the early twentieth century. Instead, the film positions itself as
critical of these practices and reveals them to be the beliefs of irrational, uneducated, narrow-
minded people who will be forced to accept the presence of modernization if they wish to
survive. And at every turn the film robs its subjects of the chance to answer this criticism, robs
them of the chance for self-representation. Steinbeck scripts their words, Meredith speaks their
words, and the “coherent story” Steinbeck merely “arranged” out of “what [he] found” results in
little more than the perpetuation of the caricature of Mexican subjects in American film. This is
not Santiago’s representation of itself; this is an American author and American filmmakers
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speaking for and about them. In the end, The Forgotten Village is a case study in the ethnic and
cultural stereotypes that enjoyed a great deal of traffic in early twentieth-century American film.
Salt of the Earth
Released roughly a decade after The Forgotten Village, I offer Salt of the Earth as a
counterpoint to Steinbeck’s film in a variety of ways. The latter focuses squarely on Mexican-
American identity (as opposed to Mexicans in rural Mexico) within the context of post-
Depression, post-repatriation xenophobia, and the ways in which Mexican-Americans
contributed to the production and completion of the film, along with the film’s statements about
“American” cultural identity and the role of Mexican-Americans in it, contrast starkly with the
negative images of Mexicans that proliferate in The Forgotten Village. This is not to say that
Salt of the Earth is free from the complications that arise when an “outsider” attempts to tell the
story of a group of which he is not a part, but the film succeeds in giving Mexican-Americans a
voice in ways The Forgotten Village fails. Although this is, in some ways, a “Hollywood” film,
it also reflects an opportunity for self-representation that was so often denied early twentieth-
century Mexican-Americans. As Benjamin Balthaser suggests, “Salt of the Earth serves as the
model for radical, democratic filmmaking” (347), filmmaking that announced as its very
motivation the desire for Mexican-Americans to represent themselves.
It was in late 1947 that Hollywood director Herbert Biberman, along with eighteen other
witnesses, was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee to answer questions
about the Communist infiltration of Hollywood. When he refused to answer such questions or to
comment on his own involvement with the Communist Party (of which he was an active
member) on the grounds that “the inquiry was an attempt to intimidate the motion picture
industry and prevent the production of socially relevant films” and that the line of questioning
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violated his constitutional rights (Lorence 49), he was charged with contempt. Biberman, along
with nine other actors, producers, screenwriters, and directors who became known as the
“Hollywood Ten,” was eventually convicted and sentenced to prison for six months, promptly
fired from his studio job, and then blacklisted, making employment in Hollywood virtually
impossible.
After serving his six month term, Biberman immediately set to work on circumventing
the Hollywood studio system by creating independent films. He formed an alliance with
blacklisted writer Paul Jerrico, and they created the Independent Productions Corporation (IPC)
with the goal, according to Biberman, of “telling stories drawn from the living experience of
people long ignored by Hollywood – the working men and women of America (qtd. in Wilson
169). In his account of the film’s production, Biberman reports that after three or four months of
searching for stories, “Things were going badly” (Biberman 37). Although IPC had several ideas
in development, they realized that they were used to creating “stories written for effect” (37) and
that they had little experience with “stories about real people and real situations” (37). They
wanted to honor their mission of representing the “living experience” of those Americans who
were conspicuously absent from American film, but they were quickly faced with what
Biberman identified as “the vast distance between intention and skill” (37). Jerrico “had heard of
an extraordinary strike in progress in New Mexico […that] had been called against New Jersey
Zinc in Bayard, New Mexico, by Local 890 of the Mine, Mill, and Smelters Worker Union” (37),
and he traveled to New Mexico to see if this strike might serve as the basis of IPC’s first film.
According to Biberman, when Jerrico returned “his eyes glowed” (37) with the possibility of
making a film about the strike, and he was determined to enlist blacklisted screenwriter Michael
Wilson to pen the script. Wilson eventually agreed, and the conditions he set for his involvement
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in the project represent an important statement about the mission IPC had set for itself.
According to Biberman, Wilson would only sign on if he felt sure that the subjects of the film
would have the chance to tell their own story:
“Fellows, we’ve got to give up trying to write stories about real people from our
point of view. I think that’s why the stories you have been doing are not coming
off. If I do this story, I want to do a story from the point of view of the people of
local 890. And if I do this story, they are going to be the censors of it and the real
producers of it . . . in point of view of its content. If you think something’s great
and they think it’s lousy, they’re going to win. And vice versa.” (qtd. in
Biberman 38).
The predominately Mexican-American union members would, it seems, be the voices of Salt of
the Earth. Although Wilson would create the script, they would have complete control over how
they were represented to American film audiences.
The strike that would serve as the basis for the film began in 1950 in Hanover, New
Mexico. Mexican-American miners engaged in a protracted battle with Anglo mine owners
regarding disparities in working conditions for Anglo workers and Mexican-American workers.
According to Ellen Baker, the miners’ primary demands called for parity in pay, safety measures
that met industry standards, paid holidays, and “a reduction in the number of job classifications
[…that] made it easier to keep Mexican American miners in low-paying jobs” (1). The miners
also “believed that Empire Zinc was colluding with other mining companies in an ambitious
effort to destroy the union” and since Local 890 had recently succeeded in “advancing Mexican
American civil, as well as labor, rights,” the strike also became an issue of ethnic and cultural
importance (3). The miners held to the picket line for eight months, and when the company
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succeeded in acquiring a Taft-Hartley injunction that prohibited striking miners from picketing,
the Union’s Ladies Auxiliary took over since they were not employees of the mine and were thus
not subject to the injunction. After more than six months, with the mine virtually closed down
because of the strike, Empire Zinc finally agreed to reopen negotiation talks which resulted in
pay raises, safer working conditions, more sanitary living conditions, and increased equality
between Anglo and Mexican-American miners. The successful strike leveled against a
discriminatory corporation by its largely Mexican-American work force proved to be precisely
the type of story IPC wanted to present to film audiences, and as development and production of
the film commenced, Biberman, Wilson, and Jerrico were ever-mindful of the need to let the
film’s Mexican-American subjects cultivate the image of themselves that would appear onscreen.
At the center of Salt of the Earth is fictional married couple Ramón and Esperanza
Quintero, both of whom become active leaders in the strike, and it is through their struggles that
we learn the details of the actual miners’ strike. When the action of the film begins, Esperanza is
expecting the couple’s third child and Ramón is already embroiled in an acrimonious
relationship with the mine owners due to his vocal complaints about unsafe and unfair working
conditions for Mexican-American workers. Negotiation talks have already started to erode
between union leaders and representatives from the mining company, and Anglo and Mexican-
American miners struggle to maintain a degree of unity despite the company’s efforts to divide
and conquer (so to speak).
Casting the film proved difficult for Biberman. He struggled to maintain what Baker
classifies as the “relationship between authenticity and professionalism” (206), and while he was
adamant that the film feature Mexican-Americans, he also wanted “some of them to be
professional actors “(206). Casting the role of Esperanza proved to be the least difficult for the
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director, at least initially. He knew of Mexican actress Rosaura Revueltas, and in a 1952
interview he” described her as ‘beautiful for this role, sensitive, earthy and not Hollywoodesque
in her beauty which is deeper and richer’” (qtd. in Baker 206). Once Revueltas signed on,
Biberman set to work on casting the role of Ramón, and this was one of the first instances in
which his directorial powers would be challenged. After professional actor Rodolfo Acosta
withdrew from the film days before filming was set to begin in response to pressure from his
agent to distance himself from the blacklisted filmmakers, Biberman was forced to quickly recast
the role. Juan Chacón was an officer of the Local 890, and Revueltas and Biberman’s sister-in-
law (assistant director Sonia Dahl Biberman) thought he was the ideal choice for the male lead.
Biberman disagreed, finding Chacón too meek to play the forceful, influential Ramon. But the
two women persisted and Biberman eventually relented, setting the stage for numerous other
union members to be cast in the film (Baker 207).
Although Biberman had no misgivings about hiring Revueltas, local miners and their
families bristled at the idea of a professional actress playing the lead female role. According to
Baker, “Union members in Grant County saw no reason why professional actors should play the
lead roles. […] Local 890 families […] wanted to protect their own story and feared that
professional actors might compromise it” (210). Once Chacón was cast, locals felt even more
strongly that they should be offered roles in the film, that they should be the ones to tell their
own story. In their effort to tell the miners’ story from their own perspective, as Wilson
demanded, the filmmakers eventually cast Local 890 members in the remaining lead roles and in
the extra roles. They also enlisted union members to serve as technical advisors and they elicited
their feedback on the script. Mexican-Americans would, in numerous ways, control the image of
themselves presented in this film. They would be the faces on the screen, they would have the
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power to deem the script inauthentic if necessary, and theirs would be the voices the film’s
audience would hear. Although Biberman, Jarrico, and Wilson’s presence and influence
complicates this notion (and is an issue I will address at a later point), Salt of the Earth reflected
an unprecedented partnership between Mexican-Americans and Hollywood filmmakers.
Once the film was cast, production was plagued by countless other difficulties due to the
filmmakers’ blacklisted status. Film crews were reluctant to sign on for fear that affiliation with
an IPC production would damage their careers, so, according to James Lorence, Biberman
developed the idea to arrange union sponsorship of the film […] that called for the International
[Union of Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers] to serve as producer. [They] could then hire [a
union film crew] and IPC could secure the mine’s permission for shooting on location” (67).
Although this sponsorship was eventually secured (indeed, the opening title card introduces the
film as presented by IPC and the International Union of Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers), the
project was still identified as an IPC film, and, as Lorence explains, “the ‘guilt by association’ so
characteristic of domestic anticommunism in Cold War America [began] to influence Salt of the
Earth” (75). The original crew was forbidden by their union to work on the film and Biberman
and Jarrico eventually had to rely on an amateur film crew. Nevertheless, IPC and the Union
persisted in their efforts, and filming began in relative peace. Although IPC would eventually
face an active campaign to suppress their film, they managed to create a remarkable narrative
about Mexican-American cultural and ethnic identity.
As the film opens, we see a pregnant Esperanza heating water in a bucket over an outdoor
fire. She is surrounded by dilapidated wood structures that comprise the Quintero home, and as
she struggles to carry the heavy bucket to the laundry line and begins to wash the clothes by hand
in her backyard, the shot shifts to various images of the village. We see the mine and its
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apparatus looming in the distance, a makeshift graveyard in which handmade crosses lean
precariously in the dirt, a church, and finally images of other homes like the Quinteros’. The
barely standing structures are remarkably small, dust swirls everywhere even as clean laundry
hangs on the lines in the yards, and the village quickly emerges as an economically-depressed
community despite the presence of the mine. While we see these images onscreen we also hear
Esperanza’s voice for the first time as she begins to narrate her story “that has no beginning”
(Salt of the Earth). She immediately invokes the transnational and imperialistic history of
relations between the United States and Mexico when she sets the film in contested land: “In
these arroyos my great-grandfather raised cattle before the Anglos ever came. Our roots go deep
in this place, deeper than the pines, deeper than the mine shaft. This is my village. When I was
a child it was called San Marcos. The Anglos changed it to Zinc Town. Zinc Town, New
Mexico, U.S.A.” As the shot shifts to a close up of Ramón working alone with dynamite in the
mine, Esperanza tells us that her husband has been laboring for the mining company for nearly
two decades: “Eighteen years my husband has given to that mine, living half his life in darkness.
The land where the mine stands – that was owned by my husband’s own grandfather. Now it
belongs to the company.” Although this land once belonged to Ramón’s family, although he was
born on it when it was already part of the United States and is thus an American citizen, and
although he repeatedly refers to himself as Mexican-American throughout the film, his Mexican
heritage renders him foreign and inferior in the eyes of his Anglo foreman. As we see in
Ramón’s first moments onscreen, he struggles against the vehicles of institutionalized racism
that refuse to see him as both Mexican and American and that use his Mexican heritage to
threaten his position within the company.
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Just after Esperanza tells us that Ramón has been in the mines for eighteen years, we see
another quick close-up of his face, a dynamite explosion, and then a soot-covered Ramon
storming out of the mine followed by several other Mexican-American and Anglo miners. After
nearly losing his life, Ramón angrily confronts Barton, the Anglo foreman, and demands that the
miners be allowed to work in pairs when handling dynamite or he will stop working. Barton,
who faces Ramón with a smirk on his face, is eager to attribute the accident to faulty equipment:
“Heard you had a little trouble, Quintero. Defective fuse? Well, you’re all in one piece. So,
what’s the beef?” Ramón is quick to correct him and he threatens to report him to the company
Supervisor: “You know the beef. This new rule of yours, that we work alone. We’re taking it
up with the Super.” Barton reminds Ramón that the Super is in talks with the union negotiating
committee and as Ramon tries to push passed Barton to the building in which the talks are being
held, Barton physically blocks him and smugly informs him that, “Super’s the one made the rule.
He ain’t gonna give you no helper.” It is at this moment that Ramón threatens a work stoppage
and also at this moment that Barton reveals himself as a racist. After Ramón declares that the
Super will help “if he wants [the miners] to go blasting,” Barton tells him to read his contract, or
to “get someone to read it for him.” Implying that Ramón either cannot read or, more likely, that
he cannot read English, Barton positions Ramón as a foreigner despite his family’s ties to the
land. And after numerous other miners echo Ramón’s concerns and lament the “blood in that
mine” from their dead friends who had to work alone and who had no one to check the fuses or
to warn them when a blast was about to occur, Barton threatens Ramón with his job: “You work
alone, savvy? You can’t handle the job, I’ll find someone who can.” When Ramón demands to
know if his replacement will be “a scab,” Barton replies that it will be, “An American.” The
invocation of Ramon’s ethnicity as evidence of his foreignness creates a demarcation between
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“American” and “un-American” that is undermined when we consider Esperanza’s opening
narrative. The land on which the mine sits once belonged to Ramón’s family, and Ramón
consistently self-identifies as Mexican-American. Barton resorts to stereotypes about Mexican-
Americans as uneducated and inferior because of his foreignness, and these stereotypes fuel the
racist violence we see in subsequent scenes. But Ramón, Esperanza, and the film’s other
Mexican-American actors actively challenge these stereotypes while also representing their
Mexican-American cultural identity.
After negotiation talks fail, union members are faced with the difficult decision of
whether or not to strike. In the meantime, the Mexican-American women of the village are faced
with their own hardships. They want the men to include modernized sanitation in their list of
demands since they are exhausted from having to chop wood all day in order to heat water for
cooking, cleaning, and laundry. As Esperanza and her neighbors hang laundry in their
backyards, they discuss their desire for equality in sanitation when Luz, one of the miner’s
wives, suggests that they “ought to be in the woodchoppers’ union” since so much of their day is
dedicated to the backbreaking labor necessary to heat their water: “Chop wood for breakfast.
Chop wood to wash his clothes. Chop wood, heat the iron. Chop wood, scrub the floor. Chop
wood, cook his dinner.” The women want their husbands to demand that they be granted the
same indoor bathrooms and hot running water that their Anglo counterparts enjoy, and their
desire for modern plumbing reflects a subtle but important departure from the “ancient ways”
depicted in The Forgotten Village. At the root of their demands is the desire for equality, and for
the wives this equality will come in a form of modernization and progress that they would
welcome into their homes. Rather than being forcibly dragged into the modern era, the women
in Salt of the Earth want to fight for this progress, want to enjoy the benefits of modernization
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that have been denied them by Anglo company owners. They have no interest in continuing to
do things as they have always been done. Instead, they want to experience the benefits that
modern plumbing can bring them. It would make their daily lives more bearable by easing their
workload, but it would also symbolize Mexican-American equality within the broader American
community symbolized by the mine. Something as innocuous as plumbing, it seems, does much
to combat the stereotypes of Mexican-Americans as backward-thinking.
After yet another miner is injured following a dynamite blast, the miners flatly refuse to
work and are faced with the difficult decision of whether or not to strike. The union members
meet to discuss their course of action, and a Mexican-American miner named Charley Vidal
speaks to the other union members in Spanish while Esperanza narrates in English. He declares
that their demands all fall under the rubric of equality and that “the mine owners would stop at
nothing to keep them from getting equality.” The union eventually decides to strike, enacting a
method of political activity that sociologist George Sánchez identifies as an important tool in
cultivating a Mexican-American cultural identity. In his seminal study Becoming Mexican
American, Sánchez maintains that Mexican-Americans “entering adulthood in the late 1930’s
and early 1940’s became acutely aware of America’s lack of tolerance” due in large part to the
repatriation campaigns that swept through Mexican-American communities during and after the
Depression (12). As a result, “many became more active in American unions and struggles for
civil rights,” not in an effort to maintain “Mexican nationalism” but rather in an effort to “forg[e]
[…] a new identity as ethnic Americans” (12). Thus, we can understand the miners’ willingness
to participate in a union strike as a reflection of their Mexican-American identity that is firmly
focused on their future in the United States. Determined to win equal rights and status, the
miners participate in what Sánchez identifies as the “upsurge in labor union activity among
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Chicanos” (229) that gained traction in the 1930’s and continued to serve as a tool for political
influence in subsequent decades. The strike is not about looking back, not about differentiating
themselves as Mexicans. The strike is about looking forward and about securing their place in
American culture as Mexican Americans.
After the men declare a strike and take to the picket line to prevent “scabs” from taking
their jobs, some of the miners report that Anglo workers are trying to cross the picket line in
order to secure temporary work at the mine. After he gives chase (and discovers that the “scabs”
are actually Mexican-American), Ramón is promptly arrested for assault despite the fact that he
does not strike the other man, and is thrown into the back of a patrol car just as Esperanza goes
into labor. In a montage sequence in which images of Ramón as the victim of state-sanctioned
violence are overlaid by images of Esperanza enduring a difficult labor without medical
attention, we see both husband and wife stripped of their rights because of their ethnicity.
The two Anglo officers who arrest Ramón pull over under a clearing of trees and climb in
the back of the patrol car, flanking him on either side in the back seat. As one officer
methodically puts on a pair of black gloves, they tell Ramón that they “want to have a talk […]
‘bout why [he] slugged that fellow back there.” When Ramón protests that, “That’s a lie,” the
officer strikes Ramon in the face with his gloved hand and says to him: “Now you know that
ain’t no way to talk to a white man.” As Ramon hangs his head, the shot shifts back to the picket
line where the miners and their wives scramble to prepare Esperanza for childbirth. Shifting
back to Ramón in the back of the patrol car, we hear one deputy say to the other, “Hey, Vance.
You said this bull-fighter was full of pepper. He don’t look so peppery now,” to which the other
deputy responds “Oh, but he is. He’s full of chilies, this boy.” After punching Ramón in the
stomach, he continues: “He likes it hot. His chiquita makes it good and hot for him – don’t she,
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Pancho?” As he punches Ramón in the stomach again, the other deputy looks on and smiles,
clearly taking pleasure in taunting Ramón about his wife and about his ethnicity.
The action shifts again back to Esperanza and as one of the miners (the man who was
injured in the second blast) approaches the sheriff to ask for a doctor the sheriff refuses to help,
declaring that he is not “an ambulance driver.” The miner pleads with the sheriff to just pick up
the company doctor since the picketers do not have a car, but the sheriff reminds him that the
“Company doctor won’t come to no picket line.” As the injured miner struggles on his crutches
to rejoin the other miners and their wives, we see the men carrying Esperanza in a blanket, her
faced wracked with pain. They realize that they cannot get her home in time to give birth, so
they decide she will have to deliver in the small shack that they have set up at the picket line
from which to serve coffee to the men. They shot shifts back to Ramón in the back of the patrol
car, doubled over pain from being beaten. Vance grabs him by the hair, demanding: “Hold your
head up, Pancho. That ain’t no way to sit.” As he pulls Ramón up we see blood trickling from
Ramón’s mouth, and when he angrily declares, “I’ll outlive you all, you lice” Vance begins to
punch him repeatedly in the stomach as the camera flashes back and forth between Ramón and
Esperanza. As she writhes in pain and prays to God that her child be healthy, Ramón exclaims,
“Oh my God” as he suffers blow after blow to his stomach. He calls out for Esperanza, she calls
out for Ramón, and as the scene concludes his bloodied and beaten face is superimposed on her
face as she cries out in pain during her contractions. We learn from Esperanza that Ramón
spends a week in the hospital recovering from the beating and then a month in jail on trumped up
charges of “assault and resisting arrest,” but we also learn that she survived the difficult labor to
deliver a healthy baby boy.
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This scene articulates in direct ways the frightening consequences of state-sanctioned
violence and intercultural interaction. Ramón is victimized by Anglo deputies because of his
ethnicity and Esperanza is victimized by the Anglo sheriff who refuses to help secure medical
care, and while the violence they both endure is difficult to see onscreen, the scene succeeds in
rendering the Anglo characters as mindless villains as they resort to stereotypes about the
Mexican-American miners. The deputies’ repeated references to Ramón as “Pancho” imply that
they are uneducated, backward-thinking racists, and the sheriff’s refusal to help Esperanza
relegates her to delivering her baby in a shack without a doctor to help her through the painful
process. The fact that Esperanza and the miners’ wives want a doctor to assist with the birth
offers yet another example of the ways in which the Mexican-American characters in Salt of the
Earth challenge the stereotypes cultivated in The Forgotten Village, and Ramón’s willful
declaration that he will outlive the deputies suggests that he will also outlive the outdated
stereotypes under which they operate. The ways in which Ramón and Esperanza respond to the
violence leveled at them because of their ethnicity suggests that they will forge ahead,
determined to conquer those who articulate the negative images of Mexican-Americans that have
long plagued them.
Baker contends that in their efforts to dispel these negative images, to let Mexican-
Americans give voice to their own lived experience, Biberman and Wilson fell prey to a certain
“romanticism” about Mexican-Americans that bordered on the essentialism with which I charge
Steinbeck. She comments on the fact that “both men referred to ‘the people’ without any direct
or personal connection to them” and that they “resembled many writers on the Left who casually
or effusively spoke of ‘the people’ as a group that possessed a singleness of purpose and for
whom these writers claimed to speak” (208). While she is willing to concede that Wilson “did
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not apply preconceived ideas of how an oppressed minority feels or how it should act,” she also
argues that the “the very project of distilling an essence speaks of an illusory homogeneity”
(208). It is true that as “outsiders,” Biberman and Wilson could not possibly write from a place
of experience, and focusing on a miners’ strike aimed at gaining “equality” does reflect a belief
in a certain single purpose for the Mexican-American miners and their wives, but I would argue
that the film resists essentializing Mexican-Americans in several key ways. For example, while
Steinbeck announces in the preface to his script that he viewed the villagers of Santiago and their
story as a pathway toward understanding Mexican culture in general, Biberman and Wilson
name no such project for their film. The story they present is about Mexican-American miners
struggling for fair wages and working conditions, but the film does not announce itself as
representing all of Mexican-American culture. And I would argue that the film allows for
nuances and complexities in its Mexican-American characters, particularly in the character of
Ramón, which challenge the claims of essentialism leveled by Baker.
In an early scene, Ramón is unwilling to see that Anglo mine-owners exploit both
Mexican-American and Anglo miners by perpetuating discriminatory work practices. As he
reiterates his demands for equality, Frank Barnes, the Anglo union leader, reminds him that,
“Equality’s the one thing the bosses can’t afford. The biggest club they have over the Anglo
locals is, ‘Well – at least you get more than the Mexicans.’” Ramón is barely willing to concede:
“Okay, so discrimination hurts the Anglo, too” he offers. But when he angrily declares, “but it
hurts me more,” he negates the possibility of a shared struggle leading to a shared solution.
While discrimination does, in a sense, hurt him more as of the victim of conspicuous racism, his
anger occludes for him the possibility of a collective response to exploitation that impacts Anglo
workers alongside Mexican-American workers, something his Mexican-American brothers do
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seem willing to consider in a scene that occurs in Ramón’s home as the men discuss tensions
between the union and the mine-owners while playing cards.
After commenting on the increase in police brutality against union leaders as a way to
provoke a reaction from them for which they can be arrested, talk turns to Ramón’s views of
Anglos and his Mexican-American friends try to make him see that he engages in essentialism
himself by refusing to see the difference between Anglo bosses and Anglo workers. Sal, one of
the union leaders, chides Ramón for the fact that he “lump[s] them all together,” and he reminds
Ramón that if he wants to climb the ranks in the union he has to be willing to recognize that not
all Anglos are deserving of his distrust. When Ramón rebuts with the statement that Frank
Barnes “is a guest in my house, isn’t he?,” Sal informs him that this is not sufficient evidence of
his willingness to accept that Anglos are as individualized as are Mexican-Americans: “Sure,
but you want the truth? You’re even suspicious of him.” Surprisingly, Ramón does not deny
this, and he says to everyone in the room that Frank’s “got a few things to learn about our
people.” The other men are uncomfortable with this statement since Frank has been working
tirelessly on behalf of the union, but Frank wants to hear Ramón’s reasoning and invites him to
“Go on. Spill it.” Ramón responds by outlining the ways in which Mexican-American union
members are excluded from strategy decisions and he suggests that even Frank is guilty of
stereotypical thinking: “Well, you’re the organizer. You work out strike strategy – and most of
the time you’re dead right. But when you figure everything the rank-an-file’s to do, down to the
last detail, you don’t give us anything to think about. You afraid we’re too lazy to take the
initiative?” Ramón’s desire to become more involved in strategic planning reflects the increased
political activity Sánchez attributes to a newly-forged Mexican-American identity, and what he
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is really campaigning for is an increased voice in the decisions that will affect him and his fellow
miners.
Frank offers a genuine denial that he thinks the Mexican-American miners are “lazy,”
and while Ramón accepts that this is most likely true, he does chastise Frank for a lack of
cultural understanding about the men with whom he works: “Maybe not. But there’s another
thing . . .like when you came in tonight – I heard you ask your wife, ‘Who’s that? His
grandfather?” Ramón gestures toward a painting of Benito Juárez hanging in his parlor, and as
the camera focuses on Juárez’s face, Ramón says to Frank, “That’s Juárez – the father of
Mexico. If I didn’t know a picture of George Washington, you’d say I was an awful dumb
Mexican.” The other Mexican-American union members are quick to defend Frank, but he
realizes that there is truth to what Ramón has just said: “No. He’s right. I’ve got a lot to learn.”
This exchange offers two educational opportunities. Frank realizes that his union efforts on
behalf of Mexican-American workers must be accompanied by an understanding of the nuances
and complexities of their culture and that he must allow those workers to be active in the
decision-making that will impact their lives, and Ramón begins to see that that he cannot
discriminate against Anglos based on their ethnicity. And I would argue that what the film
achieves in this scene is a representation of Ramón that challenges Baker’s characterization of
the film as romanticizing Mexican-Americans. Ramón is a flawed protagonist. Although he is
propelled by the desire for racial equality and fair labor practices, he is also guilty of racial
essentialism that clouds his ability to see the power that could come from Anglos and Mexican-
Americans struggling together. He is ruled as much by his anger as he is by his sense of social
justice, and he spends the majority of the film suspicious of those around him. Unyielding and
unwilling to compromise, Ramón emerges as a complex and at-times frustrating character, and it
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is not until the final scene of the film that he achieves a more inclusive socio-cultural
perspective.
When the company tries to evict the Quinteros from their home, they wait until Ramón
has gone hunting with some of the other striking miners. Word spreads quickly amongst those in
the village and then spreads to surrounding villages. The sheriffs believe that by evicting Ramón
and Esperanza they can send a message to other Mexican-American miners that they should give
up the strike and return to work and they welcome the presence of the Quintero’s neighbors since
they believe they will be frightened into submission, but the opposite occurs. Instead, Anglo
workers and Mexican-American workers, Anglo families and Mexican-American families rally
in support of the Quinteros and prevent the eviction.
Ramón returns from hunting to find crowds of people standing outside of his house and
the sheriff and his deputies carelessly tossing the Quinteros’ personal belongings into the dirt,
including the portrait of Juárez that once hung in their home. As more and more laborers stream
in in cars and on foot, both the sheriff and Ramón scan the crowd and that see Mexican-
Americans and Anglos have assembled around the home. And it is at this moment that Ramón
experiences a shift in his thinking. He realizes that the eviction signifies the company’s last-
ditch effort to break the striking miners and that, as he tells Esperanza, “They have given up
trying to break the picket line.” When he declares that, “Now we can all fight together – all of
us,” he finally realizes that a collective, inclusive effort is necessary to combat the discrimination
that has hurt all of them. Enid Sefcovic writes of Salt of the Earth that, “The story […] depicts
how Mexican-American and Anglo families overcome economic jealousies, ethnic differences,
and sexual inequality to create an environment where individuals can test their strengths and
creativity by working together as equals for the community good” (340), a sentiment Ramón
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articulates in his final lines. After telling Esperanza that she and the other women should return
the items to the home as the deputies bring them out, more and more cars stream in and the
miners recognize workers from other unions who have come to support the Quinteros. The
sheriff and company owners eventually realize that this is a battle they cannot win, that their
attempts to intimidate Mexican-American miners and to drive a wedge between Anglo and
Mexican-American workers has failed, and the company representative decides that, “Maybe we
better settle this thing.” After the defeated sheriff and his men depart, Ramón climbs onto his
porch and addresses the crowd before him: “Thanks . . . sisters . . .and brothers.[…] You were
right. Together we can push everything up with us as we go.”
Ramón’s transformation is an important moment in the discussion about self-
representation in the film. He has to arrive at his transformed view about Anglos on his own,
and it is appropriate that he is the one to articulate this transformation. Rather than refusing to
move forward in ways that will be beneficial to his cause, he eventually realizes that he must be
willing to adjust, that he must be willing to look forward to a future that includes the efforts of
Anglo union members and miners. But this realization does not come at the expense of his
Mexican-American cultural identity. Rather, as Balthaser suggests, the film articulates the idea
“that Mexican-American cultural heritage is something to celebrate and that it plays an active
role in their strike victory […]” (369). And this is an identity that Mexican-Americans have the
chance to represent themselves onscreen. From the use of local union members as actors to
deferral to Mexican-Americans about the script, Salt of the Earth represents a remarkable
moment for Mexican-Americans on film. Even Baker is willing to concede that, while “Wilson
essentialized Mexican Americans and workers, [he also] deferred to them. In the context of
producing a script, he attempted to integrate their understanding of their history with his ability
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to write a story” (208). While the script might be Wilson’s and the aesthetic of the film might be
Biberman’s, I would argue that the story of the film is the Mexican-American miners’ and that it
offers a unique moment of self-representation in American film.
These ideas of collectivity and self-representation are not ones that were easily-accepted
outside of the New Mexico town in which the film is set. An active campaign to suppress the
film emerged during production that included everything from deportation to intimidation of
distribution companies. According to Biberman’s account of the film’s production, the Motion
Picture Industry Council sent a member to investigate the film that they labeled as Communist
propaganda, and as Baker writes, in an effort to halt production Buck Harris, the public relations
director for the Screen Actors Guild “suggested that one ‘positive step’ would be to have the
Immigration and Naturalization Service ‘check on’ Mexican actress Rosaura Revueltas’s
citizenship status to see if she could be charged with violation of her visitor’s visa” (225).
Revueltas was obviously essential to the film, and Harris knew that her absence would make it
impossible to complete filming. She was arrested and deported because of an administrative
oversight that occurred when she legally entered the country, and Biberman, Jarrico, and Wilson
were forced to move some production to Mexico to finish the film.
Others in the Hollywood establishment joined efforts to suppress the film once it was
completed. Roy Brewer, the international representative for the International Alliance of
Theatrical and Stage Employees and Moving Picture Operators (IATSE) “pledged to use union
ties to prevent Salt’s exhibition in the United States” (Lorence 83), and Howard Hughes
“outlined in meticulous detail the steps that could be taken to kill the film during the post-
production process” (83). These steps included refusal to assist IPC in any way in the film’s
production, increased investigations into IPC’s applications for film equipment, and an appeal to
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Washington to prevent the film from being exported “to Mexico or anywhere else” (qtd. in
Lorence 83). According to Jarrico, Hughes’s plan was successful in its attempts to hamper
production and distribution of the film and “the struggling company encountered trouble at every
step mentioned” by Hughes (83).
The film also fell prey to the wrath of politicians. California Congressman Donald
Jackson attacked Salt of the Earth on the floor of Congress and he labeled it as “a new weapon
for Russia deliberately designed to inflame racial hatred and to depict the United States as the
enemy of all colored peoples” (qtd. in Biberman 86). Under the guise of concerns about U.S.
foreign relations and the very idea of democracy, Jackson maintained that “if this film is shown
in Latin-America, Asia, and India it will do incalculable harm, not only to the United States but
to the cause of free people everywhere” (86). He vowed to “do everything in my power to
prevent the showing of this Communist-made film in the theatres of America” (86). In the face
of this powerful campaign to suppress the film, Biberman and Jarrico were able to complete
filming but it was shown in just a handful of theaters and it never reached the audience they had
hoped for.
Accusations of anti-American sentiment in the film reveal both a misunderstanding of the
film’s story and the exclusion of Mexican-Americans from ideas of what it means to be
American, and this is precisely the struggle the film sought to illuminate. Biberman identified
the characters in the film as America’s “older blacklisted.” He writes the following of the
Mexican-Americans on which the film is based: “We had thought ourselves as the blacklisted.
And we were the veriest newcomers. Culturally and socially, as well as politically and
economically, vast numbers of our American people had been blacklisted for centuries. Had
they not been, we might never have been” (Biberman 43-44). His efforts to tell the stories of
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these “blacklisted” Americans appealed greatly to Chacón, who believed that “freedom of the
screen for ordinary people to tell their stories in dramatic form would destroy the walls between
people” (Lorence 99). Of course, the key here is that ordinary people be allowed to tell their
own stories, that their voices be the ones to articulate their struggles, their lived experiences,
their triumphs and their faults. And I would argue that Salt of the Earth succeeds in this where
The Forgotten Village fails. Mexican-Americans in Salt of the Earth desire modernization, are
invested in a Mexican-American identity marked by increased political activity, and defy ethnic
and cultural stereotypes. And while it is true that Biberman, Jarrico, and Wilson are indeed
present in the film, it is a film that privileges the perspective of its Mexican-American characters
and that offers the chance for self-representation so often denied them.
An examination of The Forgotten Village and Salt of the Earth in relation to each other is
quite revelatory in terms of the opposition between the two films. Whereas the former reflects
the tendency to both essentialize and denigrate Mexican culture despite the filmmakers’
protestations that their aim was to simply present what they witnessed, the latter claims no such
neutrality yet succeeds in presenting Mexican-American culture in ways that resist
generalizations and stereotypes. And central to this distinction is the opportunity for self-
representation that one film denies and that the other champions. The Forgotten Village mutes
the voices of its subjects in numerous ways and offers no forum in which they might address the
criticisms being leveled at them by the filmmakers. They are consistently presented as
provincial, uneducated, and dangerously rooted in the past. Conversely, Salt of the Earth was
created with the idea of self-representation as the genesis of its production. Firmly committed to
creating a narrative space in which Mexican-Americans could present their own experiences, the
film succeeds where The Forgotten Village fails.
212

Additionally, Salt of the Earth offers a visual representation of Mexican-American
culture that is decidedly at odds with the vision of Mexican culture in The Forgotten Village.
The latter frames its story as a battle between tradition and modernization as it unfolds within the
confines of a single village and the culture it represents. But Salt of the Earth addresses notions
of modernity in ways that position them as an important part of Mexican-American cultural
identity. The characters in Salt of the Earth are resolute in declaring both their American
citizenship and their Mexican heritage. Concerns about equitable labor practices, fair access to
modern amenities, and the opportunity for political involvement are bound up with their cultural
self-identification, and as such the film offers a representation that is decidedly more nuanced
than that presented by The Forgotten Village. Echoing the texts in the preceding chapters of
this project that inscribe a burgeoning Mexican-American identity, Salt of the Earth visually
articulates the notion of a cultural identity that is both Mexican and American, both acutely
aware of its history and invested in the conditions of modernization that are vital to its future.

213

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Asset Metadata

Creator Bremmer, Jessica (author)

Core Title Self-representation, cultural formation, and Mexican-American modernism

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program English

Publication Date 11/05/2012

Defense Date 10/11/2012

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Américo Paredes,Anita Brenner,Josefina Niggli,Mexican-American modernism,OAI-PMH Harvest,Salt of the earth,The forgotten village

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Rowe, John Carlos (committee chair), Deverell, William F. (committee member), Handley, William R. (committee member)

Creator Email bremmer@usc.edu,bremmerj@hotmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c3-108860

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