Badmen, Bandits, and Folk Heroes

The Ambivalence of Mexican American Identity in Literature and Film

Juan J. Alonzo

• Publisher: University of Arizona Press
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780816528127, 9780816528684
• eBook ISBN: 9780816545445
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Hispanic American Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Badmen, Bandits, and Folk Heroes is a comparative study of the literary and cinematic representation of Mexican American masculine identity from early twentieth-century adventure stories and movie Westerns through contemporary self-representations by Chicano/a writers and filmmakers. In this deeply compelling book, Juan J. Alonzo proposes a reconsideration of the early stereotypical depictions of Mexicans in fiction and film: rather than viewing stereotypes as unrelentingly negative, Alonzo presents them as part of a complex apparatus of identification and disavowal. Furthermore, Alonzo reassesses Chicano/a self-representation in literature and film, and argues that the Chicano/a expression of identity is characterized less by essentialism than by an acknowldgement of the contingent status of present-day identity formations.

Alonzo opens his provocative study with a fresh look at the adventure stories of Stephen Crane and the silent Western movies of D. W. Griffith. He also investigates the conflation of the greaser, the bandit, and the Mexican revolutionary into one villainous figure in early Western movies and, more broadly, traces the development of the badman in Westerns. He newly interrogates the writings of Américo Paredes regarding the makeup of Mexican masculinity, and productively trains his analytic eye on the recent films of Jim Mendiola and the contemporary poetry of Evangelina Vigil.

Throughout Badmen, Bandits, and Folk Heroes, Alonzo convincingly demonstrates how fiction and films that formerly appeared one-dimensional in their treatment of Mexicans and Mexican Americans actually offer surprisingly multifarious and ambivalent representations. At the same time, his valuation of indeterminacy, contingency, and hybridity in contemporary cultural production creates new possibilities for understanding identity formation.

Table of contents

• Contents
• List of Figures
• Introduction: Ambivalence and Contingency in the Representation of Mexican Identity
• 1. The Greaser in Stephen Crane’s Mexican Stories and D. W. Griffith’s Early Westerns
• 2. Greasers, Bandits, and Revolutionaries: The Conflation ofMexican Identity Representation, 1910–1920
• 3. The Western’s Ambivalence and the Mexican Badman
• 4. Stereotype, Idealism, and Contingency in the Revolutionary’s Depiction
• 5. Gregorio Cortez in the Chicano/a Imaginary and American Popular Culture
• 6. Reformulating Hybrid Identities and Re-inscribing History in Contemporary Chicano/a Literature and Film
• Epilogue: The Return of the Stereotypical Repressed: Why Stereotypes Still Matter
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index