Almost right where we started
FROM ‘BORDERTOWN’ TO ‘BORDERTOWN,’ ONE MEXICAN’S HOLLYWOOD JOURNEY
WHENEVER I VISIT OlveraStreet,asIdid recently, my walk through the historic corridor is always the same. ¶ Start at the plaza. Say a prayer at the massive cross that marks the area as the birthplace of Los Angeles. Pass the stand where out-of-towners and politicians have donned sombreros and serapes for photos ever since the city turned this area into a tourist trap in 1930. ¶ Look at the vendor stalls. Wonder if I need a new guayabera. Gobble up two beef taquitos bathed in avocado salsa at Cielito Lindo. Then return to my car and go home. ¶ I’ve done this walk as a kid, and as an adult. For food crawls and quick lunches. With grad students on field trips, and with the late Anthony Bourdain for an episode of his “Parts Unknown.”
This last visit was different, though: I had my own camera crew with me.
My last chance at Hollywood fame was going to live or die on Olvera Street.
I was shooting a sizzle reel — footage for television executives to determine whether I’m worthy of a show. I want to turn my 2012 book “Taco USA: How Mexican Food Conquered America” into the next “Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives.” Or an Alton Brown ripoff. Or a TikTok series. Anything at this point.
For more than a decade, I’ve tried to break into Hollywood with some success — but the experience has left me cynical. Personal experience and the historical record have taught me that studios still want Mexicans to stay in the same cinematic lane that American film has paved for more than a century. We’re forever labeled … something. Exotic. Dangerous. Weighed down with problems. Always “Mexican.” Even if we’re natives of Southern California. Especially if we’re natives of Southern California.
I hope my sizzle reel leads to something different. I doubt it will. The issue is systemic. Producers and scriptwriters can only portray the Mexicans they know — and in a perverse, selffulfilling prophecy, they mostly only know the Mexicans their industry depicts even in a region where Latinos are nearly half the population. The cycle even infects creators like me.
As the film crew wrapped, I looked around. We were right where I began, except I now looked south on Main Street. The plaza was to my left; to my right was the historic La Placita church. City Hall loomed on the horizon. The vista was the same as the opening scene of “Bordertown” (1935), which I had seen the night before. It was the first Hollywood movie to address modern-day Mexican Americans in Los Angeles. It was a reminder that 86 years later, Hollywood’s Mexican problem hasn’t really progressed at all.
Screen misrepresentation of Mexicans isn’t just a longstanding wrong; it’s an original sin with an unsurprising Adam: D.W. Griffith. He’s most infamous for reawakening the Ku Klux Klan with his 1915 epic “The Birth of a Nation.” Far less examined is how Griffith’s earliest works also helped give filmmakers a language for typecasting Mexicans.
Two of his first six films were so-called “greaser” movies, one-reelers where Mexican Americans were racialized as inherently criminal and played by white people. “The Greaser’s Gauntlet” (1908) is the earliest film to use the slur in its title. Griffith filmed at least eight greaser movies on the East Coast before heading to Southern California in early 1910 for better weather.
The new setting allowed Griffith to indulge his Mexican obsession. He used the San Gabriel and San Juan Capistrano missions as backdrops for melodramas embossed with Spanish Fantasy Heritage, the white California myth that romanticized the land’s Mexican past as it discriminated against the Mexicans of the present.
In films such as his 1910 shorts “The Thread of Destiny,” “In Old California” and “The Two Brothers,” Griffith codified cinematic Mexican characters and themes that persist. Reprobate father. Saintly mother. Wayward son. The idea that Mexicans are forever doomed because they’re, well, Mexicans.
Griffith based his plots not on how modern-day Mexicans lived, but on how white people thought they did. This presumption nearly earned Griffith a beating from angry Latinos.
As Robert M. Henderson’s 1970 book “D.W. Griffith: The Years at Biograph” describes, the director was staging a religious procession in San Juan Capistrano for “The Two Brothers” when a crowd “broke and rushed the actors” because they felt the scene mocked them. The company rushed to their hotel where the townspeople waited outside for hours. It was perhaps the earliest Latino protest against negative depictions of them on screen.
But the threat of angry Mexicans didn’t kill greaser movies. Griffith showed their box-office potential, and many American cinematic pioneers dabbled in them. Thomas Edison’s company shot some, as did its biggest rival, Vitagraph Studios. So did Mutual Film, an early home for Charlie Chaplin. Horror legend Lon Chaney played a greaser. The first western star, Broncho Billy Anderson, made a career out of besting them.
These films were so noxious that the Mexican government in 1922 banned studios that produced them from the country until they “retired ... denigrating films from worldwide circulation,” according to a letter from Mexican President Álvaro Obregón. The gambit worked: The greaser films ended. Screenwriters instead reimagined Mexicans as Latin lovers, Mexican spitfires, buffoons, peons, mere bandits and other negative stereotypes.
That’s why “Bordertown” surprised me when I saw it. The movie starred Paul Muni as Eastside lawyer Johnny Ramirez and Bette Davis as a temptress.
Based on a novel of the same name, it’s not the racist travesty many Chicano film scholars have made it out to be. Yes, Muni was a non-Mexican playing a Mexican. Johnny Ramirez had a fiery temper, a bad accent and repeatedly called his mother (played by Spanish actress Soledad Jiminez) “mamacita,” who in turn calls him “Juanito.” And the film’s poster features a bug-eyed, sombrero-wearing Muni pawing for a fetching Davis, even though Ramirez never made a move on Davis’ character or wore a sombrero.
These and other faux pas (like Ramirez’s friends singing “La Cucaracha” at a party) distract from a movie that didn’t try to mask the discrimination Mexicans faced in 1930s Los Angeles. Ramirez can’t find justice for his neighbor, who lost his produce truck after a drunk socialite on her way back from dinner at Las Golondrinas on Olvera Street smashed into it. That very socialite, whom Ramirez goes on to date (don’t ask), repeatedly calls him “Savage” as a term of endearment. When Ramirez tires of American bigotry and announces he’s moving south of the border to run a casino, a priest in brownface asks him to remain. “For what?” Ramirez says. “So those white little mugs who call themselves gentlemen and aristocrats can make a fool out of me?”
“Bordertown” sprung up from Warner Bros.’ Depressionera roster of social-problem films that served as a roughedged alternative to the escapism offered by MGM, Disney and Paramount. But its makers committed the same error Griffith did: They fell back on tropes instead of talking to Mexicans right in front of them who might offer a better tale.
Take the first shot of “Bordertown,” the one I inadvertently re-created on my TV shoot.
Under a title that reads “Los Angeles … the Mexican Quarter,” viewers see Olvera Street’s plaza emptier than it should be. That’s because four years earlier, immigration officials rounded up hundreds at that very spot. The move was part of a repatriation effort by the American government that saw them boot about a million Mexicans — citizens and not — from the United States during the 1930s.
Following that opening is a glimpse of a theater marquee advertising the Mexican music trio Los Madrugadores (“The Early Risers”). They were the most popular Spanish-language group in Southern California at the time, singing ballads about the struggles Mexicans faced. Lead singer Pedro J. González hosted a popular AM radio morning show heard as far away as Texas that mixed equal parts music and denunciations against racism.
By the time “Bordertown” was released in 1935, Gonzalez was in San Quentin, jailed by a false accusation of statutory rape pursued by an L.A. district attorney’s office happy to lock up a critic. He was freed in 1940 after the alleged victim recanted her confession, then deported to Tijuana, where he continued his career before returning to California in the 1970s.
Wouldn’t Gonzalez make a better movie than “Bordertown”? Warner Bros. could have offered a bold corrective to the image of Mexican Americans if they had just paid attention to their own footage! Instead, Gonzalez’s saga wouldn’t be told on film until a 1984 documentary and 1988 drama.
How Hollywood imagines Mexicans versus how we really are turned real for me in 2013 when I became a consulting producer for a Fox cartoon about life on the U.S.-Mexico border. The title? “Bordertown.”
It lasted one season in 2015, and I even got to write an episode, which happened to be the series finale.
The gig was a dream deferred. I had visions of becoming the brown Tarantino or a Mexican Truffaut before journalism got in the way. Over the years, there was Hollywood interest in stories I wrote but never anything that went nowhere.
“Bordertown” opened up more doors for me. I got another consulting producer credit on a Fusion special for comedian Al Madrigal and sold a script to ABC that same year about gentrification in Boyle Heights years before the subject became a trend. Pitch meetings piled up with so much frequency that my childhood friends coined a nickname for me: Hollywood Gus.
My run wouldn’t last long. The microagressions became too annoying.
“Bordertown” veteran writers rolled their eyes any time I said one of their jokes was clichéd, like one about a donkey show in Tijuana. Or when they initially rejected a joke about menudo, saying no one knew what the soup was. They weren’t happy when another Latino writer and I pointed out that you’re pretty clueless if you’ve lived in Southern California for a while and don’t know what menudo is.
The writers were so petty they snuck a line into the animated “Bordertown” where the main character said, “There’s nothing worse than a Mexican with glasses” — which is now my public email to forever remind me of how clueless Hollywood is.
The insults didn’t bother me so much as the insight I gained from those interactions: The only Latinos most Hollywood types know are the janitors and security guards at the studio, and nannies and gardeners at their homes. The few Latinos in the industry I met had assimilated into this worldview as well.
Could I blame them for their ignorance when it came to capturing Mexican American stories, especially those in Southern California? Of course I can.
What ended any aspirations for a full-time Hollywood career was a meeting with a television executive shortly after ABC passed on my Boyle Heights script (characters weren’t believable, per the rejection). They repeatedly asked that I think about doing a show about my father’s life, which didn’t interest me. Comedies about immigrant parents are clichéd. So one day I blurted that I was more interested in telling my stories.
I never heard from the executive again.
Five years later, and that Hollywood dream won’t die. I’m not leaving journalism. But at this point, I just want to prove to myself that I can help exorcise D.W. Griffith’s anti-Mexican demons from Hollywood once and for all. That I can show the Netflix honcho they were wrong for passing on a “Taco USA” series with the excuse that the topic of Mexican food in the United States was too “limited.” And the Food Network people who said they just couldn’t see a show about the subject as being as “fun” as it was.
When this sizzle reel gets cut, and I start my Hollywood jarabe anew, I’ll keep in mind a line in “Bordertown” that Johnny Ramirez said: “An American man can lift himself up by his bootstraps. All he needs is strength and a pair of boots.”
Mexicans have had the strength since forever in this town. But can Hollywood finally give us the