We'd need the whole film of the trip in real time, including the unbearable heat and the music. We'd have to replay it all from end to end at home in a darkened room, rediscover the magic of the freeways and the distance and the ice-cold alcohol in the desert and the speed and live it all again on the video at home in real time, not simply for the pleasure of remembering but becasue the fascination of senseless repetition is already present in the abstraction of the journey. The Mexicans, become Chicanos, act as guides on the visit to El Alamo to laud the heroes of the American nation so valiantly massacred by their own ancestors. But hard as those ancestors fought, the division of labour won out in the end. Today it is their grandchildren and great-grandchildren who are there, on the same battlefield, to hymn the Americans who stole their lands.
History is full of ruse and cunning.
But so are the Mexicans who have crossed the border clandestinely to come and work here. SALT LAKE CITY Pompous Mormon symmetry. In fact the whole city has the transparency and supernatural, otherworldly cleanness of a thing from outer space. A symmetrical, luminous, overpowering abstraction. But the city itself is like a jewel, with its purity of air and its plungin urban vistas more breathtaking even than those of Los Angeles.