SOURCE: Limόn, José E. “Tex-Sex-Mex: American Identities, Lone Stars, and the Politics of Racialized Sexuality.” American Literary History 9, no. 3 (autumn 1997): 598-616.

In the following essay, Limόn argues that Lone Star presents a “radical revision” of traditional gender roles in relationships between the Anglo-American and Mexican communities.

John Sayles's new film, Lone Star, will provide closure to an argument I wish to make concerning certain American identities. I will also have occasion to revisit another classic treatment of such identities in the film High Noon. Before film became their primary discourse, these identities were first fully articulated in nineteenth-century dime novels of the West, many of which were, like Lone Star, set in Texas. A now very distant discursive cousin of the Sayles film called, in fact, Little Lone Star (1886) and written by one Sam Hall features Anita, “a physically precocious” young Mexican woman living on a...