Halfway across That Line: Gender at the Threshold of History in the North American West

Abstract

Figure 1. Elizabeth Jameson. Fifty-fourth president of the Western History Association. Photo by Dave Brown. There is a scene in my favorite movie, Lone Star (1996), which compresses the social and spatial boundary lines of western history. Lone Star , according to writer/director John Sayles, is “a story about borders.” “In a personal sense,” Sayles elaborated, “a border is where you draw a line and say ‘This is where I end and someone else begins.’ In a metaphorical sense, it can be any of the symbols that we erect between one another—sex, class, race, age.”1 Eagle Pass, Texas, where Lone Star was filmed, becomes the fictional town of Frontera—“frontier” in the sense of border. In Frontera, the Anglo minority has long dominated the ethnic Mexican majority and the smaller African American community. Borders there both exclude and protect: the international border, the racial neighborhoods and cafes, local class lines, the intimate boundaries of sex, the narrative lines of contested histories, of personal lives and public stories. At one point in the film, Sheriff Sam Deeds drives across the bridge to Mexico to speak to Chucho Montoya, El Rey de las Llantas (King of the Tires), who, he has heard, once witnessed a long-buried murder. As they chat at one of El Rey’s tire lots, Deeds broaches the murder. Montoya responds, “You the sheriff of Rio County, right? Un jefe muy …