“Do I look Mexican?”: Translating the Western Beyond National Borders

Abstract

This paper explores the migration of the western beyond national borders, specifically examining films that circulate amongst Spanish, Italian, and American contexts through translation. The films examined here are not traditional “spaghetti westerns” so much as films on the “fringe” of this well-documented and analyzed group of films. Revenge of Trinity, or La Collera del Vento, a Spanish-Italian collaboration, focuses exclusively on farm workers rights in rural Andalusia, transporting stereotypical western figures to the story of a workers uprising. 800 Bullets, a film that directly addresses the legacy of the spaghetti western from a modern Spanish viewpoint, focuses on the global impact of the western genre. Using translation as a critical lens, this article argues that it is possible to rethink the western as a transnational genre, where even films tied to a particular national context become products of the circulation and translation of generic elements.