ABSTRACT
When Miguel Vargas, a Mexican detective improbably played by Charlton Heston in Orson Welles’s A Touch of Evil, makes the statement above to his white American bride (played by Janet Leigh), they have suffered extreme indignities on both sides of the border dividing the fi ctitious town of Los Robles, the “Paris of the [U.S.-Mexican] Border.” Ironically enough, Vargas has earlier boasted about their two countries’ history as good neighbors: “One of the longest borders on earth is right between your country and mine. Open border. Fourteen hundred miles without a single machine gun in place.”
