Parodie à la frontière mexicaine dans Machete (Robert Rodriguez, 2010) et Tejano (David B. Garcia, 2018)

Abstract

Borderland cinema, whether it be Mexican or US-American (Babel, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, Sicario, Sin Nombre), constantly borrows from the narrative, visual or musical codes of the “other” and, by displacing them, sets out to shape the contours of its own cultural identity, situated on the margins of national narratives. Such a displacement is particularly visible in Texas, where the border with Mexico runs longest than in all the other border states, and where the term tejano designates Mexican people who have settled in Texas. Leaning on an analysis of two American tejano movies, Machete by Robert Rodriguez (2010) and Tejano by David Blue Garcia (2018), this article aims at studying the parodic processes used by these border films to define themselves in contrast with American history and its legend, as it is narrated by its film culture. While the Western, labelled “American cinema par excellence” by André Bazin and J.-L. Rieupeyrout, has often been the object of filmic parodies, especially within US-Mexican border cinema, the latter questions through the “ironic inversion” (L. Hutcheon) of the codes of the former the very existence of the border, its legitimacy, and the social and racial inequalities pervading the region. These two contemporary border films, both made by tejanos, offer two very different aesthetic experiences of the border. Through the study of Machete as a complex parodic object multiplying references and displaying a carnivalesque aesthetic, and its comparison with the refined aesthetics of the post-Western Tejano, this article intends to start a discussion on the means by which border movies parody the traditional films genres and visual codes, in order to question the persistence of dominant US ideology.

Keywords

• Parody
• border
• cinema
• tejano
• satire
• immigration