The ambiguity that is a result of the mixing of cultures and races is "demystified" as the lecture notes imply mainly because the film refuses to stereotype. Right and wrong are not virtues obtained by any race in particular -- but by men and women who prefer not to be overcome by the strictures of profiles: Vargas, for example, pursues justice not because he is mestizo but because he is a just man. Quinlan, on the other hand, is a white man with a past (implicitly filled with dalliances and minglings within the Mexican community). Quinlan's obsession with the Mexicans seems to stem from some kind of guilt -- which he himself barely acknowledges. Although he admits to planting evidence and framing the Mexicans, he asserts bitterly that they are nonetheless "guilty, guilty." Quinlan himself escapes judgment even though he is killed and all we know of him in the end is that he was "some...
The real worth of the individual is somewhere in the heart -- which, of course, is inscrutable to the last.
45). There are also important racial issues that are examined throughout "A Touch of Evil"; these are accomplished through what Nerrico (1992) terms "visual representations of 'indeterminate' spaces, both physical and corporeal"; the "bordertown and the half-breed, la frontera y el mestizo: a space and a subject whose identities are not fractured but fracture itself, where hyphens, bridges, border stations, and schizophrenia are the rule rather than the exception" (Nericcio,
Treatment of Women in Mexican Culture The choices for women have, across both time and space, almost always been far more constrained than the choices of men. They have in fact all too often been reduced to a single pair of opposing choices: The pure or the corrupt, the white or the black, the chaste or the sexual - the virgin or the whore. Mexican culture is certainly not exempt from this
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