ABSTRACT
At the heart of this essay is an extended consideration of John Sayles's film Lone Star (1996). Sayles's masterpiece provides both the impetus and part of the content for my argument concerning recent and hopeful changes in certain American identities. Before film became their primary mode of discourse, these identities and the politics of racialized sexuality they reflect were first fully articulated in nineteenth-century dime novels of the West, many of which were, like Lone Star, set in Texas. A now very distant discursive cousin of the Sayles film, called, in fact, Little Lone Star (1886) and written by one Sam Hall featured, for example, Anita, “a physically precocious” young Mexican woman living on a Texas hacienda “whose passions and complexion are compared to the red-hot volcanoes of her native Mexico.” She is being threatened with rape by Caldelas the Coyote, a vicious, degenerate Mexican bandit, until she is rescued by a strong, clean-cut, fair-haired Anglo-Texan cowboy named William Waldron. Anita reciprocates the sexual interest of the “fair-haired hero.” 1 Identities like Anita's, Caldelas's, and Waldron's were on display again and again throughout the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries in fiction, film, song, and even television advertising. Who can forget the Frito Bandito, cartoon cousin of Caldelas the Coyote? From them we have inherited a potent and perduring American cultural iconography of Anglo-American-Mexican relations that because of its demographics and history has a special intensity in Texas, but certainly resounds in other parts of the U.S. West.
