ABSTRACT
In his study Mexico as Seen by the Foreign Cinema [México visto por el cine extranjero], Emilio García Riera traces the fi rst large-scale representation of Mexico on fi lm to the spate of short-reel Westerns at the end of the fi rst decade of the twentieth century. The unique landscape and architecture of the U.S. Southwest, García Riera writes, lent itself to the production of early Westerns and at the same time shaped the Western as a genre with distinctly Mexican attributes. In the making of such fi lms, Mexican and Mexican-American labor was essential. The open nature of the U.S.- Mexico borderlands provided U.S. and European fi lmmakers with a constant fl ow of on-location fi lm sets complete with extras-“vaqueros and cowboys, Mexican bandits and gringos, Mexican rural police and [Texas] rangers, Yaqui indians and Apaches, rancheros and cattlemen”—character types that appeared regularly in the popular fi lms of Bronco Billy, Tom Mix and William S. Hart, three pioneers of the early Western (21).1 The free fl ow of human capital in southern California particularly benefi ted directors like D. W. Griffi th, who began to base their productions in the region. One of Griffi th’s favorite themes was the Mexican and Spanish heritage of California, epitomized by his 1910 adaptation of Helen Hunt Jackson’s famous nineteenth century novel Ramona; starring Mary Pickford, the fi lm helped to crystallize the borderlands as a site of kindred otherness. As García Riera notes, “more than any other state bordering with Mexico, California gave the fi rst U.S. fi lm industry settings with the double advantage of being at once exotic and their own” (36).2
