Lone star history and significance

Lone Star

A significant theme in Lone Star is history. Too often history can become a burden; it can mean to us what we narrowly allow it to mean. Humans have often felt compelled to act as if they are influenced only from the past rather than from the present. Express your thoughts and feelings, regarding this statement. Be sure to offer examples.

Lone Star (1996) is a film about a colonized region in the borderlands of the Southwest, which were annexed to the United States under the provisions of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848. When Abraham Lincoln was in Congress, he described the Mexican War as an act of aggression and conquest against a sovereign nation, and many people at that time and later agreed with him. As a result of the war, the northern half of Mexico was incorporated into the United States, including Colorado, New Mexico, California and South Texas. In this borderland that John Sayles named "Frontera" and "Rio County" a "corrupt and racist system tries to enforce its legal and social boundaries, as well as its empire" (Torres 105). This region of the country has always been notoriously corrupt, as exemplified by how Lyndon Johnson won his senatorial election in 1948 thanks to the fake ballots provided by the Anglo political boss of south Texas, and was known to his colleagues as 'Landslide Lyndon'. In the movie, the system is enforced by a succession of patriarchs and bosses like Charlie Wade and Buddy Deeds, who assumed power after murdering Wade and burying his remains on the old army base. His son Same Wade succeeds him as sheriff, but the old Anglos regard him as too uncertain and troubled, and describe him as "all hat and no cattle" (Torres 106).

In the movie and real life, the Mexican-American inhabitants outnumber whites in this region by ten-to-one, yet there has always been a hierarchical racial caste system in this region (Lone Star Lecture Notes 2011). Aside from the small Anglo ruling elite, typified by sheriffs like the brutally racist Charlie Wade and his "subtle but every bit as controlling successor Buddy Deeds, light-skinned, middle and upper class Mexicans have always looked down upon the darker and more indigenous-appearing lower classes (Torres 107). This is hardly unique to Texas, of course, but reflects the caste system in Mexico and the rest of Latin America going back to the original conquest. Mercedes describes herself as white of 'Spanish' and despises the 'Indians' and lower class migrants from Mexico, and can aspire to upper class status because of the restaurant that she owns. To be sure, she originally was an undocumented worker as well and only obtained the capital to open the business because of her secret affair with Buddy Wade. Sam's successor as sheriff will be another light-skinned, middle-class Mexican-American who shares the same values as the dominant Anglo culture and can be counted on to uphold the "existing power structure" (Torres 108). For the lower class Mexicans, discrimination and segregation are the norm, symbolized by the destruction of one of their communities called Perdido (lost) in order to make an artificial lake for the enjoyment of the town's elite.

Question 2. The Border that separates the United States from Mexico is less a physical reality than it is a political one. The border is also a psychological reality. Both act to separate families, nations, communities, and identities. At this level the notion of border is a metaphor for transgression. Explain this concept using examples from Lone Star and from the assigned reading.

Perhaps the central transgression of the film is Sam Wade's affair with Pilar Cruz, although neither of them realized until the end that they are half-brother and half-sister, and have therefore committed incest. John Sayles did not add the complication of children resulting from this affair since Pilar's medical condition makes it impossible for her to have any more. Even so, one of his goals in Lone Star was to end "all illusions about our separations as nations, races, cultures, and classes -- thus the sanctity of borders in challenged" (Torres 122). Her mother Mercedes also transgressed racial borders with Buddy, but as always in the past this was kept completely hidden. So it was when Southern slave owners had children with the black women they owned, or with the mestizo offspring produced by the Spanish aristocrats and Conquistadores. Even the existence of these mixed-race offspring was a challenge to the strict racial hierarchies and boundaries that existed in the past, no matter that they had no power at all in the larger society.