Can a Mexican writer be the best of Hollywood Latino stereotypes?
The misrepresentation of Mexicans on screen is not only a long-standing problem; it is original sin. And he has an unsurprising Adam: DW Griffith. He is best known for awakening the Ku Klux Klan with his 1915 epic The Birth of a Nation. Much less examined is how Griffiths early works also helped give American filmmakers a language to translate Mexicans with. Two of his first six films were so-called greasers, single-reel films where Mexican-Americans were racialized as inherently criminal and played by whites (a third film replaced Mexican bandits with Spanish bandits). Its 1908 effort The Greasers Gauntlet is the first film to use insult in its title. Griffith shot at least eight films on the East Coast before heading to Southern California in early 1910 for better times. The new setting allowed Griffith to double down on his Mexican obsession. He used the missions of San Gabriel and San Juan Capistrano as backdrops for melodramas embossed with Spanish Fantasy Heritage, the white California myth that romanticized the past of Mexican states while discriminating against Mexicans of the present. In films such as his 1910 shorts The Thread of Destiny, In Old California (the first film set in what would become Hollywood) and The Two Brothers, Griffith codified cinematic Mexican characters and themes that persist. The reprobate father. The holy mother. The capricious son. The idea that Mexicans are doomed forever because theyre, well, Mexicans. Griffith based his plots not on how modern Mexicans actually lived, but rather on how whites thought they did it. That presumption almost got Griffith a beating from angry Latinos. As described in Robert M. Hendersons 1970 book DW Griffith: The Years at Biograph, the director was hosting a religious procession in San Juan Capistrano for The Two Brothers when a large crowd suddenly rushed in and rushed the actors because they felt the scene was laughing at them. The company rushed to their hotel where locals waited outside for hours. Only the intercession of the Spanish-speaking hotelier stopped a certain riot. It was perhaps the first Latin American protest against negative representations of them on the big screen. But the threat of angry Mexicans hasnt killed the Greasy Movies. Griffith showed the genres potential at the box office, and many American film pioneers dabbled in it. The Thomas Edisons company has cut it down, as has its biggest rival, Vitagraph Studios. The same goes for Mutual Film, one of Charlie Chaplins first homes. Horror legend Lon Chaney played the role of oiler. The westerns first star, Broncho Billy Anderson, made a career out of beating them. These films were so harmful that the Mexican government in 1922 banned studios that produced them in the country until they retired  denigrating films in world circulation, according to a letter Mexican President lvaro Obregn wrote to his secretariat for external relations. The bet has worked: the films of fat have ended. Rather, the writers re-imagined Mexicans as Latin lovers, Mexican spitfires, buffoons, peons, simple bandits, and other negative stereotypes. Thats why Bordertown surprised me when I finally saw him. The Warner Bros. movie, starring Paul Muni as Eastsides lawyer named Johnny Ramirez and Bette Davis as the temptress he despises, was popular upon its release. Today, its nearly impossible to see outside of a hard-to-find DVD and the occasional Muni Marathon on Turner Classic Movies. Based on a novel of the same name, this is not the racist parody that many Chicano film specialists claim to be. Yes, Muni was a non-Mexican playing a Mexican. Johnny Ramirez had a fiery character, a bad accent, and repeatedly called his mother (played by Spanish actress Soledad Jiminez) mamacita, who in turn called him Juanito. The infamous and incredulous ending suddenly makes Ramirez realize the emptiness of his fast and fun life and returns to the Eastside where I belong with my own people. And the movie poster features a bug-eyed, sombrero-wearing Muni pawing at a Davis, even though Ramirez never moved the Davis character or wore a sombrero. These missteps and others (like Ramirezs friends singing La Cucaracha at a party) distract from a film that didnt try to hide the discrimination Mexicans faced in the 1930s. in Los Angeles. Ramirez cant do justice for his neighbor, who lost his truckload of produce after a drunk socialite returning from a dinner party at Las Golondrinas on Olvera Street crashed there. This very mundane, with whom Ramirez continues to this day (dont ask), repeatedly calls him Savage as a term of affection. When Ramirez tires of American bigotry and announces that he is moving south of the border to run a casino, a brown-faced priest asks him to stay. Ramirez responds. Bordertown is from Warner Bros.s Depression Era Social Problem Movie roster. which served as a rough alternative to the escape offered by MGM, Disney and Paramount. But its creators made the same mistake Griffith did: They fell back on tropes instead of talking to Mexicans right in front of them who might offer a better story. Just take the first shot of Bordertown, the one I inadvertently recreated during my television shoot. Under a headline that reads Los Angeles, The Mexican Quarter, viewers see Olvera Streets as emptier than it should be. This is because only four years earlier, immigration officials rounded up hundreds of individuals at this very location. The move was part of a U.S. government repatriation effort that saw them start around one million Mexican, non-U.S. Citizens during the 1930s. After this opening shot, we get a brief glimpse of a theater marquee advertising a Mexican music trio called Los Madrugadores (The Early Risers). They were the most popular Spanish-speaking group in Southern California at the time, singing traditional corridos but also ballads about the hardships Mexicans faced in the United States. Lead singer Pedro J. Gonzlez hosted a popular AM radio morning show heard as far as Texas that mixed music with anti-racism denunciations. By the time Bordertown was released in 1935, Gonzalez was in San Quentin, jailed on a false statutory rape charge being pursued by a Los Angeles prosecutors office happy to lock up a critic. He was released in 1940 after the alleged victim recanted his confession and was summarily deported to Tijuana, where Gonzalez continued his career before returning to California in the 1970s. Warner Bros. Could have made a bold fix to the image of Mexican Americans if they had just paid attention to their own images! Instead, the Gonzalez saga wouldnt be told on film until a 1984 documentary and 1988 drama. Both were shot dead in San Diego. The two received only limited screenings in theaters in the American Southwest and one broadcast on PBS before going on video. No streamer wears it.