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Forget the Alamo: Thinking About History in John Sayles' Lone Star
Anna Adams
Muhlenberg College, Allentown, Pennsylvania
| JOHN SAYLES' FILM Lone Star is an excellent vehicle for teaching about the production and interpretation of history in a high school or introductory level college history class. The film illustrates that history is subjective, that the sorting and arrangement of evidence is what makes history, and that history is not necessarily an inevitable linear progression toward Western "civilization." In Lone Star, history is a complex tapestry woven of many different perspectives. John Sayles' interest in history is evident in much of his work. His novel Los Gusanos tells the tale of the Cuban community in Miami; his film Matewan chronicles a coal miners' strike in West Virginia; Men with Guns deals with a modern revolutionary movement in a mythical Latin American country resembling the Zapatista revolution in Chiapas, Mexico; and Sunshine State centers on the early development of Florida real estate. While many of Sayles' works are about specific historical events or periods, they are also an examination of the nature of history, what it means, how it is written, how it is interpreted, how it is erased, how it effects the present, and why it is important to understand. |
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In his novel, Los Gusanos, a prisoner in Castro's Cuba who had fought in an uprising against Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista laments: "¿La historia? La historia es una puta ... If one of those cabrones had been a better shot I would have been killed and now I would be remembered as a national hero. A martyr." |
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His cellmate, a former professor of history, nods, "¿Y pues? So it is a lie. Nothing changed in my heart between then and now. History will call me a traitor because some comemierdas couldn't shoot straight." |
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"It depends on who writes the history." |
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"Or rewrites it," offers a third mate. |
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"Then history is a puta ... What she says depends on which guy is up her bollo."1 |
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Later, history professor Villas, meditating in his jail cell on perspectives in history, sees all history reduced to "men with guns and men without, those behind the doors and those who hold the keys."2 He conjures up "a Dahomean chained below deck in the middle passage, yanked out of his tribal life and into this damp hell, calling on gods who no longer answer" and "the Portuguese trader above, helming the ship, reading his future in the force of the wind, the color of the sky, calculating the loss in gold with each slave gone blind and thrown to the trailing sharks."3 Sayles wants his readers to understand that both of these stories – of the Dahomean chained below and the Portuguese trader above are integral to the understanding of the history of slavery. |
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The movie Lone Star, to my mind Sayles' masterpiece, is a brilliant exploration of the nature of history. Set in a small Texas border town in contemporary times, Lone Star examines the relationship between past and present, the importance of perspective in historical accounts, and the origins of differing perspectives. Sayles explores the nature of borders – physical, racial and cultural – in this small town aptly named Frontera, where whites, blacks, and Mexicans live side by side, mixing infrequently. The porous borders between the past and the present, illustrated by Sayles' seamless cinematographic transitions between time periods, remind us of the important link between the present and the past. Sayles uses the personal histories of some of Frontera's inhabitants as a metaphor for political history. Just as the individuals cannot escape their family histories, the town cannot escape its past. Briefly, the film tells the story of an investigation into the death of a brutal, racist, and corrupt former sheriff, Charlie Wade (Kris Kristofferson), whose body is uncovered in the desert years after his mysterious disappearance. Was he murdered? By whom? Why? In this opening scene, Sayles tell us that it is difficult to bury history and in the course of the investigation, Sheriff Sam Deeds (Chris Cooper) will uncover some disturbing personal history. |
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Sayles cautions us to be aware of the subjectivity of historical interpretation through the conflicting stories that emerge during Sam's investigation. He gives equal representation to the white, black, and Mexican perspectives, shifting scenes between O's Bar, run by Otis Payne (Ron Canada), the "Mayor of Dark Town," The Santa Barbara Café, run by Mercedes Cruz (Miriam Colón), a Mexican widow, and the Lone Star Bar, run by a white racist who advertises, "Aquí se habla Americano." |
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In Frontera, interpretations of past events will depend on generation, nationality, and ethnic background. For example, Sam questions an elderly, black widow: "Nobody ever complained about Wade?" Her response: "Not if you were black or Mexican." Sam's memories of his father, former sheriff Buddy Deeds (Matthew McConaughey), contrast sharply with those who say, "Your father tried to do good for people," or "When Buddy died they broke the mold." A Mexican-American reporter does not share the general Anglo admiration for Buddy Deeds. He is investigating the 1963 burial by flooding of the town of Perdido, again aptly named, by developers who wanted to make a lake. "They build a dam to make a lake and a whole town disappears. People lived in Perdido for a hundred years. Mexicans and Chicanos were deported and Buddy Deeds winds up with lakefront property bought for a fraction of the market price. People ought to know the full story on Buddy Deeds." Like the town of Perdido, history can be lost, buried or covered up. |
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Lone Star examines official histories and those who try to revise them. In the local high school, a battle ensues between Pilar, a Mexican-American history teacher (Elizabeth Peña) and the local parents organization whose white members are opposed to the way she teaches history, particularly the history of the Alamo – the history that all Texans are continually exhorted to remember. In that official history, the battle of the Alamo is "a shrine to anti-Mexican sentiment, the ultimate symbol of the triumph of the moral character of white over brown."4 However, historians Arnoldo de Leon and Américo Paredes have documented how Anglos wrote the history of Mexicans in nineteenth-century Texas. Through an examination of contemporary newspapers, letters, and travel accounts, de Leon traces Anglo attitudes toward Mexicans – how they came to be viewed as indolent, morally defective, and traitorous.5 Paredes has observed further, "And had the Alamo, Goliad, and Mier not existed, they would have been invented as indeed they seem to have been in part."6 |
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Sayles portrays a distraught white parent who insists that Pilar is "tearing down our heritage and the memory of people who fought and died for this land." But a Mexican parent says, "we fought and died too," to which a white parent responds, "You lost and winners get the bragging rights. That's how it goes." The white arguments continue: "Well, the way she's teaching, everything is turned around. I was on the text book committee and her version is not in there. The men who founded this state have the right to tell it how it happened, not the way someone wanted it to happen." When a Mexican, "to add a little historical perspective," reminds the others that Texas was founded as a slave state, the response is, "You may call it history, but I call it propaganda. I'm sure they have their version of what happened at the Alamo on the other side, but we're not on the other side, so we're not about to have it taught in our schools." For these white parents, there is only one history of the Alamo. In it, all Americans were courageous and all Mexicans were cowards. Any other version threatens Anglo heroes and Anglo dominance over the majority Mexican community. These Anglo parents want their children to learn the same history that they learned, a history based on the writings of the distinguished Texas historian, Walter Prescott Webb who wrote in 1935:
Without disparagement, it may be said that there is a cruel streak in the Mexican nature, or so the history of Texas would lead one to believe. This cruelty may be a heritage from the Spanish Inquisition; it may be, and doubtless should be, attributed partly to the Indian blood.7
Perhaps the school teacher, Pilar, remembers reading those words when she was a child. As a Mexican teacher of history, she wants her students, most of whom are Mexican, to have a more balanced understanding of the past. |
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That this portrayal of Pilar is based in reality is shown by a memory of Rosa Linda Fregoso. She remembers the pain of her own education in a Texas classroom listening to her Anglo teacher, an admirer of Walter Prescott Webb, present a binary history in which kindly, brave, noble Anglos fought against cruel cowardly, tyrannical Mexicans. Fregoso remembers: "She gazed at me, the only Tejana in the class, and I felt her whiteness overpowering me each time she mentioned the cruel streak in the Mexican nature."8 Richard Flores has similar memories. After his third-grade class completed its tour of the Alamo museum, one of his classmates said to him, "You killed them! You and the other 'mes'kins'!"9 In his discussion of history as represented at the Alamo museum, Flores suggests that this representation is meant as a socializing factor that reinforces to the millions of annual visitors a certain version of history. He writes:
Does the image of treacherous Mexicans constructed from the emergent memory-place of the Alamo continue to fashion their perceptions, closing their American minds? I suggest it does, for the ability of the Alamo to wield social identities is a powerful and evocative form of meaning construction.10
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In Lone Star, Otis Payne, although not trained as such, plays the role of historian. He keeps an archive/museum of Black Seminole history and a more personal archive in his home that consists of newspaper clippings and memorabilia about his estranged son, Delmore (Joe Morton), who spent his life believing that his father had abandoned him. When Delmore sees this shrine-like historical documentation of his life, he comments to Otis' wife, "I thought he never asked about me." She replies, "He just didn't ask your mother." We are reminded that historical interpretation is dependent on the nature of the sources. In Otis' Black Seminole Museum, John Horse ("The Spanish called him Juan Caballo") is a hero whose men "beat Zach Taylor and a thousand troops." Otis is pleased to hear from his grandson that the schools are teaching the Trail of Tears now. Like Pilar, Otis insists that there is another side to official history, one that apparently was left out of the history books when he was a student. |
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Mexican life in Sayles' town of Frontera centers in the Santa Barbara Café owned by Pilar's mother, Mercedes, widow of Eladio Cruz who, Pilar is told, died shortly before her birth. Mrs. Cruz is a successful businesswoman. She drives a big car, lives in a nice house, dresses in fine clothes. She employs Mexican immigrant workers in her café and insists that they speak English – they are in America now, they should forget their past. Widowed at a young age, Mrs. Cruz raised her daughter through her hard work and has refused to accept her daughter's "greasy" Mexican husband. Although she would be seen as Mexican by Anglos, Mrs. Cruz insists to her daughter that she is of Spanish heritage, implying that her ancestors occupied the land long before Anglos or Mexicans arrived and that she is socially above the Mexicans in town. A part of her fabricated past comes back to haunt her when one of her employees appeals to her to help his girlfriend who was injured during an illegal border crossing. In one of Sayles' cinematographically-seamless transitions to the past, Mrs. Cruz flashes back to her own illegal crossing many years before and the man who helped her and became her husband. Acknowledging her inability to escape her real history, Mrs. Cruz does not call the border patrol to arrest the illegal crosser as she had threatened to do. This incident, along with her attitude toward recent Mexican immigrants, reflect a long standing issue in Mexican communities. David Gutiérrez, who has studied this divide between recent arrivals and long term residents, writes that the more established community fears that the illegal aliens will take their jobs, depress wages, undermine unions, and reinforce negative stereotypes of Mexicans. He remembers that his well-established Mexican family referred to the newcomers as "wetbacks."11 |
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In Sayles' Frontera, there are many borders besides the physical Mexican/United States border. The film presents borders between the past and the present, between white, black, and Mexican, between truth and lies – borders that are difficult to maintain. Sayles tells us that all borders, like the Mexican/United States border, are porous. When Otis tells his grandson about John Horse, his grandson asks if he was a black man or an Indian. "Both," replies Otis. And he says to his son, "It's not like there's a hard line between the good people and the bad people. You're not on one side or the other." In Frontera's Lone Star Café, two army officers, a black woman, and a white man break the color lines by socializing. The owner comments, "We're in trouble. The lines of demarcation are getting fuzzy. In order to run a civilization, you have to have clear lines of demarcation ... People don't want their salt and sugar in the same jar." |
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The film centers on Sam's investigation, which takes him to sources, human and archival. While examining the long record of Wade's career, he uncovers scores of men who had been shot while resisting arrest. The individual documents gain significance only in the context of the investigation. What he uncovers differs from Sheriff Deeds' particular construction of the evidence in many cases and reveals a pattern that would probably otherwise have remained buried in the arrest records. In his ex-wife's garage, he retrieves a box of his father's old papers. In it, he finds letters, photos, hospital records, and a birth announcement that lead him to uncover more of this complicated history. One of Sam's human sources is an Indian who became buddies with Sam's father in Korea and now sells junk at a roadside souvenir stand. He reveals to Sam what most people in the town knew, that his father had a woman on the side for years. When Sam asks who the woman was, the Indian shows him the skin of a rattlesnake that had jumped at him from a crate. "Be careful where you go poking. Who knows what you'll find." The implication is that some histories might be better left buried. |
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As part of his investigation, this time into the death of Pilar's father, Eladio Cruz, Sam crosses the United States/Mexican border to question Chuchu Montoya, the Mexican tire "king," an eyewitness to Cruz's murder. The king draws a line in the dirt with a Coke bottle. "I don't have to answer questions on this side of the line." Sam replies, "Your government has always been happy to have that line. The question was where to draw it." The information learned from his trip across the border fills in the mystery of some of Sam's personal history and reveals a chronology at odds with official history. When he questions Otis and Hollis about what really happened and their role in the cover up, Otis explains that as time went on, people liked the story of Wade's mysterious disappearance better than the truth they might have learned. Frontera's mayor, Hollis Pogue (Clifton James), worries that when word gets out that the body is Wade, people will think that Buddy did it. Sam replies, "Buddy's a god damned legend. He can handle it," but once again history is buried when Sam assures the conspirators, "as for me, it's just one of your unsolved mysteries." Here Sayles reminds us that historians have tended to see some people as more worthy of historical consideration than others: If that body had been "some poor mojado who swam across at night and got lost in the brush and starved out there, it wouldn't go much further, but this is a former prominent citizen who disappeared under a cloud." |
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As film maker/historian John Sayles balances different perspectives and weighs historical evidence, but while he gives equal time, he is not neutral. His portrayal of the white parents in Pilar's school, who feel their minority power threatened, is not sympathetic. A white citizen of Frontera complains, "They call everything else in the country after Martin Luther King and we can't have one measly court house. It's bad enough that all the street names are in Spanish." And when the owner of the Lone Star Café explains that he is as liberal as the next guy, Buddy responds, "as long as the next guy is a red neck." White sergeant Cliff Potts explains to his buddy that his black fiancé's family welcomes him because they were afraid their daughter was a lesbian and any male would be preferable to a woman. His friend replies, "It's always heartwarming to see one prejudice beaten by a deeper prejudice." |
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One of the film's most moving scenes deals with the idea that history is based on power relations, that history is produced by "men with guns," by those who hold the keys, not by those behind the doors. Black Colonel Delmore Payne questions Private Johnson, a black female: "What do you think about the army?" |
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Johnson: "This is their country. This is one of the best deals they offer." |
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Delmore: "Why do you think they let us in on the deal?" |
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Johnson: "They need people to fight Arabs and yellow people. They may as well use us." |
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For Private Johnson, the "men with guns," the ones who hold the keys are the whites. Through her lens, the borders between blacks and whites are better fortified than those of the military hierarchy. And through this exchange, Delmore's personal history becomes political. He is forced to confront the history of race relations in the United States and ask himself, "Can I be a black soldier in the United States Army and not be a mercenary like one of those black Seminoles who just chased Indians for the whites?"12 Delmore wants to believe that history does not matter. He tells his son, "From the day you're born you start from scratch, no breaks, no excuses." In his view, the early history of Texas as a slave state is not relevant. He chooses to ignore that past just as the angry Anglo parents want to ignore the ugly history of how their ancestors treated Mexicans and blacks. |
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Sam too wants to ignore some of his past. Pilar asks Sam, "How long have you lived here?" |
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Sam: "Two years." |
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Pilar: "There's nothing on the walls, no pictures." |
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Sam: "I haven't got kids. The other pictures ... it's nothing I want to look back on." |
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It is not surprising that Sam prefers to forget his sad childhood, his forced separation from Pilar, and his unhappy marriage, especially because he now understands why he and Pilar were forced to separate as teenagers. Although she insists that his story is not over, he knows now that past events may preclude his future happiness. |
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Sam, who was never able to live up to his father's reputation, is not the only character who has difficulty escaping family history. Despite his insistence that life is what you make it, Delmore is hardened by what he understands as his father's abandonment of him. Sam's ex-wife Bunny is stuck in her role as a little-girl-trying-to-please-her daddy, and Chet, Delmore's son, believes he is condemned to go to West Point like his father. Pilar learns that her family history is based on a series of lies: her mother was not born in the United States; Eladio Cruz, her supposed father, was an undocumented worker; and finally, Eladio Cruz was not even her father. The secrets of her past reflect the sordid history of Frontera, where being Mexican was shameful and where Mexicans and Anglos did not openly socialize. |
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Sayles has expressed his view that history is eminently revisitable,13 and in Lone Star, he revisits and alters Frontera's traditionally white, Webb-based history by including Mexicans, African Americans, and Native Americans as objects and subjects of history. Those who have been hidden from history, who have been excluded from the official history texts, are given equal time in Sayles' film. Sayles wants to reflect the multicultural history of the United States. "English-speaking culture is just one of many cultures. It has become the dominant subculture in certain areas, but it's a subculture just like all the others. American culture is not monolingual or monoracial. It's always been a mix. As one character says, 'We got the whole damn menudo down here.'"14 |
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As the personal history of Sam and Pilar is exhumed, the knowledge of their past complicates the dream of their future. In the last scene, Pilar and Sam meet at the vacant drive-in movie where they had been caught years before. When Sam reveals the terrible truth about their parentage, Pilar, the historian who has battled for a more complete history, realizes that history can be dangerous. She begs, "Can't we start from scratch? All that other stuff, all that history, to hell with it. Forget the Alamo." |
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Notes
1 John Sayles, Los Gusanos (New York: Harper Collins, 1991), 290.
2 Ibid., 309.
3 Ibid., 308.
4 Earl Shorris, Latinos: Biography of the People (New York: Avon Books, 1992), 35.
5 Arnoldo de Leon, They Called them Greasers: Anglo Attitudes toward Mexicans in Texas, 1821–1900 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1983).
6 Américo Paredes, "With his Pistol in his Hand:" A Border Ballad and its Hero (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1971), 19.
7 Walter Prescott Webb (from The Texas Rangers, 1935), as cited in Paredes, 17.
8 Rosa Linda Fregoso, "Recycling Colonialist Fantasies on the Texas Borderlands" in Hamid Nacify, ed., Home, Exile Homeland: Film, Media and the Politics of Place (New York: Routledge, 1999), 169–192.
9 Richard R.Flores, Remembering the Alamo: Memory, Modernity, and the Master Symbol (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002), xiii.
10 Ibid., 34.
11 David Gutiérrez, Walls and Mirrors: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the Politics of Ethnicty (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 2.
12 Dennis West and Joan M. West, "Borders and Boundaries: An interview with John Sayles," <http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/MCR/Sayles.htm>, 4.
13 See <http://www.chud.com/news/june02/june28sayles.php>.
14 Op. cit. West and West, p. 3.
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