ABSTRACT

Shortly after the U.S. annexation of half of Mexico’s territory in 1848, not only was slavery re-instituted, but Mexicans viewed the process as one of dispossession and humiliation. As a result many rebels, some real and some imagined, rose in defiance during the second half of the nineteenth century. The uprisings produced figures that emulated a Robin Hood of the Southwest, who were eventually stylized as the character Zorro. 1 These anti-gringo masked avengers, who led secret lives, were appropriated and quickly transformed into symbols of Anglo-Saxon culture. 2 The Lone Ranger, Batman, and all of the superheroes that followed them are nihilistic myths that exposed the dualities, day/night, exposed the dualities, day/night, discourse/reality, of a new U.S. culture. Actors such as John Wayne, Gary Cooper, and Clint Eastwood helped to elevate the cowboy as a prototypic symbol of the “authentic American,” which had little or no connection to the Quakers, Puritans, Pilgrims of the Mayflower, or the intellectualism of the Founding Fathers. The cowboy is another mutation of the Mexican vaquero who, in turn, is rooted in the Hispano-Arab culture. It is no coincidence, then, that current conservative groups who resist the nonexistent “Mexican invasion” were and are from Texas and other Southwestern states. The more distant states, such as in New England, were more removed, and thus, less critical.