ABSTRACT

Early 1960s westerns about Native Americans showed once again that inserting critiques of colonialism and racism into genres designed to celebrate white heroism could result in ambivalent, even politically incoherent films. Although critics have often noted a resemblance between westerns and imperial adventure films, these observations have often focused more on the similarities between film genres than on the commonality of the colonial history. Although histories of Native American activism focus on the late 1960s and early 1970s, new movements arose in the early 1960s, inspired by the African-American civil rights struggle. In 1960 some important films examined the historical relationship between Americans and Mexicans. If the U.S.–Mexican relationship is in one sense a rivalry between two settler states formed through revolution against European colonizers, the inequalities between the two neighbors give the relationship colonial overtones. Filming in Mexico, Huston evoked the life of the pioneers on the desolate plains of the Texas panhandle.