I saw Brokeback Mountain, the other night, with housemates Shauna and Dax. It wasn’t the film I wanted it to be at any point. It wasn’t sexy, it wasn’t touching (there’s only one seen between Jack Twist [Jake Gyllenhaal] and Ennis Del Mar [Heath Ledger] where any affection came through), and after the first twenty minutes it wasn’t even majestic… If, like most of San Francisco was, you were hoping for sweaty rodeo action or Hollywood romantic lacrimancy, forget it.

But, in addition to staying out of the expected territory, the film also went places I didn’t expect it to. Places like Mexico.

The plot, in broad strokes, is: Scrappers Twist and Del Mar work together for a season herding sheep on Brokeback Mountain in early 1960s Wyoming. They awkwardly approach friendship, and then plow into some lust-heavy approximation of love. Though both men marry and have children, they meet back together regularly on Brokeback, and carry on an affair that lasts nearly two decades. Twist yearns, throughout, to start a life with Del Mar, living together on their own ranch, but Del Mar’s very valid (and several times throughout the film realised) fear of homophobic persecution prevents this from happening. It also regularly interferes with their relationship.

It is in one of the rough periods in their relationship that we see Twist (now residing in Texas) drive South to Mexico. He stumbles out of a border saloon and walks down a shaded street where man after man asks, ‘¿Señor?’ He selects one, and the two disappear.

I love this city, but this is an abusive relationship — San Francisco is kicking my ass. Things have gone from bad to worse in my personal life, I’ve been working for two weeks straight, and I feel like I’m breaking. I keep fantasising about leaving. A couple months back, I just wanted to kick it with Nature for a couple days in one of the nearby state parks. It wasn’t about getting away from San Francisco so much as better understanding its regional natural context. But now, I need out. And ‘out’, in my brain, has been meaning Mexico.

I have no salacious plans. I just want to go, camp out for a few days, practise my Spanish, and try to be relatively invisible.

Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty driving down the road of beautiful, tragic whores and unearned Mary-Jane as they approach Mexico City…

For a decade between Spanish and US rule, the land below me was part of Mexico. According to historian Kevin Starr, early norteamericanos in California were protestantly appalled by the profligacy and decadence of the half-breed Mexicans who were the dominant class in the area. But not every Easterner who came into this territory was boiling over with Manifest Destiny. In 1816, a Boston carpenter named Thomas Doak and a black sailor known to history only as Bob jumped ship and swam ashore to new lives in Monterey. Both were baptised as Catholics and married into Mexican families. They would be the first two US-born Californians. There was a freedom here that their later compatriots would despise:

In their near-anonymous struggle for a better life Bob and Doak were setting a pattern for California liberation; for Juan Cristóbal [post-baptism Bob] found release in the Californians’ acceptance of color (so many themselves having black ancestry), and Felipe Santiago [post-baptism Thomas Doak] found being a respected, well-payed carpenter, son-in-law of Mariano Castro, preferable to the hardships of life before the mast.

Kevin Starr. Americans and the California Dream: 1850-1915. p. 12.

Juan Cristóbal’s Californian freedom would not last fifty years. Early San Francisco’s most famous black poet was the separatist James Monroe Whitfield, an intellectual associate of Martin Robinson Delany. Right before the Civil War, Whitfield apparently left San Francisco to explore the possibility of establishing a negro colony in Central America. (See Philip M. Montesano’s 1967 University of San Francisco thesis Some Aspects of the Free Negro Question in San Francisco, 1849-1870 and here and here.)

Is America unusually strict? Does it demand too much of its citizenry? Or is it just that — as foreigners — ex-pats, refugees, and vacationers can get away with things that are impossible at home? Or is it maybe (Yes. Probably.) both?

Paul Simon:

And whoa whoa
She said, ‘Why?
Why don’t we drive through the night
And we’ll wake up down in
Mexico?
Oh, I
Oh, I – I don’t know nothin’ about nothin’
About Mexico.
And tell me why
Why won’t you love me
For who I am
Where I am?’

This entry was posted on Wednesday, 14 December 2005 at 08:14 and is filed under Miscellanea. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.