INTRODUCTION
Throughout its history the city of Tijuana has always been profoundly influenced by the United States and in particular by its film industry. In 1915 Tijuana had just a thousand inhabitants, but by 1960 it had become a bustling border city of over 185,000 people.Footnote 1 American tourism to Tijuana first boomed during the 1920s and 1930s, as prohibition saw thrill-seekers flee south of the border to indulge in drinking and gambling. As the city grew in response to the rapidly increasing numbers of tourists, huge flamboyant casino and racetrack complexes were built. These casinos were frequented by Hollywood stars and featured regularly in the press. The mythic status that Tijuana has acquired in the United States seems to have imbued the city with what Paul Vanderwood calls a “persistent lure” for Americans.Footnote 2 Vanderwood writes that
Tijuana seems to nudge, even challenge, something quite profound in the American psyche. Crossing the border evokes a feeling of “freedom,” not just raising hell and having a good time, but as Liberty put it, a sense of “playing hooky from the world's greatest supervisor of morals – Uncle Sam.”Footnote 3
Despite shifts in type of visitor and rises and falls in visitor numbers, due not least to recent challenges to the industry from narcoviolence, tourism prevails in Tijuana. The city remains a popular destination for Americans to this day, a fact perhaps deeply connected to the sense of moral abandonment that Vanderwood evokes. Tijuana has also been a frequent fixture on American movie screens since the beginning of the twentieth century. From early westerns, including Border Raiders (Stuart Paton, 1918), to racing tales such as Riders Up (Irving Cummings, 1924), and on through police dramas like Federal Man (Robert Tansey, 1950), Tijuana has held a lasting appeal for Hollywood filmmakers apparently because of this sense of amorality. In his study of the relationship between Tijuana and Hollywood, Tim Girven claims that cinematic images of Tijuana produced in the 1920s and 1930s set the tone for a representation of the city as dark, seedy and dangerous that would persist throughout the century.Footnote 4
In addition to the attention Tijuana has received from the American film industry, it has also been the focus of a substantial body of academic work. As Josh Kun and Fiamma Montezemolo have argued, the city has variously been described as “‘hybrid,’ ‘not Mexico,’ ‘the End of Latin America and the beginning of the American Dream,’ ‘the happiest place on earth,’ ‘a laboratory of postmodernity,’ ‘a third space,’ ‘a porous border,’ ‘a Walled City,’ a ‘drug capital’.”Footnote 5 Amongst the many writings on and about Tijuana, the one consistent theme is the inability to define this city through any single lens or mythology. For Humberto Félix Berumen, Tijuana “is a kind of palimpsest made up of multiple voices that have contributed to diversify its own social physiognomy.”Footnote 6 Similarly, Santiago Vaquera-Vásquez describes Tijuana as a place of “fragmentation: there is no conception of a total Tijuana. In this sense, Tijuana is known, but only in passing, never as a unit.”Footnote 7 Drawing on this idea of fragmentation and multiplicity, Tijuana has also been hailed as a quintessentially postmodern city by authors such as Néstor García Canclini, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Santiago Vaquera-Vásquez and Lauro Zavala.Footnote 8 As a no-place or ciudad de paso, Tijuana is figured as a liberatory manifestation of globalization through its cultural mixing and hybridity. However, following Kun and Montezemolo's approach, this article will hope not to simply reproduce such romanticized images of the city which seem to reduce it to only a border crossing. Engaging with critical frameworks developed from within Tijuana, the article aims to understand the city as a real, physical space and as a home to its many inhabitants who are not just passing through.
Despite this persistant recognition of the impossibility of defining Tijuana, Hollywood, in contrast, has often been credited with the creation and perpetuation of the wholly singular dark legend, or leyenda negra, surrounding Tijuana. Making a similar argument to Girven, Berumen asserts that the “myth of Tijuana as the ultimate city of vice is the result of the articulations and distribution of American cinema in the 1920s and 1930s.”Footnote 9 Many of the films about Tijuana use the city's name in their titles, as Berumen argues, “as if it were the unquestionable symbol of vice and indulgence.”Footnote 10 But although ultimately bound up in this mythmaking, some of these films are also are concerned with exploring the relationship between the legend and the real experiences of those inhabiting the city.
The Tijuana Story, a film directed by Leslie Kardos in 1957, is one such movie. The tagline which featured on the film's promotional material, “the most notorious sucker-trap in the western hemisphere,” explicitly evokes the city's seedy reputation. Alongside the title, which seems to use the city's name as precisely an “unquestionable symbol of vice and indulgence,” the film poster shows a lady dressed in red patrolling a street lit by cantinas and bars. Evoking a sense of infamy and seediness, the promotional material used to sell this film accompanies a story which combines semidocumentary sequences showing the urban spaces and people of Tijuana with a narrative focussed on the local community's fight against organized crime. The contrasts between the different settings which the film's action inhabits could not make this contradiction clearer. City gangsters control cheap, glitzy casinos where drinking, smoking and gambling attract gangs of American tourists. The dark alleyways surrounding these bars are where the young American men buy drugs and shout after girls. These scenes are set in stark contrast to the sequences which introduce the family life of the film's protagonist, a character based on a real Tijuanan journalist, Manuel Acosta Mesa (played by Rodolfo Acosto). Set in a small, humbly appointed apartment, these scenes focus on home, family life and morality, and could not be further from the stereotypically seedy image of Tijuana presented elsewhere in the film.
The film tells the true story Acosta Mesa's efforts to use his newspaper to protest the actions of a criminal gang and to make a stand to clean up the city. The gang terrorizes the town, beating a schoolteacher to death for reporting the selling of drugs to children, and intimidating Acosta Mesa and his family. The violence against Acosta Mesa escalates as he refuses to stop condemning the gangsters in his editorials, eventually leading to his assassination. In the wake of his death, Acosta Mesa's son continues his work, rousing the community to pull together to defeat the criminals, and at his funeral, Tijuanans turn out to pay their respects and show their support for his ideals. Exploring the apparent contradiction between the way in which this film is marketed and its socially conscious content provides a more detailed understanding of Hollywood's relationship with Tijuana and offers a way to talk about the city without reducing it to any one singular definition: there is no one Tijuana story.
The Tijuana Story is just one link in a long chain of Hollywood entanglement with the city. The first part of this article therefore begins with an examination of the history of Tijuana the city and its status within American culture, drawing on secondary historical sources. The discussion continues with an analysis of some of the many cultural contexts and factors which may have impacted on the production of The Tijuana Story, using research from trade and fan magazines, national newspapers and secondary historical sources. The article concludes with close textual analysis of the cinematic space of The Tijuana Story's city, arguing that the use of mobile, multiple viewpoints and perspectives resists any singular view of the city. Drawing on Giuliana Bruno's geographic approach to film analysis and her understanding of the film spectator as “voyageur” rather than “voyeur,” the concept of viewpoint in its dual geographic and ideological senses is engaged to examine how the cinematic city operates.Footnote 11 The film is also positioned as part of a wider body of texts which use images of Mexico and Mexicans to explore left-wing and revolutionary ideologies.
THE BLACK LEGEND OF TIJUANA
In 1929, a United Artists executive remarked, “There is a difference between using the name Tia Juana and some other name that is not known, because it has certain connotations – it has a meaning to the audiences and brings a reaction in them.”Footnote 12 Tijuana has appeared in American film footage from at least as early as 1915, when a newsreel was produced showing the opening of a racetrack, and American film has kept returning to the city ever since.Footnote 13 Tim Girven has argued that it was during the period between 1924 and 1935 that Tijuana's image as vice-ridden, corrupt and evil was cultivated. For Girven, films made about the city at this time produced this “prototypical” American vision of Tijuana.Footnote 14 He argues this vision constituted an imperialist gaze which sought to fix Tijuana as other, and which has persisted in American cinematic visions of the city ever since.
However, it was not only cinematic images of Tijuana that worked to produce the city's image. Hollywood stars and the media circulating around them also played an important role. Early Tijuanan holiday resorts such as Agua Caliente were frequented by Hollywood luminaries like Charlie Chaplin, Dolores Del Rio and Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle. The famous casino and racetrack complex Agua Caliente was also where Rita Cansino – later Hayworth – was first discovered as a teenage dancer. As Girven and Paul Vanderwood have shown, images of the stars cavorting in the grand casinos and bars brought the city national attention and significance in the USA. In Girven's words, it became “a space in which the personal lives of screen idols [were] publically played out.”Footnote 15
Newspapers and fan magazines featured shocking stories of stars' behaviour as they drank and gambled across the border while these activities were banned at home. In addition, scandalous celebrities such as Olive Thomas, who died of a drug overdose in Paris, and Fatty Arbuckle, tried three times for manslaughter, were such frequent clients of the casinos and racetracks of Tijuana that they became inextricably associated with the place.Footnote 16 These celebrity scandals became known as Tijuana bibles, the same name given to the pornographic comics often featuring famous actors which emerged around this time.Footnote 17 In tandem, stars were often invoked in the marketing of Tijuana's glamorous hospitality and adverts for the resorts featured images of celebrities such as Clark Gable, Bing Crosby, Helen Twelvetrees and Jean Parker relaxing south of the border.Footnote 18 Through these advertisements Tijuanan resorts were inextricably linked to Hollywood glamour. Because their lives were displayed through their leisure time in Tijuana, the stars' scandals and the city alike became known across the United States.
It is clear that both cinematic representations of Tijuana and the close connections between the city and Hollywood personnel worked to produce a licentious image of the place at this time. But further, as Girven has claimed, it was no coincidence that the emergence of the city of Tijuana aligned directly with both the advent of Prohibition in the USA and the rise of Hollywood filmmaking. It was during this period in the 1920s that the city first began to grow rapidly in size in response to American demand for alcohol, gambling and prostitution. The increasing interconnectedness of Tijuana and Hollywood also played a major role in publicizing the city and further boosting American tourism south of the border. John Price has claimed that “Tijuana was born solely of … trade and tourism. It has no history prior to the creation of the border.”Footnote 19 In this way, Tijuana can be understood as the dialectical product of interaction with the United States. Because of the significant influence of the Hollywood industry during this period of rapid growth in Tijuana, cinema is also deeply implicated in the construction of the city and its image.
The view of Tijuana that developed through 1920s and 1930s Hollywood movies was, in Price's words, of “a city of vice where prostitution, pornographic movies, live sex demonstrations, and drug traffic were unequalled.”Footnote 20 Other scholars agree that the city's reputation has played an important role in its history and its relationship with the USA. Jennifer Insley has argued that “[a]ccording to popular US discourse, the city is the ultimate symbol of Mexican lust, dishonesty, and darkness.”Footnote 21 Diana Palaversich finds the leyenda negra de Tijuana (black legend of Tijuana) to be the most persistent and pervasive discourse about the city.Footnote 22 The phrase leyenda negra dates from criticism of Spanish colonization of the Americas, and was coined by Spanish intellectual Julián Juderías in 1914 in order to protest “the characterization of Spain by other Europeans as a backward country of ignorance, superstition, and religious fanaticism that was unable to become a modern nation.”Footnote 23 Since then, the black legend has continued to influence attitudes towards Hispanics and Mexicans, and Rafaela Castro holds it responsible for widespread “derogatory stereotyping of Mexicans” and “the uncivil treatment of Mexicans and Californios” during the war between the USA and Mexico of 1846–48.Footnote 24 Highlighting the implication of the film industry in this mythology, several scholars have argued that Tijuana's leyenda negra was “initially constructed on the celluloid screen.”Footnote 25 Palaversich's argument specifically foregrounds the role of American imperialism in the production of the city and its mythic status. Recalling the war between the two countries which saw the USA take control of a huge proportion of Mexico's territory, this American legend of Tijuana foregrounds its own colonial effects, positioning the imperial actions of the United States on a continuum with those of colonial Spain.
Jane Jacobs has emphasized the important role that the city often played in the regulation of colonies, attesting that “it was in outpost cities that the spatial order of imperial imaginings was rapidly and deftly realised.”Footnote 26 But despite the city's role in establishing imperial power and order, the very nature of this complex, multifarious space means that it is also a place of contestation. Jacobs continues, “Imperialist manipulations of space never had an unchallenged surety, either in the past or the present. Precisely because cities are sites of ‘meetings,’ they are also places which are saturated with possibilities for the destabilisation of imperial arrangements.”Footnote 27 Just as Tijuana's mythology was constructed through interaction with Hollywood, there also exist spaces of challenge and destabilization both in the city and in representations of its legend. The Tijuana Story is one such space where the city's “misrepresentation in myth and fantasy” is brought to the fore.Footnote 28
SERIES EXPOSÉS, POPULISM AND POLITICS: PRODUCTION CONTEXTS OF THE TIJUANA STORY
The Tijuana Story was directed by Leslie Kardos and produced by Sam Katzman in 1957. During the 1950s, producer Katzman was best known for churning out films in his infamous Jungle series (which earned him the moniker “Jungle Sam”), as well as making breakthroughs into teen movie audiences with controversial youth-rebellion flicks Rock around the Clock (Fred Sears, 1956) and Don't Knock the Rock (Fred Sears, 1956). Katzman is widely credited with a talent for spotting contemporary issues which had potential for exploitation at the cinema, such as the rise of rock and roll.Footnote 29 As Wheeler Winston Dixon argues, during the 1950s, “with the exception of one or two ill-conceived projects [Katman's films] attracted the public's attention and reaped substantial returns at the box office.”Footnote 30 Katzman was well known as one of “the most cost-conscious – and because of this, one of the most controversial – producers working in Hollywood in the 1950s.”Footnote 31 Throughout the decade he produced an average of three serials and seventeen features a year. Films were often made in just six days and for budgets of less than $100,000.Footnote 32 The producer publicly professed his lack of interest in the artistic merit of his pictures, and in the Life magazine feature “Meet Jungle Sam” he declared his “moviemaking philosophy”: “I'll never make an Academy Award movie but I am just happy to get my achievement plaques from the bank.”Footnote 33 Despite this hard-edged moneymaking image, Katzman is also lauded as one of the very first American independent filmmakers to grant, according to Dixon, considerable artistic freedom to directors and writers.Footnote 34 In addition, he made regular use of crew members blacklisted by the House Un-American Activities Committee, more so than any other producer of the time.Footnote 35
The Tijuana Story was made by Katzman's company Clover Productions for Columbia Pictures as one of a series of crime exposés set in different cities. Previous Clover Productions flicks The Houston Story (William Castle, 1955) and Miami Exposé (Fred Sears, 1956) were also based on social problems, but had a very different tone. Dramatic stories of corruption, murder and betrayal, these films threw a sensational light on violent scenarios. These films form part of what Will Straw has identified as a cycle of lurid “city confidential” films, which draw upon “the traditions of the semi-illicit stag film, the police procedural, the semi-documentary instruction film, the vice exposé movie and the low-budget mystery.”Footnote 36 Straw further argues that the films' “narratives … are secondary to their cataloguing of vice, and to the formal organization of these films as sequences of scenes in night-clubs, gambling dens and along neon-lit streets.”Footnote 37 Perhaps not unexpectedly, then, The Houston Story was denounced by its contemporary reviewers as a “machine-made racketeer picture which lacks distinction in all departments.”Footnote 38 The Tijuana Story stands apart from Clover Productions' other exposé flicks as well as from the wider cycle of city confidential films. Described by Kun as “a rare case of responsible Hollywood filmmaking about border life,” the film's social realist style, similarities to explicitly left-wing films, and central story of morality and community positions it as a more complex picture which engages with the tensions between American mythologies of Tijuana and the lived experience of the city's inhabitants.Footnote 39
The Tijuana Story is based on real events which took place in Tijuana in 1956 and saw local journalist Manuel Acosta Mesa murdered by a criminal cartel as he strove to clean up the city. For the first time, the film shifted the Clover Productions exposé series outside the USA to a Mexican city, but, in a move which stresses the interdependence of the two countries in the border region, Los Angeles newspaper reporter and television personality Paul Coates provides the film's narration. Coates regularly wrote about Tijuana in his “Confidential File” column at the Los Angeles Mirror and helped bring national coverage to the events surrounding Acosta Mesa's death, stories which perhaps caught Katzman's eye and led to the production of The Tijuana Story. Indeed, in his columns Coates depicts the situation in Tijuana in cinematic terms, drawing on classic iconography of westerns and Mexican bandidos. He writes that the community of vigilantes in the city “wear no broad sombreros, no special uniforms, no shiny badges. They pack no pistols.”Footnote 40
Despite the film's lurid marketing strategy and Katzman's reputation for exploitation, The Tijuana Story was received by its contemporary critics as a film with clear aims and a political project. For example, the Monthly Film Bulletin found that the film “is at pains to ask Americans not to judge Mexico by its border towns.”Footnote 41 Its semi-documentary style was seen as a key feature by reviewers, with the Hollywood Reporter lauding its “pointed documentary appeal.”Footnote 42 The Tijuanan setting was significant, too, and considered to be “accurately staged and well lensed.”Footnote 43 In addition, the actors' Mexicanness was important to critics, and the Hollywood Reporter found “added interest” in the fact that “Mexican players look and act like Mexicans even when portrayed by Americans.”Footnote 44 Further heightening the sense that the film was a kind of personal crusade, Variety reported that “producer Sam Katzman kept this project on the shelf a couple of years because of threats from certain sinister underworld figures.”Footnote 45 Notwithstanding the fact that the events in Tijuana took place only a year before he made the film, the image of Katzman braving it against underworld threats to bring the truth to light on behalf of the Mexican townsfolk is a compelling one.
The fact that Katzman chose this story for his film suggests that the plight of the community struggling to overthrow a criminal cartel caught the public imagination at the time. As well as Coates's Los Angeles Mirror reports, national press such as the New York Times covered the shooting of Acosta Mesa and the story of his newspaper, El Imparcial.Footnote 46 While it may be the case that The Tijuana Story was made in response to public interest in the story, aspects of the film which evoke specifically left-wing themes and stylings, which will be discussed in detail below, perhaps indicate that Katzman and the filmmakers had a more personal and political connection to the film. Granting the production crew freedoms unavailable elsewhere in the Hollywood system, they were able to pursue this unusually themed film which seems an awkward fit with the sensational exposé series.
Straw has argued that during the postwar period, the semi-documentary filmmaking style emerged from a grouping of filmmakers whose political position lay somewhere between a “progressive coalition” and “left-wing activism.”Footnote 47 Such documentary film style has its origins in early travel films or travelogues, which Jeffrey Ruoff has described as “an open form” that “offers an alternative to both the linear cause-and-effect structure of classical Hollywood cinema and the problem–solution approach of Griersonian documentary.”Footnote 48 These travelling documentaries became a way for filmmakers to move outside dominant narrative frames and structures. Seen as a descendent of such documentary travel narratives, Tijuana's landscape is traversed by the film in the manner of a travelogue. But through its semidocumentary style and, as we will see, its constant shifting of perspectives and frames, it also resists dominant Hollywood visions of Tijuana.
THE CINEMATIC CITY: DESTABILIZING SPACES
In a movie which appears to be concerned with exploring the ways in which Tijuana is constructed as a cinematic city, it is not surprising that the visual structure of the film calls attention to a wide range of different viewpoints and perspectives of the cinematic space. The spatial analysis of film is a methodology that has been advocated by scholars such as Bruno and Tom Conley, who take an explicitly physical and geographic approach to textual analysis of cinematic space. Bruno puts forward the filmic “voyageur,” as a challenge to the traditional voyeur of film studies, and understands the experience of film to be one of transportation and movement.Footnote 49 Conley focusses on the cartography of cinema and asserts that “maps appear in most of the movies we see.”Footnote 50 His claim that “a map in a film is an element at once foreign to the film but also, paradoxically, of the same essence as film” suggests that it is crucial to analyse the ways in which films chart and map out spaces, drawing dividing lines and exerting power in much the same way that maps do.Footnote 51
The geography of The Tijuana Story's cinematic space similarly attempts to map out Tijuana and transport the audience through its streets, but it presents an acutely incoherent perspective on the city. The word “perspective” invokes ideas of personal opinion and physical position; both the ideological and the geographical. Bruno has argued that the development of perspective in art in the fifteenth century enabled new, shifting visions that broke away from the linearity which had previously pervaded visual culture. This enabled the later development of perspectival cartographic practices such as bird's-eye view, and a mobile visual culture replete with multiple, moving viewpoints which in turn led to the emergence of cinematic vision. Bruno claims, “Cinematic vision bears the destabilizing effect of a shifting, mobilized field. The product of the history of space, filmic space is a terrain of shifting positions – the product of multiple, incorporated, and mobile viewpoints.”Footnote 52 For Bruno, cinematic images incorporate multiple, flexible and shifting perspectives which do not present a totalizing vision, but rather a destabilizing one. This multi-perspectivalism can be seen at work in The Tijuana Story, where the film breaks down any singular, mythical account of the city and presents instead a multitude of mobile, shifting perspectives that are unfixed and detotalizing.
The film opens with a documentary sequence narrated by Coates. The first image is a long shot of Tijuana's infamous main strip, Avenida de Revolución. As Coates tells of the 12 million American visitors to the city in 1956, the view shifts to a high-angle long shot of the border crossing shown from the American side as cars stream under arches into and out of Mexico. Then, in an unusually dislocating cut, the camera is suddenly positioned under one of these arches in the dark, as the cars drive through from the United States towards the screen. This edit almost violates the traditional 180-degree axis of action of classic Hollywood cinema which the rest of the movie adheres to. The shot physically transports viewers through the border, and with its dislocating jolt of unconventional editing, the audience is thrown off-balance in a liminal borderline space.
The Tijuana of The Tijuana Story is marked by movement within its frames. Cars are always moving down the streets as tourists walk along pavements, filling the frame with motion in multiple directions. The film shifts its national territory too, switching between the USA and Mexico in the space of a cinematic cut. Multiple perspectives are also presented through the cinematic architecture. The opening sequence contrasts different viewpoints and angles, offering a constantly moving and dislocating effect. Exterior shots of Tijuana repeat throughout the film and the architecture of the border city is ephemeral as each shot fades into the next, always in motion as the camera moves through streets and switches from one angle to another, from long shot to close-up of the city.
The concept of border architecture developed by Eloy Méndez Sáinz and Jeff Banister is useful in understanding how these spaces of Tijuana operate. They argue,
“Transitional architecture” is a contradiction in terms in which the natural inclination toward permanence sinks into the waters of the ephemeral … Transitions favor the meaningless, the non-place. And border cities are international ports destined to combine the various conditions of passageways, or areas of transition.Footnote 53
The idea that border cities comprise transitional architecture and spaces which are always changing and in motion speaks in a filmic language; The Tijuana Story's city is seen from a mobile and moving multiplicity of perspectives. This cinematic city is also marked as a non-place through the camera's focus on neon signs. The clubs and bars that these signs belong to do not appear at all, as the neon lights are shown in extended montages one after the other, surrounded by empty black screen. In a sequence of extremely canted shots, the camera angles change with each new neon sign, producing a jarring disconnect in the filmic space. Through this ever-moving and changing transitional space, the filmic border city becomes unstable through its diverse, conflicting and shifting perspectives. Thus the film seems to support Michael Dear and Gustavo Leclerc's assertion that the “principal trope in artistic, cultural, and intellectual representations of Tijuana is space.”Footnote 54 However, in this cinematic representation of the city, space is rendered paradoxical, changing and transitional. The different geographical perspectives offered on the city echo the contradiction between the film's marketing, which draws explicitly on the dark legend, and its central narrative, which attempts to present filmgoers with Tijuanenses' own view on their home.
The vision of the city offered by The Tijuana Story is further destabilized through the constant shifting of its framing narratives. The film opens with an American telling of events provided by the Los Angeles reporter. Following the earlier sequence of images of Tijuana and the border crossing, a new shot shows newspapers being printed. The voice-over describing the courageous journalism of Mexican hero Acosta Mesa directly implies that these are his papers going to print. Yet as the camera pauses on one of the finished newspapers, it is revealed that it is Paul Coates's paper, the Los Angeles Mirror. As the film's titles are superimposed atop the printing machines rattling off copies of the American paper, it suggests that the Tijuana story is, in fact, the story of Coates's own newspaper articles. He is shown at his desk, apparently in the middle of his work, reading out headlines from El Imparcial, the Mexican newspaper. This initial framing device offers audiences a highly mediated view of Tijuana that is shown through the prism of the American journalist's reports.
After these introductory sequences, Coates reappears in the middle of the picture, enacting a similar dislocating shift from the Mexican centre of the story in Tijuana back to the newspaper offices in Los Angeles. His voiceover bursts back into the movie to narrate a scene where Acosta Mesa reinstates his newspaper in the face of intimidation from the gangsters. Coates speaks for Acosta Mesa here, his voice-over providing the words as the Mexican journalist's soundless mouth speaks on the screen. Having been immersed in the Mexican tale, audiences are suddenly pulled back to Coates's story in the USA. This repeated abrupt switching back and forth between the two countries draws attention to the framing device and begins to question Coates's perspective and position as the narrator. The film refuses to offer a unified perspective on the city, and the story resists framing by the American journalist through highlighting the artificiality of his narration.
American perspectives of Tijuana are further challenged by the performance of Rodolpho Acosto in the title role. A regular character actor in American films, Acosto was known for playing bad guys and bandits in movies such as The Fugitive (John Ford, 1947), City of Bad Men (Harmon Jones, 1953) and Bandido (Richard Fleischer, 1956). The Tijuana Story marked his first and only title role in American cinema, something that was not missed by the film's contemporary critics. Acosto's performance was almost unanimously regarded as the highlight of the film, and the fact that he was presented as an authentic Mexican voice telling a Mexican story was much more significant for commentators than Coates's appearance. One critic found Acosto's portrayal “powerful and sensitive,” and wrote that the film “frequently touches the heart.”Footnote 55 For the Hollywood Reporter, Acosto was “particularly impressive,” and Variety found his performance “outstanding” in its “dignity and force.”Footnote 56 The fact he was a “native Mexican” was also singled out in reviews, demonstrating the importance of a believable Mexican voice in the film, one which challenged the narration and perspective on events offered by Coates.Footnote 57
As J. B. Harley has argued, the act of mapping is never deployed without some form of political power.Footnote 58 And, similarly, cinematic representations of places are never devoid of political impact. Alongside its formal challenge to colonial accounts of the city, the thematic content and visual style of The Tijuana Story also conveys political contestations. At moments the film bears a resemblance to The Grapes of Wrath (John Steinbeck, 1939) and Salt of the Earth (Herbert Biberman, 1954), both of which are renowned for their revolutionary sentiments. During one of his rousing speeches Acosta Mesa declares, “when a decent man is hurt, I feel it.” The line cannot help but recall Tom Joad's final speech in The Grapes of Wrath in content, tone and rhythm: “Wherever there's a fight so hungry people can eat, I'll be there. Wherever there's a cop beating up a guy, I'll be there.”Footnote 59 The lines given to Acosta Mesa's publisher (Michael Fox) also echo this revolutionary and communitarian outlook. His final speech in the film, “Manuel was right, there is no power in the world stronger than us. Together we can clean up Tijuana, all it takes is the will,” also makes explicit the film's collective, socialist ethos. Roused by Acosta Mesa's death, the community come together in an uprising against the criminals and corrupt officials running the town.
During the film's closing funeral sequence, the stylistic influence of Salt of the Earth can also be felt, which, added to the similar focus on the plight of oppressed Mexican communities, draws a clear comparison between the two films. The Tijuana Story's funeral procession shows Acosta Mesa's coffin followed by his family, friends and other members of the community passing through the streets of Tijuana. Intercut with long shots of the slow-moving procession are distinctive close-ups of townsfolk, showing their faces and expressions to demonstrate their empathy with Acosta Mesa's cause. Recalling the slow, documentary-style close-ups used to show the determination and nobility of the strikers in Salt of the Earth, these images further lend The Tijuana Story a definite socialist and revolutionary ethos, presenting Tijuana as a moral and politicized community.
The Tijuana Story therefore forms part of a wider cycle of films which use images of Mexico and Mexicans to engage with left-wing and liberal ideas. The figure of the Mexican revolutionary has featured in films from Sergei Eisenstein's unfinished ¡Que Viva México! (1933) to Juarez (William Dieterle, 1939), Viva Zapata (Elia Kazan, 1952), Vera Cruz (1954), The Professionals (Richard Brooks, 1966) and The Wild Bunch (Sam Peckinpah, 1969), all of which use their images of Mexico or Mexicans to tell political narratives. The figure of the Mexican revolutionary in these films recalls the visual style of Mexican muralists such as Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco. The Tijuana Story's representation of strong, determined Mexicans willing a social revolution into being positions it in a lineage with the work of these explicitly political artists who were committed to socialism and communism, as well as with this wider body of films which use Mexican revolution to explore leftist ideas.
CONCLUSION
Tijuana has a long history as a cinematic city and the Hollywood film industry played a significant role in both the construction of the city and the production of its mythic status. The Tijuana Story is an American-made film which does not simply perpetuate the black legend of the city constructed in American cinema, but, through its contradictory embracing of both the city's seedy mythology and the perspective of Tijuanan citizens, it can perhaps offer new understandings of the city's history. Although the film maps out the city for its voyaging American viewers, it is not with a totalizing imperialist gaze but with a more itinerant and transitional one, where we are not sure which side of the border we may be on at any one time, nor which perspective of events we are presented by the film's ever-shifting narrative viewpoints. As it derails such imperial visions of the city, The Tijuana Story opens up a multitude of other possible alternatives, suggesting that there can be no single story of Tijuana, but rather manifold shifting and competing narratives. The transitional spaces of this cinematic city, coupled with Hollywood's complex historical connections with Tijuana, raise important questions about the extent of cinema's visible, physical effects on the border.
In examining the production contexts of the film it is also clear that there is no definitive account of its influences or political persuasions. However, its striking appeal to the style and imagery of explicitly left-wing cultural texts, coupled with its difference from the other exposé films of Katzman's series, suggests that there may have been specific political motivations behind the production. The involvement of Coates, who had long campaigned to bring light to the injustices faced by the people of Tijuana and to build support for their struggles, also supports this interpretation. It is perhaps significant that it is Mexican characters who become politically potent figures in this production, given the film's broader cultural and historical contexts. Michael Denning has argued that, for the broad left-wing movement of the early to mid-twentieth century known as the popular front,
the romance of revolution was manifested not only in the popularity of the Soviet films of Eisenstein and Pudovkin, but also in the romance of the Mexican revolution, embodied in the grand murals of Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco, the novels of B. Traven, and the films Juarez and Viva Zapata. The success of the Popular Front politics of international solidarity lay in the ability of these narratives to displace the imperial fantasies of race war that dominated American popular culture.Footnote 60
Mexico thus began to play an important role within the leftist movement's international solidarity and multicultural identity. The images of Mexican revolutionaries popularized by Rivera, Orozco and other muralists were echoed in Hollywood movies, creating an indelible link between left-wing politics and Mexican revolution that would persist within American cinema throughout the twentieth century. Further, as Rebecca Schreiber has argued, Mexico provided an important safe haven for many communist and left-wing artists and filmmakers fleeing persecution in the USA during the House Un-American Activities Committee investigations.Footnote 61 This, coupled with the regular appearance of politically charged images of Mexico and Mexicans, suggests that Mexico played a vitally important role in the cultural imaginary of the American left during this period.
The Tijuana Story's shocking tale of a journalist's murder by criminal gangs has startling resonances with the situation facing journalists working in Tijuana today. Human Rights Watch reports that “at least 85 journalists were killed between 2000 and August 2013, and 20 more were disappeared between 2005 and April 2013.”Footnote 62 In their analysis of journalist murders in Mexico, the Committee to Protect Journalists claim that 80 percent of those killed wrote on crime.Footnote 63 Holding clear echoes of El Imparcial, a small Tijuanan weekly Zeta launched by Jesús Blancornelas regularly publishes exposés about police and government corruption and complicity in drugs trafficking. Two journalists at the newspaper have been murdered since 1988, but it continues to publish critical stories determinately remaining, as its motto declares, libre como el viento.Footnote 64
