In director William A. Wellman's grim anti-lynching parable, The Ox-Bow Incident (1943), Mexican-born, East Los Angeles-raised actor Anthony Quinn plays Juan Martinez. This sophisticated, falsely accused Mexican faces an illegally deputized posse with dignified repartee, cuts a bullet out of his thigh, then throws the slug and the knife at the feet of his shooter, the ringleader of a murderous mob. To Luis Valdez, the Mexican American playwright, screenwriter, and director, who had just turned eight years old when the movie was released, Quinn's character "looked like someone I could identify with, and I did. You hold on to these things. You are always looking for someone you can relate to" (qtd. in De Los Santos et al.).

Director John Huston's tragic morality tale, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948) is notable for being set in Mexico with a considerable amount of Spanish-language dialogue. In the film, Mexican actor Alfonso Bedoya's bandido character challenges a rifle-shooting Fred C. Dobbs (Humphrey Bogart). Gold Hat fires back:  "Badges? We ain't got no badges. We don't need no badges. I don't have to show you any stinking badges!" Such defiant celluloid moments, magnified by their paucity and eliciting varied responses, illustrate how ethnic Mexicans – that is, Mexicans and Mexican Americans alike – insert themselves into America's national imaginary.¹
 
Whereas scholarship on Hollywood Westerns has analyzed the allegorical otherness of Native American characters and the normative whiteness of cowboy archetypes, consistent with the genre's nineteenth-century dime novel origins, ethnic Mexicans have been essentialized in movies depicting America's mythical frontier. Accordingly, this article critically surveys the relevant roles of Mexican American actor Anthony Quinn and Mexican actress Katy Jurado and argues that post-World War II psychological Westerns reveal the extent of their inclusion in popular culture, despite the structural constraints of the film industry. Seeking equal opportunity, devoted actors surpassed demeaning stereotypes by artfully representing themselves.  As a result, they subtly changed the mainstream with their powerful, pleasurable performances, thus staking a claim in a redefined conception of Americana.  As Carlos Cortés contends, the entertainment media "help shape expectations," "influence audience's values and attitudes," and "condition" viewers (82, 84, 87). This process occurs on the seemingly abstract level of signification, or visual meaning making, hence the importance of this article's featured players in the creation of U.S. cultural history.

In an example of interpreting pop culture imagery to reimagine one's place in all-American stories, the male narrator of New Mexican writer Nash Candelaria's book, The Day the Cisco Kid Shot John Wayne, recalls his childhood relationship with motion pictures, race, and representation:

We all had our favorites and our definite point of view about Hollywood movies. We barely tolerated those cowboy movies with [gringo] actors...we'd sniff with disdain. But...we'd cheer for the Indians and sometimes for the bad guys if they were swarthy and Mexican.

They showed the Zorro movies several times each, including the serials, with one chapter each Saturday.  Zorro drew mixed reviews and was the subject of endless argument...That was what Zorro did to us. Better than Gene Autry but still a phony Spaniard, while all the indios y mestizos were bit players.

That was no doubt the reason why our favorite was the Cisco Kid...Gilbert Roland, César Romero, Duncan Renaldo. With the arch-sidekick of all time, Chris-Pin Martín, who was better any day than Fuzzy Knight, Smiley Burnette, or Gabby Hayes. (14-15)

The Cisco Kid was a sympathetic Mexican bandit who helped those in need and challenged oppressive authority figures in the West. Chris-Pin Martin, born in Tucson, Arizona, of Mexican and Yaqui Indian heritage, played a serious dramatic role in director John Ford's 1939 Western, Stagecoach. His Mexican character's Apache wife was played by Mexico City singer and actress Elvira Ríos. But Martin was best known as a comic actor, particularly for portraying the bumbling-but-reliable characters Gordito (Chubby) and Pancho in multiple Cisco Kid movies. According to Fernando Vásquez, an Army veteran raised in California's southern San Joaquin Valley, "images like the Cisco Kid and Pancho" are "still stereotyping, but superficially much more positive" (Martín-Rodríguez, 245, 97).

In Stuart Hall's assessment, "Stereotyping reduces people to a few, simple, essential characteristics, which are represented as fixed by Nature" (257). Hollywood has depicted Mexicans as greasers, bandits, buffoons, sexy señoritas, and Latin lovers, over-determined roles that helped define American popular perceptions in the United States. Stereotypes reinforce in-group members' belief in their natural superiority over outsiders while minorities can internalize negative images. In the cultural struggle over stereotypes, people exercise the power to define and portray themselves with dignity. According to Richard Dyer, "How we are seen determines in part how we are treated; how we treat others is based on how we see them." In this way, "representations...have real consequences for real people" because they "delimit and enable what people can be in any given society" (Matter of Images 1, 3). As George Lipsitz argues, taking ethnic Mexicans seriously is "indispensible to any honest engagement with the complexities and contradictions of culture" in the United States, and their "presence helps give American society its distinctive character" (49, 58).

Ethnic Mexicans, American Myths

In the extensive filmographies of Anthony Quinn and Katy Jurado, their impressive Western roles remain unappreciated by scholars. During the 1950s, these two actors seized opportunities to show their skills by developing nuanced, well-rounded characters. For example, in 1952, Anthony Quinn matched Marlon Brando's intensity in an anti-Communist, Cold War film about the Mexican Revolution, Viva Zapata! Quinn's riveting, rousing performance as Emiliano Zapata's cynical, hard-drinking brother, Eufemio, an insurgent turned local despot, earned him a Best Supporting Actor Academy Award. He was only the second Latino Oscar-winner. In 1953, Quinn played a bank robbing, Sheriff-killing Mexican bandido, José Constantino Esqueda, in Ride Vaquero! Set in 1865 Brownsville, Texas, this Western justifies America's continental expansion. As its homesteaders make their fortunes in cattle empires, they bring law, order, and the army to a corrupt border region. Esqueda is a menace, rustling cattle, burning ranches, and killing white settlers. In his only bandido role, Quinn embodied the traditional stereotype with flair, creating an eloquent, fast-talking villain, artistic yet sadistic. In 1953, Quinn, who had previously portrayed dignified Native Americans in three films, played a proud leader, Chief Osceola, resisting forced removal in Seminole, set in 1835 Florida. In 1954, Anthony Quinn played Zampano, the strongman, in Italian director Federico Fellini's La Strada (The Road). With this role, he garnered international acclaim.

Guadalajara-born Katy Jurado had already been working in Mexican cinema for eight years before her 1951 Hollywood film debut in The Girl and the Bullfighter as Chelo Estrada. In 1952, Jurado shines in High Noon, director Fred Zinnemann's tense Western starring Gary Cooper as Marshall Will Kane who must alone face four gunmen arriving on the noon train. Jurado's character, Helen Ramirez, is an unmarried outsider who lives in the town's fancy hotel where she is socially isolated from judgmental community members. Jurado first appears on screen in a robe and satin nightgown, with Will Kane's young deputy, Harvey Pell, played by Lloyd Bridges, who, after breakfast, tries to kiss her on the cheek, but she turns her face away. In their next encounter, Helen tells Harvey to "grow up," calls him "a fool," and makes him leave her hotel room. Gary Cooper, in an Academy Award-winning performance, shares one scene with Katy Jurado, who plays his ex-lover. Towards the end of their exchange, Ramirez briefly switches from English to Spanish, saying, "Un año sin verte" ("A year without seeing you"). Kane replies, "Si, lo se" ("Yes, I know"). Their mutual respect, unspoken understanding, and deep feelings – one year after their relationship ended – are evident in Cooper's awkward body language and fidgeting hands as well as in Jurado's empathetic parting glances.

Even though Helen Ramirez shares features of two Hollywood Latina stereotypes, the aristocratic dark lady and the hot-tempered harlot, she is also a savvy businesswoman who owns the general store and the saloon. Although she is coded as lascivious and therefore immoral, in a dramatic break from all previous Western movie Mexicanas, economically independent Ramirez expresses a professional tone of authority. For instance, Sam (Tom London), an older white man, works for, and takes orders from Helen, and she summons a local Anglo businessman, Mr. Weaver (Cliff Clark), to her hotel room, where he arrives, hat in hand. She shrewdly negotiates a deal for him to become her "silent partner." In a rare movie exchange, after gratefully thanking Ramirez for the opportunity, and for always being "decent" to him, he sincerely bids her good luck as she settles her affairs and prepares to leave town.

Ramirez also approaches Harvey from an undeniable position of strength as she reminds him, "I can take of myself." In an emotional scene, she says disdainfully, "You are a good-looking boy...but...it takes more than big, broad shoulders to make a man." She flatly tells Harvey that he will never become a man like Will Kane, to which he responds by grabbing her, telling her to stay in town with him, and forcibly kissing her. When Harvey pulls her close again, trying to kiss her against her will, Helen declares, "I don't like anybody to put his hands on me unless I want him to. And I don't like you to. Anymore." Then she slaps Harvey across the face in an assertion of defiant dignity. Helen exhibits the same grit with Marshal Will Kane when she tells him, "I would not lift a finger for you...Nothing in life is free."

During one of her scenes opposite Will’s new bride, Amy, Helen Ramirez tells her, “I hate this town. I’ve always hated it. To be a Mexican woman in a town like this.” Katy Jurado more than merely reads her lines to ingénue Grace Kelly; displaying self-awareness as a racialized, gendered subject, she speaks for every ethnic Mexican woman in white male-dominated Hollywood. In addition, Ramirez bluntly tells Amy, “I don’t understand you … If Kane was my man, I’d never leave him like this.  I’d get a gun.  I’d fight.”  This turning point marks the beginning of Amy’s character arc, with Ramirez as catalyst, culminating in the film’s showdown climax, when the Quaker pacifist Amy shoots one of Will’s would-be assassins in the back, killing him. Because Ramirez does not conform to the patriarchal gender roles of wife and mother, she can never find redemption by marrying the Anglo protagonist, nor equal the white woman as frontier civilizer; nonetheless, her financial interests and appreciating assets give her options. Moreover, in High Noon, other than the Marshal, Helen Ramirez is the only character with honorable convictions:  the Mexicana’s ethical center grounds the story. While media stereotypes de-historicize specific ethnic groups, beyond discussions of trait identification and positive versus negative images, I argue that actors can disrupt the dominant ideological narrative in popular cultural production.

For many Chicano and Chicana viewers, who refocus their lens from the white stars of the silver screen, High Noon is all about Helen Ramirez, about Katy Jurado stealing her scenes. In José Limón's analysis, for 1950s ethnic Mexicans, "watching this film, often in segregated theaters...Helen Ramirez  has achieved some large measure of victory," although her "strong Mexican presence" is "too quickly" erased "to make narrative way for the white couple to be reunited" (117). According to Carmen Huaco-Nuzum, Chicana spectators directly identify with Jurado's stereotype subverting, "culturally empowered characterization" (152-154, 144). For instance, Dionne Espinoza notes, Beverly Sanchez-Padilla created a tribute performance monologue, La Katy, with a working-class Chicana narrator inspired by Katy Jurado's "challenge to Lloyd Bridges not to touch her without her consent in High Noon" (103-104). Indeed, "Among Mexican-American women of a certain age," Jurado's High Noon performance "is legendary"; her fans admire her "iron backbone" and embrace her "heartbreaking vulnerability" (Acosta). Jurado holds her head high throughout, comporting herself haughtily, with integrity; her proud portrayal of Helen Ramirez adds ethnic Mexican visibility to the mainstream by reinvigorating a seemingly stock character with resilience and intelligence.

In 1953, for High Noon, Katy Jurado won two Golden Globe awards:  Best Newcomer and, in an industry first for a Latina, Best Supporting Actress. Next Jurado co-starred with Charlton Heston in the cavalry Western, Arrowhead, set in 1886 at a US Army fort on Chiricahua Indian land in Texas. Jurado's half-Apache character, Nita, the fort "laundress," spies on behalf of the Apaches, who are resisting relocation to a reservation. Merciless racist Ed Bannon (Charlton Heston) hates Apaches, and after he kills Nita's brother she tries to knife him in his sleep.  When Bannon orders her taken into custody, Nita stabs herself, telling him before she dies, "Don't touch me – I hated your hands on me," and wishes him a painful death at the hands of the Apaches.

In 1954, Jurado played the Comanche wife of Spencer Tracy's ruthless cattle rancher, Matt Devereaux, in a King Lear-like drama on the desert range, Broken Lance, a CinemaScope Western that follows the tragic downfall of a self-made Irish American and addresses racism, vigilantism, political corruption, environmental pollution, water access, and mineral rights. At their best, postwar "adult Westerns" substituted "anxiety for action," which exposed cracks in the façade of righteous US territorial expansion (Pauly 259). Playing the daughter of Chief Joseph, formerly a powerful leader in the territory, Jurado, as Señora Devereaux, maximizes her limited screen time, depicting a patient, devoted, sensitive, understanding, and respectful character who returns to live with her people after her husband of twenty-five years dies. For this performance, she became the first Latina to be nominated for a Best Supporting Actress Academy Award. In 1954, Jurado also won a Silver Ariel, the Mexican Oscar, as Best Supporting Actress for El Bruto (The Brute), by director Luis Buñuel.

In 1956, Katy Jurado's celluloid path crossed Anthony Quinn's in Man From Del Rio, a rare Western with two Mexican lead characters (see Figure 1). The film exhibits many typical Western elements:  gunslingers vying for reputation and position; a lone gunman resisting potential domestication by a loving townswoman; frontier citizens dependent on a violent man to uphold law and order; a knock-down, drag-out barroom fight; and a showdown duel in the middle of main street. Anthony Quinn plays David Robles from Del Rio, Texas, who avenges friends killed by a gunslinger by learning how to shoot, then quick-drawing the murderer in Mesa, a fictional cattle town west of Wichita, Kansas. When two "rowdies" tie up the Sheriff, David shoots and kills them. After the Sheriff quits and moves, the people hold a town hall meeting, with a brief debate and a ballot vote, and grudgingly recruit Robles as their new lawman. Regardless, as the storekeeper’s wife clarifies, just because they hired him as Sheriff, they do not "have to accept him socially." As a result, despite his new clothes and his newfound confidence, he is shunned at the town's annual dance, scorned by the hypocritical citizens. In contrast, the saloon owner, Ed Bannister (Peter Whitney), a retired gunslinger with fourteen notches on his pistol handle, and his roughneck pals accept Robles as their "kind" regardless of race, in the fraternity of gunfighters. If the United States is, as Richard Slotkin argues, a "gunfighter nation," then Hollywood Westerns convey "the mythic expression of ideology" via "the clearest expression of our 'national culture'" and "American identity" – "the popular culture industry" (5, 10).

Figure 1

Katy Jurado plays Estella, a widowed nurse who is respected and accepted by the local townspeople, after living there for four years. When she first meets Quinn's character, she rebuffs his advances, and in their next exchange, when David jerks Estella by the shoulders, pulling her in to force a kiss, she shoves a pair of medical scissors dangerously close to his face, warning him, "I do not feel in the mood for love." Jurado made the most of her sultry roles in Westerns, but despite the postwar ideology of domesticity, and the concurrent backlash against female freedom and mobility, her most compelling characters control their own sexuality. According to Richard Dyer, most 1950s sexpot and debutante female film roles portrayed idealized, physically unthreatening women who were merely "vehicles for male sexuality" (Heavenly Bodies 40-41). While cinematic white women were being screen-written back to their proper social place, Katy Jurado's seemingly marginal characters in Hollywood feature films transcended previous Latina representations. For instance, Estella is the only one brave enough to stop the outlaws from killing the town Sheriff. When nobody else comes to her aid, Estella yells, "Cowards! What happened with you people in this town?" The bad men, who call her "Chiquita," and who taunt David, calling him "Pancho" and, sarcastically, "Señor," capture and almost abduct Estella, who is rescued by Robles.

Although other Westerns also address social acceptance and community belonging, Man From Del Rio explores these themes through two ethnic Mexican characters. For example, Estella tells David, "I earn money. Soon I can buy a place, but more important, I earn a place here. I earn respect." The white settlers accept Estella, and as she informs David, "I like it here. I belong here. I have chosen Mesa." She is integrated into the community where she has "many friends." Her employer, the local doctor, values her professionally and helps her personally; the storekeeper and the other townfolk appreciate her. In contrast, Estella explains to Robles that the townspeople respected his gun, not him, and she repeatedly tries to persuade him to put down his pistol, which illustrates the picture's critical, discursive intervention:  the Mexican woman articulates a repudiation of America's gun culture and history of violence. In the end, after Robles outsmarts the villain without firing a shot, he leaves in the classic American image of the lone cowboy even though Estella had asked him to live with her and her daughter in a different town. 

In the movies, "one common method of keeping minority communities on the margins" is to exclude its members "from being considered 'American' in … the creation of a sense of national identity" (Benshoff and Griffin 8). In contrast, with dignified characterizations, ethnic Mexicans symbolically demand an insubordinate place as equals in America's usable past. In Maryann Erigha's estimation, "movies and images...shape audience perceptions and exert influence beyond the screen," hence the importance of minority groups increasing the frequency and quality of their cinematic representations so that they can stake "claims in the dominant cultural canon" (29, 26). Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. notes that "film has been the most potent vehicle of the American imagination," and that it "is both an industry that lives by stereotype and an art that often undermines stereotype" (xii, xiv). Popular films occasionally highlight Mexicans and Mexican Americans, which changes the form, features, attitude, and personality of the cultural imaginary by degrees, over time. Rather than facile figures, Katy Jurado prospering in pioneer towns suggests real Mexicana entrepreneurs and nurses, while Anthony Quinn swaggering across southwestern vistas evokes vaqueros (cowboys) and other historical Mexicans from the multicultural West. 

In 1957, Quinn starred as Robert "Bob" Kallen, an accused killer seeking refuge in Mexico after fleeing Texas in The Ride Back! The film tells the story of Sheriff Chris Hamish, played by William Conrad, a lone lawman who must cross the border and bring back a desperado to stand trial for murder, braving dangerous Apache country along the way. This character-driven postwar Western is remarkable not only for featuring a half-white, mestizo protagonist, but also for depicting non-caricatured Mexicans. In particular, Victor Millan as Father Ignacio is excellent, as is Jorge Treviño as a Mexican police officer raising a child with his wife in the dusty desert borderlands. The screenwriter, Antony Ellis, depicts daily Mexican family life with good-natured humor, and Treviño's uniformed policeman invokes international cooperation with the "policia Americano."

Bob Kallen, whose mother is Mexican, hides out in a Mexican town, where he meets Elena (Lita Milan), the beautiful young cousin of the local Catholic Padre. Although ostensibly the villain, Quinn's bilingual, bicultural character propels the narrative in this psychological study of an insecure Sheriff doing his duty. The first act takes place in Mexico where Spanish-speaking dialogue without subtitles as well as matter-of-fact bilingual communication dominates the screen time. English-speaking viewers are placed in the same position as the protagonist when he ventures south of the border. In a rare reversal, the bad guy serves as an interpreter for the hero and strategically translates from Spanish to English. The movie also features a bittersweet, all-Spanish romantic scene between Kallen and his lovelorn Mexican girlfriend that ends with Roberto telling her, "Te quiero" ("I love you").
           
This intelligent, introspective motion picture, set in a forbidding wilderness, amid hostile scenery, addresses redemption, allegiance, justice, and cross-cultural understanding. Quinn is charming, endearing, menacing, cunning, brash, sarcastic, and defiant; William Conrad's character admits to self-doubt, fear, and failure. While the role of Elena is underdeveloped, the film nevertheless portrays a loyal, loving, and fearless Mexican woman, advancing a subtly subversive point of view when the Mexican villagers are willing to wield their machetes to protect Kallen, and when a scornful Elena mocks the unlovable "gringo" lawman.

The two protagonists unexpectedly reveal their personal lives and hopes during the four-day long ride back, which leaves the viewer to wonder: Will Bob Kallen escape his chains and become an expatriate in Mexico? As a Mexican American, will he get a fair trial in Texas? Did he murder in cold blood or kill in self-defense? Anthony Quinn confidently commands the screen. He plays another humanized killer with redeeming qualities, conveys an all-American individualism, and embodies the vigilante mentality that condones extralegal violence when necessary. R. Philip Loy argues that "Westerns reflected, reinforced and helped to shape values, attitudes and behavior patterns" (121). Americans valued "the legitimate use of violence" by "virtuous people...settling the continent" (3).
           
Mexicans and Mexican Americans are typically only remembered as bandits, dishonorable outlaws blocking the westward expansion of civilization and capitalism, as in Ride, Vaquero! The ethnic Mexican Western roles of Katy Jurado and Anthony Quinn situate the contradictory position of a marginalized people who never fit into the Puritan-Protestant tradition, the Jeffersonian yeoman ideal, or the Jacksonian frontiersman typology. Some scholars argue that Hollywood Westerns convey certain creeds, consciously representing America's national essence (Durgnat and Simmon 69-70). According to Matthew Carter, the genre not only creates "a romanticized version of the nineteenth-century American West," but also presents "cautionary tales for the cultural-hegemonic beliefs in American exceptionalism and Manifest Destiny," including Frederick Jackson Turner's "conceptions of a singular American 'national character'" (9, 6, 12). Carter acknowledges Patricia Nelson Limerick's contention:  to supplant the frontier paradigm's "grand narrative of optimism and simplistic binarism," the concept of la frontera (the borderlands) "exposes a darker, more complex 'legacy of conquest'" (163). In particular, "transnational Westerns" set on both sides of the border can help scrutinize "Anglo-America's national mythology" and thus counter "the heroic version of the frontier story" (184, 9).
           
Rather than praise the march of progress and other common values in the American imaginary, as Mary Lea Bandy and Kevin Stoehr argue, "the postwar use of the Western genre in a more critical, demythologizing manner" led to "stories that frequently centered on morally ambiguous characters and psychologically complex situations" (157). Meanwhile, although "the figure of the Mexican and the setting of the US-Mexican border recur throughout many Western films," "the role of the Mexican in the Western movie has not received the same type of detailed treatment that has been accorded the role of the Native American" (173, 174). I agree that "the Western film helps to tell a story...about what it means to be – and what it took to become – an American," as part of "a complex, collective memory" (6, 2). In this regard, Gore Vidal criticized "Hollywood, the principal factory of [the twentieth] century's proto-myths," but he appreciated "the Western" as a genre that reflects "the night mind of the race" (17, 19). The roles written for ethnic Mexicans in 1950s Westerns reveal how they are remembered in the story of America and illustrate "the liminal persistence of Western narratives in the American mind" (O'Connor and Rollins, 1).
           
In 1957, Anthony Quinn earned a second Best Supporting Actor Academy Award for portraying Paul Gauguin alongside Kirk Douglas as Vincent Van Gogh in Lust for Life. In 1958, the versatile Quinn earned his first Best Actor Academy Award nomination for playing a domineering, wealthy widower in the torrid melodrama Wild is the Wind. In director John Sturges's Western, Last Train from Gun Hill (1959), Quinn played a powerful cattle baron, Craig Belden, whose son is taken into custody by Belden's old friend-turned lawman, played by Kirk Douglas, for raping and killing the Marshal's wife, a Native American woman. Belden tries to save his son, but they both end up shot and killed. In 1959, Quinn also co-starred in director Edward Dmytryk’s law-and-order community Western, Warlock, playing a Doc Holiday-type sidekick to Henry Fonda's killer character, a Marshal described as a "vigilante, gambler, and gunman." Quinn's character, Tom Morgan, nicknamed "the black rattlesnake," is a gunslinger, faro card dealer, and partner to the Marshal, with whom he travels from town to town, watching his back on the streets and living together in hotel suites. He spruces up their room "real fancy" with art on the wall and new drapes from San Francisco, but after the Marshal decides to marry a local woman and settle down, a spurned Tom Morgan gets drunk and jealously forces "the only friend [he] ever had" to shoot him. 

In Westerns, as Richard Dyer points out, "The intense relationship of two men" is common. "The gayness" of such a relationship, Dyer argues, can be "implicitly yet definitely enough etched in" by holding unusually long "exchanged glances" (Matter of Images 67, 68). In Anthony Quinn's Western film roles, he never played the hero, even as the leading man, and while portraying characters of suspect morals or fluid sexuality may not necessarily equal so-called positive representation, such layered roles ring true, insinuating Chicanos and Chicanas into, and thereby destabilizing, the mythos of American culture. In Warlock, a cowboy gang rustles cattle south of the border, then ambushes and kills thirty-seven Mexicans. Even though folks blamed it on the Apaches, a member of the group, disillusioned and guilty, tries to redeem his own participation in the racial violence by becoming a Deputy Sheriff, in an American morality play. 
           
Katy Jurado read many scripts for 1950s Westerns with "roles that were mere stereotypes of what American believe Mexicans are like." She explained, "I didn't take all the films that were offered, just those with dignity" (McLellan). Jurado infused honor into potentially stereotypical roles even as she played women of color who fall for white men. In Dragoon Wells Massacre (1957), a Western set in 1860s Arizona Apache country, Jurado played a well-dressed character named Mara Fay, who coyly tells an outlaw, "You can take me home...but only to the door," and calls him "querido bandido" ("dear bandit"). Mara is contrasted with a conceited, sandy blonde character, Ann Bradley, played by Mona Freeman. On the wagon trail, Katy sarcastically refers to her as "princess" while chastising her for wasting drinking water in the desert. At an army fort, Mara shoves Ann's face down to the ground, wrestles her in the dust, and threatens to kill her. Cavalry Captain Matt Riordan tells Mara she is a "lovely," "remarkable woman." She pledges to stay with her "Capitán," saying, "What is mine is mine for always." In the final scene, Mara calls Captain Riordan "my man," and they hold hands smiling, each on horseback, with Mara holding a repeating rifle in her other hand. 
           
In The Badlanders (1958), set in 1898 Arizona Territory, Jurado played a kind-hearted Mexican prostitute.  In the mining town of Prescott, Mexicans "were brought in as cheap labor," the villains are the town's Deputy and two crooked businessmen, and the good guys, played by Alan Ladd and Ernest Borgnine, are newly released ex-convicts who pull off a goldmine heist. Borgnine's character, McBain, served his sentence for manslaughter, and on his first day in town, he rescues Jurado's character, Anita, from being assaulted by three men on the street. They call her a "Mex filly," and "Chiquita." After he takes on all three of them, they call him a "Mex lover." Anita confides that she is alone and that ever since she delivered her own stillborn infant she has served as the neighborhood midwife to the local Mexican women. Jurado tells Borgnine that she wants him to stay with her, clarifying that she is no teenager dreaming of "a man who is pretty as a postcard." She calls him "querido" ("dear") and "very good" on the inside, but she calls herself a "bad girl." When the mine boss's main henchman pounds on Anita's door, McBain throws him out, assures Anita that she too is very good on the inside, then promises to make her his wife and to buy a horse ranch in Durango, Mexico. 
           
Ladd's character, Peter "The Dutchman" Van Hoek, who cheerfully speaks a few Spanish words when talking to Anita, is advised against working with Mexicans, but he explains that he trusts Mexicans, and that he has "even forgotten the Alamo." For the three-man inside job, he enlists his friend, a Mexican explosives expert. Ultimately, Anita saves the two honorable thieves, rallying the town's large Mexican community to their defense on Cinco de Mayo, and rides out of town with McBain and his share of the loot. Although Jurado played a harlot role, with Anita delivering a newborn baby, hiding inside her house to avoid forced sex, inciting an impromptu Mexican mobilization, and moving to Mexico with her white fiancé, her character was clearly a realistic, sympathetic individual, not a simplistic, laughable member of a homogenized racial group. According to Charles Ramírez Berg, "The more the film contextualizes its Latino characters, the more background the screenwriters provide for them so that they" are not "cardboard types, the less stereotypical they will appear" (89).

In 1959, on the television series The Rifleman, set in 1880s New Mexico Territory, Katy Jurado co-starred in an episode written and directed by Sam Peckinpah. Jurado played a Basque character, Julia Andueza, who opens a boarding house that becomes "an overnight success" with the people of North Fork City. The title character, Lucas, played by Chuck Connors, knows that Julia was a dishonest card dealer going by the name Big Ana in Bismarck, North Dakota, because she cheated a friend of his. When he tells her she does not belong in his town, she replies, "Who are you to tell me where I belong?" When Lucas says, "We don't want your kind," she slaps him, and proclaims pride in her work and in herself as the owner of a business. As she declares, "I want this to be my town." When her former boss, who left her with a knife scar on her cheek, arrives to make Julia turn her establishment into a saloon with gambling, she refuses, which triggers a fight between her and his two blonde crooked card dealers. By standing up to a violent bully, with help from Lucas, she proves that she does indeed deserve a chance to start over and escape her past. Once again Jurado brought to life another tough character, the sole entrepreneurial Mexican woman in a small frontier town. The following year on the television series The Westerner Jurado appeared in an episode as Carlotta, a character who helps the hero fight bandits terrorizing a town. 
           
Jurado excelled with limited screen time in Marlon Brando's directorial debut, One-Eyed Jacks (1961), playing Maria Longworth, a Mexicana in Monterey, California, married to Marshal Dad Longworth, played by Karl Malden. Dad had betrayed Brando's character, Rio, in Sonora, Mexico, when they were partners in crime, but he has since reformed and taken in Maria's daughter, Luisa, played by Mexican actress Pina Pellicer, as his stepdaughter. When Luisa stays out all night with Rio after the town's annual Mexican fiesta, the film includes an un-subtitled Spanish-language scene of great emotion between Jurado and Pellicer, as the Mexican mother shows love and understanding. Maria lies to her husband, saying that nothing happened between her daughter and Rio, but Luisa becomes pregnant by Rio and wants to ride off with him. When the Sheriff arrests Rio unjustly, Luisa helps him escape from jail, but the drifter kills her stepfather, then leaves town. The film ends with Rio abandoning Luisa and their unborn baby. Before the concluding showdown, Maria correctly suggested that her ex-outlaw husband wanted his old friend to hang because of personal reasons, to hide a secret from his past, with Jurado’s character realistically registering an understanding of the Caucasian lawman that cuts to the quick.
           
In 1962 Jurado played a character based on the real-life Spanish-born 1840s New Mexican saloon owner and professional gambler, La Tules, on the television series Death Valley Days, and in 1966 she reprised her role as Helen Ramirez, with Peter Fonda starring as Will Kane's son, for a failed US television pilot, High Noon:  The Clock Strikes Noon Again.² Jurado depicted a range of ethnic Mexican women operating in the mythical Old West. In doing so, she created a cinematic gallery of vehement frontier women with poised presence. In Rosa Linda Fregoso's words, "the symbolic visibility of meXicanas" in American cultural representation counters "their invisibility in the history of the nation" (xiv, xiii ). As Emma Pérez asserts, "To think of the past as a colonial imaginary opens up traditional categories such as the 'West' or the 'frontier'...uncovering the hidden voices of Chicanas that have been relegated to silences, to passivity" (5, xvi). Katy Jurado played Indians, Mexicans, and Mexican Americans neither complicit with colonialism nor entirely oppressed by it. She showed us how, when given the chance, actors can create three-dimensional characters based on real people, rather than two-dimensional caricatures based on exaggerated types. 

Conclusion

Analyzing the Western roles of Anthony Quinn and Katy Jurado illuminates how ethnic Mexicans, maligned as inferior, have asserted their proper place in national narratives, rearticulating a monolingual common culture. Despite the dehumanizing effect of racial stereotypes, actors can insert subtextual counter-narratives, their "demands for recognition and inclusion" part of what David Gutiérrez calls "a protracted struggle" by Mexicans and Mexican Americans "to prove their importance, to prove themselves significant in American society," continuing "the project of humanization pursued by historians of the ethnic Mexican experience since" the early twentieth century (531, 520). Virginia Scharff contends, "Historians have learned there are more characters on- and offstage, acting with greater skill and knowledge, than we had once imagined" (2).

Ethnic Mexican actors make the most of their parts, creating memorable moments by embodying realistic roles, mastering their craft as professional artists, and insinuating themselves into US myths. They bring a perspective with deep hemispheric roots, and their representations advocate for an inclusive worldview. As Margarita de Orellana concludes, "Cinema is inscribed in history, entering a realm of collective images, conscious or subconscious, that we might call 'the imaginary'" (2). Consequently, a "journey into otherness" via Hollywood depictions of Mexicans "is the history of America’s own self-image” (120-121). Considering the legacy of stereotypical Mexicano-Chicano cinematic portrayals, the outstanding work of Anthony Quinn and Katy Jurado reveal Mexicans and Mexican Americans expressing themselves in popular culture, potentially expanding the notion of who counts, and who belongs, as a real American. In short, spotlighting ethnic Mexicans center stage in the play of US cultural history demythologizes Hollywood westerns and reimagines Americana.

Notes

1. This article uses the term Mexican for a person from Mexico; Mexican American and Chicano or Chicana for a Mexican-descent person born and raised in the United States; ethnic Mexican for both Mexicans in the United States and Mexican Americans together; and Latino or Latina for a person of Latin American descent born and raised in the United States.  Mestizo or mestiza originally referred to colonial race mixing in the Americas, specifically the biological offspring of Spaniards with Indians.

2. In 1973, Jurado appeared briefly as a Sheriff's wife handy with a double-barrel shotgun in macho director Sam Peckinpah's elegiac Western, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, her last foray into the genre; Quinn's last Western was Los Amigos, a.k.a. Deaf Smith & Johnny Ears (1973), an Italian production in which he played a sensitive, deaf mute cowboy handy with a pistol and a Gatling gun.

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