In the 19th Century, the US was taking more and more land and displacing Hispanic communities. The US encroachment into Texas and California coincided with President Vincente Guerrero's abolishing of slavery in 1829. Antonio López de Santa Anna, Mexico's eighth President, honored Guerrero's decision diligently; he was also a great admirer of the abolitionist Frances Trollope.
Even so, history continued to be written by the winners. The stand at the Alamo, which took place fifteen years after Mexico's founding, was romanticised, as was the eventual victory against Santa Anna's army. It was whitewashed as a "fight for the right to be free" without going into what the "freedom" was. As a result, Mexico lost half its territory and its good reputation.
Alamo veterans such as Colonel Juan Seguín were chased out of the Republic of Texas in 1842, made to feel like foreigners in their own lands.
The war, as well as the 1849 gold rush and resulting continued displacement, made way for the 1855 "Greaser Act", scapegoating those "of Spanish blood" by portraying them as volatile, untrustworthy, dirty criminals to justify stealing their land.
The story continues a little after Tuco Ramirez' time.
In the early 20th Century, the US-supported overthrow of dictator Porfirio Diaz caused the ensuing Mexican Revolution to bleed into the US. The vaquero turned revolutionary leader Pancho Villa crossed the border many times to gather supplies and to fight against American intervention. There was a lot of anti-Mexican sentiment happening at the time, and the Texas Rangers murdered scores of Mexican civilians.
Consequently, Villa's complicated legacy helped shape the bandido archetype in the public imagination, with his straw hat, which he wore for publicity, bandolier and mustache.
Filmmakers such as DW Griffith, Edwin Carewe and John Huston portrayed this archetype in their works; 'The Treasure of the Sierra Madre's Gold Hat left an impression on the public consciousness as a "greaser archetype".
The persecution didn't stop there. After the market crash of 1929, the US government blamed people's economic problems on Mexican-Americans, characterising them as "public charges" draining welfare funds. Around two million people of Mexican descent were deported, including naturalised citizens. The people coming in were sprayed with chemicals. The stereotype of Mexicans as dirty, lazy and diseased persisted through the decades as continued justification for historic land grabs. The descendants of those who had fought with Americans at the Alamo had been betrayed.
Part of Pearl Idelia Ellis' book 'Americanization through Homemaking' also featured some anti-Mexican racist misogyny propaganda, implying the girls were as dirty and uncivilised as the boys.
Despite the US government's "good neighbor" diplomatic strategy during World War 2, it continued its displacement and persecution of immigrants and refugees. In 1942, seventeen Mexican-American youths were arrested for the murder of José Gallardo Díaz on unsubstantiated evidence and convicted, and the media used this to create racial tension; historically, Mexicans were characterised as the enemy or as a burden, and this was what the press built on.
A year later, a group of sailors, incited by the press, stormed into a Latino neighborhood and beat a group of Mexican Americans and tore off their Zoot suits.
Then came the deportations of the 1950s, a time of conformity and suspicion towards anything "un-American". The US government turned immigrants against veterans of WWII and the Korean war, once again depicting them as untrustworthy, lawless, diseased and as lazy moochers. Over a million were deported. Some were interrogated as communist spies.
By the mid-20th Century, the resentment towards Mexico for abolishing slavery had been largely forgotten, though it was a catalyst for decades of grudges mutating into stereotypes and profiling.
The 1855 "Greaser Act" characterised those of Spanish blood as "not peaceable and quiet persons". Tuco Ramírez' characterization is a symptom of this, although given his bad luck and desperate situation, Sergio Leone shows us that Tuco has a lot of justifiable reasons to be angry.
He fits some stereotypes and subverts others; although Clint Eastwood's Blondie calls him a "greasy rat", Tuco even takes a bath when he has the chance. His hair is dry and scruffy rather than greasy, for another thing.
He is politically apathetic, though very aware of events going on around him, if for self-serving reasons. He was too busy surviving to notice the Alamo and Cinco de Mayo, events remembered by Americans.
But he is a migrant of sorts, navigating a constantly changing border. Despite his apathy, his very identity is political.
And of the bandido characters throughout film history, he's one of the most memorable.
The constant exchange of stereotypes and racial profiling over the centuries has manifested in ICE's "War is Peace" business strategy, detaining and killing people, some of them Mexican Americans. They say they want peace, but they can't make a profit if there's no conflict.
Furthermore, the Republicans, with their MAGA symbol, have left their messaging open to interpretation. They also hoped, even when it didn't work and Latinos knew the history, that potential Latino voters would take their promises literally and assure them that they're the "good" ones while seeing every Latino man, Mexican, Colombian, Honduran, Venezuelan, Salvadoran, Cuban, Puerto Rican, etc. as a stereotype, as the "bad hombres" Donald Trump talked about, as foreigners in their own land like Juan Seguín.
In an eerie parallel to 1942, as of July 7th 2026, 17 Mexican Americans had been killed by ICE between 2025 and 2026.
I fell in love with Tuco Ramírez at a time when the Republicans were characterizing Mexicans as criminals and Laura Loomer was confronting President Obama while wearing a party hat. It was an utter, arrant coincidence.
This is more than just me being a fangirl.
When I had my gallery "Tuco Ramírez and Me" at Theatre Deli in January 2026, it was mainly about what he personally meant to me. What I couldn't explain was his potential political significance, the implicit impact he or less well-developed bandidos, from films, pulp novels and TV shows had on the American imagination.
It's impossible for me to love him without sparing a thought for his people.
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