Once Upon A Time in Mexico

Robert Rodriguez's debut feature, El Mariachi (1992), became the first part of the story of a Mexican legend that was soon followed by two sequels: Desperado in 1995, and Once Upon A Time in Mexico in 2003. The three independent productions maintain not only the legendary Western story of a Mexican gunman and protector known as El Mariachi, but they also share a set of violent combats melted with a background of Mexican people and culture in which somehow the hero is capable of taking the right actions against drug Cartels, only under the watch and advise of an American strategist.

In this final installment of the Mariachi trilogy, the Mexican hero, again like in the past encounters with drug Cartels, is driven into an ultraviolent gunfight looking for revenge. But unlike the previous two movies, now his desires of finally ending with the life of his wife’s murderer and the drug cartels are accompanied by stronger allies that will bring the Mariachi a deserved success: agents from the FBI and the CIA. According to these agents, especially the CIA agent (Sands), their presence in Mexico help to “restore the balance” of the country and also the United States, even if this means taking advantage of the hatred of one man to destroy a common enemy.

In the beginning, the CIA agent Sands pays for information about the Mariachi legend who is presented as “a real Mexican”, a sanguinary and skilled gunman that seems to be invincible. Though that the plot portrays comic-like confrontations with closeup scenes and limited dialogue between the characters, when El Mariachi and his supporters talk about the reasons to get involved in any kind of dispute, there is an emphasis on personal inspirations and moral values that money cannot buy. “A man that wants nothing is invincible” comments one of El Mariachi’s friends (nothing referring to monetary compensations). However, this portrayal of the "real Mexican" as someone with strong convictions and morals is part of the narrative of a legend. Thus, those pure motivations driving the characters to destroy the coalition of the most dangerous organizations in Mexico (drug cartels and illegal paramilitary associations) are not an attempt to describe the real Mexican, but they belong to this kind of Mexican superhero called El Mariachi.

In a society where being surrounded by gunmen like El Mariachi, corruption within the Mexican Federal Agency, and drug Cartels living unaccountable of crimes committed outside Mexico, nevertheless, the incentives to eliminate danger before it can cross the border to the United States become stronger and more effective when different parties join forces. As seen in other movies about U.S international war on drugs like in Sicario (2015), the CIA and the FBI have contrary opinions about the legitimacy of U.S. intervention in Mexican territory, but at the end of the day the need of protecting the U.S. from external dangers wins over diplomacy and encourages a coalition for a greater gain.

Finally, the people that are not involved in the Cartel's conflict are shown close to the end in a revolutionary upheaval to protect Mexico's liberty. Suddenly everyone from the youngest to the oldest adult joins forces to fight against the paramilitary forces with guns and strong nationalism which results in victory.

"El Mariachi" in this movie becomes part of a superhero-story, a legend, like the Mexican version of a Marvel hero. Even from its title, the phrase Once Upon a Time reminds us that this legend is not real. In reality, the victory over the war on drugs has not come yet, the Mexico-US coalition in the fight is more like a Mexico-US division, history does not tell us about a coup d´etat sabotaged by the U.S, and El Mariachi does not exist, though that is what we might wish.

The Pilgrim

At the end of The Pilgrim, Charlie Chaplin makes a series of brief forays across the border separating the US and Mexico. At first, his international travel is purely accidental. For the border is nothing but a signpost in the middle of a scrubby area of open space. Chaplin's character, the eponymous pilgrim, leans upon the post until suddenly realizing he has mistakenly strayed into Mexico. So he hurriedly returns to the US and leans on the same post from the other side. How easy it is to slip across the frontier, even without knowing what you have done!


But the pilgrim has been brought here for a purpose. The bulk of the film has shown how he broke out of jail and headed for Texas disguised in parson's clothes. Arriving at a small Texas town, and taken to be the local church's long-expected new man of the cloth, he mugs his way through a sermon on David and Goliath and is then taken to his new digs, with a family of suitably respectable church-goers. An old prison buddy sees the pilgrim, however, and tags along thinking that a heist is in operation. And even though, in priestly garb, it is the reformed ex-con hero who foils his former cellmate's attempt to steal the family's money, nonetheless his past catches up with him. And so the sheriff takes him away. But the man of the law has obviously a soft spot for this reluctant criminal, which is why he has taken him to the Mexican border.

Realizing that Charlie is now steadfastly law-abiding, and is not about to run off south on his own accord, the sheriff has to devise some stratagem to get the pilgrim off his back. He asks him to pick him a bunch of wild flowers, first from just over the border post and then from much further out into the Mexican scrub. With Charlie sent on this wild-goose chase, the lawman then spurs his horse and heads away. . . only to discover his bedraggled convict chasing him up the trail, waving a bunch of blooms over his head.

In the face of the pilgrim's stubborn refusal to take a hint, the sheriff gets of his horse and physically kicks him into Mexico. Which is when Charlie realizes what's going on, and in the middle of the desert starts thinking of the future. "Mexico: a new life. Peace at last!" But no sooner is this thought vocalized than up from the bushes rise a couple of bandidos engaged in a fearsome firefight. Spooked, the pilgrim races back to the frontier, before realizing that he can't go back to the USA, either. So the film ends with Charlie waddling off into the distance, straddling the boundary line and with one out-turned foot facing Mexico, the other the USA.

Again, then, this is a movie that undoes the notion of a Latin utopia safe from either crime or the law. But every time that this fantasy is revealed as baseless, its ubiquity and force are also underlined. The dream of some Latin "outside" is so prevalent that Hollywood endlessly has to reinvent it, if only then to dash it to pieces, to show us that the best a character can do is to straddle the line between inside and out, hoping that neither side notices.

Out of the Past

In "Shades of Black and Brown: Visions of Mexico and Mexican-Americans in 1940s Film Noir", Eric Enders comments that for Jacques Tourneur's classic noir Out of the Past "Mexico provide[s] a momentary escape from the harsh realities of urban America," and that the movie's protagonists, Robert Mitchum's Jeff Markham and Jane Greer's Kathie Moffat, spend much of the film "trying to, as Greer’s character puts it, 'go back to Acapulco and start all over as if nothing had ever happened.'"

Again, then, Latin America functions as a place of escape, a potential utopia untouched by the law or, as a consequence, by crime. Enders quotes James Naremore's observation that "during the 1940s, noir characters visited Latin America more often than any other locale, usually because they wanted to find relief from repression." But as we've seen in the neo-noir The Long Goodbye (let alone Touch of Evil), things are seldom that simple. Noir characters may be endlessly crossing borders, as Naremore also observes: "to visit Latin America, Chinatown, or the 'wrong' parts of the city" ("American Film Noir" 15), but in part thanks to such endless criss-crossing, they also destabilize those borders and the comfortable distinctions such frontiers are supposed to uphold.

Precisely such a destabilization is played out within one of the Mexican scenes in this film. Markham has gone down to Acapulco in search of Moffat on the order of seedy gambling kingpin Whit Sterling (Kirk Douglas). Moffat, Sterling's mistress, had fled leaving him with a bullet in the stomach and $40,000 poorer. Markham catches up with the broad but soon falls for her, and so after a brief paradaisical romance in and around the Mexican resort, they determine to flee onwards, to ensure that Sterling can't trace and come after them. On the day of their departure, Markham hears a knock on his hotel room door. Opening it expecting his visitor to be Moffat, he discovers instead Sterling plus henchman Joe Stephanos. Markham is forced to do a visible double take: he'd expected something quite different on the other side of the door. But instead of romance and the promise of escape, he finds trouble and a reminder of all he had thought to have left behind. In short, you never quite know what's on the other side of a border, behind the door.

And though it might be nice to imagine, as Moffat suggests, that Latin America represents the one site of relief and sunshine (when she and Markham first meet in an Acapulco cantina, she is described as "coming out of the sun"), noir trades in uncertainty, leaving no respite even far from home. After all, can we even believe Moffat's utopian promises? Her line to Markham is just one among many: she's endlessly stringing him along, and as likely as not to turn on him once again in an instant. The discourse of Latin utopianism is figured clearly as yet another element in the complex web that North American characters weave among themselves.


So the point is not (as Enders suggests) whether noir movies portray Latin America benignly or otherwise. The point is how they self-consciously present discourses of Latin Americanism (or, here, also either small town or rural contentment) as one more means by which US modernity consoles itself with the possibility of an outside, even as it destroys any such division between inside and out.

Image Link: a very extensive collection of stills.
YouTube Link: the scene in which Moffat declares "I want to go back to Mexico".

Men with Guns

The virtues of a road movie are that it can easily combine both realism and fantasy. On the one hand, as in a classic nineteenth-century novel, the episodic nature of road movies effortlessly shows us all the different estates and occupations that constitute society as a whole. On the other hand, few cinematic journeys are ever fully innocent: they soon acquire the character of a fable or mythical quest.

In Men with Guns, then, John Sayles takes on the road movie genre to show us a cross-section of an un-named contemporary Latin American country and to spin a fable of fantasies both utopian and touristic.

Physical geography reveals also human variation. As the film moves from the capital to the countryside, from the plains to the highlands, we also move from a world of bourgeois civility to campesinos eking out an increasingly precarious existence from salt-selling, cane-cutting, or coffee-picking.

The movie's protagonist is Dr Humberto Fuentes, a recently-widowed doctor and medical professor from the capital who is searching for his former students, whom he had sent out three years earlier on a health program to work with the country's indigenous peoples.

En route, he is joined by an orphaned campesino boy, an army deserter, a defrocked priest, and a young woman struck mute since her horrendous rape at the hands of the military.

For everywhere Fuentes goes he finds that the "men with guns" have been there before him. From the army officer in his well-appointed surgery at the film's outset, to the company of soldiers guarding a "model village" of displaced people in the highlands, to the guerrillas in the cloud forest, their influence is all-pervasive.

The quest, then, becomes the search for a place where there will be no more violence, a utopian space "where men with guns don't go" represented by the semi-mythical village "Cerca del Cielo" ("Close to Heaven") that people describe as somewhere "más adelante," "further on," and almost magically hidden from both the army and the guerrillas.

But the words that Fuentes uses to invoke Cerca del Cielo (as he convinces the young mute not to take her own life, not to give up on the quest) are taken straight from a tourist brochure advertising a resort somewhere near Bali: it's a place "where the air is like a caress, where gentle waters flow, where wings of peace lift the burdens from your shoulders."

For this utopian quest comes to overlap with the travels and travails of a pair of US tourists who are out searching for archaeological sites. The two journeys, the search for political refuge and the backpackers' trail, constantly intertwine: early on Fuentes meets the US couple in a roadside restaurant, where (still ignorant about his country) he tells them that accounts of army atrocities are fabrications of the foreign press; later we discover that the tourists are obsessed by a conception of a Latin American culture blood-soaked from an epoch of pre-Columbian sacrifice.

While both natives and foreigners are in some senses looking to turn back time, the tourists are overly fascinated with death, but Fuentes is trying to move past the violence that he's inadvertently uncovering to reach the oasis of peace that, ironically, the Western tourist industry has given him the language to describe.

Finally, this complex and perhaps almost unique film (made by a US director but mostly in Spanish and indigenous languages) maintains a delicate balance between the opposed conceptions of Latin America as utopia and as heart of darkness, between indigenous authenticity and globalized hybridity.

It ends ambivalently and uncertainly: Fuentes fails to find his students, but he does encounter both death and repose; Cerca del Cielo exists, but is no paradise, rather a place of what Sayles himself terms "quiet desperation." It's "where rumors go to die." Still, in its final shot, the film holds out the possibility of yet another más adelante, a continued dream of something better further on.