78 Denv. U.L. Rev. 1049 Copyright (c) 2001 Denver University Law Review University of Denver (Colorado Seminary) College of Law 2001 78 Denv. U.L. Rev. 1049 LENGTH: 4854 words ARTICLE: LACRIT V SYMPOSIUM; CLASS IN LATCRIT: THEORY AND PRAXIS I A WORLD OF ECONOMIC INEQUALITY; BORDER CROSSINGS; Making Evil: Crime Thrillers and Chicano Cinema Juan Velasco [*1049] James Donald, following Michael de Certeau's description of New York city's landscape in The Practice of Everyday Life, states that the city that people experience produces "an 'anthropological,' poetic and mythic experience of space," and later he adds: "In the recesses and margins of urban space, people invest places with meaning, memory and desire." n1 When the city is transferred to the border, however, film representation, meaning and memory become part of a distorted reality, a landscape filled with images related to fear, hybrid identities, and sexual and racial tension. n2 In fact, the space in between nations and cultures is usually recreated as a war zone; and its city becomes the place in which a dehumanized and distorted configuration of identity raises both sides' respective national fears. Why the hysteria and intense fascination with the space of the border? How does legal discourse participate since the 1940s in the arts and entertainment industry? In the case of the U.S.-Mexico border, in particular, both nations project their fears onto this liminal territory through the criminalization of the hybrid identities. Film narratives during the 1940s and 1950s (and later on in the 1980s) point to the existence of a space in-between, in which the United States' worst fears and racial and economic distrust are projected. n3 It is my intention to look at how the theme of "crossings" is transformed into a discourse of criminality while targeting liminality and hybridity, and legitimizing the spread of rhetoric of fear around the issue of [*1050] the border with Mexico. In order to do that I will analyze the work of two directors which I consider representative of different ways of using the space and the metaphor of the border: Orson Welles' 1957 film Touch of Evil, and Lourdes Portillo's documentaries La Ofrenda: The Days of the Dead (1988), and El Diablo Nunca Duerme/The Devil Never Sleeps (1994). The analysis of Portillo's work demonstrates how the cognitive historical and cultural framework of the Chicana artist is substantially expanded beyond the southwestern border and problematizes the whole notion of borders. On the other hand, the concept of the "border" is problematic, and the projection of destructive desire on this geographic and symbolic area is particularly clear when analyzing the use of visual space in Orson Welles' 1957 film Touch of Evil. The original novel, Badge of Evil, written by Whit Masterson, takes place not in Los Robles (a bordertown in Mexico) but in San Diego. Critics have interpreted the director's decision to make a film about Los Robles, a fictional town in Mexico, as a shift in the text's emphasis: the "most fundamental theme, from the opening sequence on, is the crossing of boundaries," and the audience becomes complicit in "violent fantasies, sexual and racial." n4 As these changes take place in the script, legal language, sexual miscegenation and criminal suspects enter simultaneously the landscape of representation of these border crossings. In this sense, Orson Welles' Touch of Evil can be read, simultaneously, as one of the best cinematic examples of not only U.S. contemporary perceptions of the border, but also the criminalized mestizo identities it originates.