Disrupting the building’s all-brick façade are the exterior shutters to three rounded window frames lined above an elongated archway marquee. These features dominate the upper frame of a daytime scene depicted in one of several photographs that Russell Lee (1903-1986) made at the Lone Star Theater in Pharr, Texas, February 1939. A vast open sky envelops the movie house, and certain cloud formations above confuse the insinuated stillness of the surrounding streets on this unhurried Sunday afternoon in the Rio Grande Valley. Below, by contrast, the photograph registers a panoramic rush of disparate sidewalk action. Two women, turned away from the camera, one in plain attire, the other in a patterned dress, stroll hand-in-arm to a place beyond the left perimeter of the picture. Seven boys cluster to the left of the cinema entrance, in front of an abandoned bicycle strewn on the curb. The two youngest wear overalls, another sports a fedora hat, and a slightly older youth, with eyes closed as though mesmerized by the moment, rotates his body in mid-step while, behind them all, a poster announces the screening of a Saturday late-night “Owl Show.” Near the left door of the cinema, two girls and two young women linger in various gestures of anticipation, oblivious to the young boy in light-colored long-sleeve shirt and trousers who, with hands folded in defiance, gazes directly at the photographer. A row of fourteen men and boys in profile, some turned facing the ticket booth beside the right door entrance, engage in conversation. As the men stand around—a few donning suspenders, satin vests, or teardrop fedora hats—they mark time and shift weight while an attendant, who seems to sweep the floor to the right-door entrance, completes his task in preparation for the two-o’clock showing. Suspended from the cinema archway, and advertising the motion picture “now playing,” is the hand-painted poster for The Citadel (1938) directed by King Vidor, starring Robert Donat and Rosalind Russell. And a standing billboard beside the seven boys announces a Screen Song from Paramount Studios, one of many cartoon shorts directed by Max Fleisher. These reels featured animated punchline vignettes and ended in a live-action big-band singalong, “with the famous bouncing ball” over the lyrics of such popular 1930s tunes as “You Took the Words Right Out of My Heart,” “Thanks for the Memory,” “Beside a Moonlit Stream,” or “Please Keep Me in Your Dreams.”
Allow yourself then, insofar as the photograph invites you to picture, the various residents of Pharr at the Lone Star Theater—Mexicans, Tejanos, Mexican-Americans; men, women, and children—now gathered inside and seated together. Hands and faces reveal a palette of skin tones in copper, bronze, and beige, side by side in assorted manners of dress and other markers of a social order, one and all modulating in particular styles of Spanish and English, the arrangements of public life provisionally suspended—lights out, the projector flickering, “You took the words right out of my heart / And it was like a bolt from the blue”—in a communal singalong to a movie short before the feature film.
Despite U.S. nativist efforts to contain the migration of Mexicans across the border—the formation of the Border Patrol in 1924, policies of visa refusal, and waves of forced “repatriation”—both first- and second-generation Texas-Mexicans, around seven hundred thousand in 1930, were the overwhelming majority in the Rio Grande Valley, where many worked as tenant farmers or migrant laborers. In Fit to be Citizens, Natalia Molina specifies the complex connection between social membership and citizen status, underscoring how even “those who are not citizens negotiate a sense of national identity, calibrating notions of citizenship and democracy in the process.”1
As a visitor to the Rio Grande Valley and on assignment for the Farm Security Administration, Russell Lee was attuned to these experiences of belonging that transpire in shared public space and in the collective practices of everyday life. As a guest myself, and upon completing the cycle of poems in Carbonate of Copper, a book largely written during weeks spent in the Rio Grande Valley, I selected Russell Lee’s “Waiting for the movie to open, Sunday afternoon, Pharr, Texas, February 1939” from among scores of FSA photographs held at the Library of Congress, including those made by Arthur Rothstein and Dorothea Lange—and I assembled a visual sequence of sixteen photographs entitled “Sign for Bridge: Fable.” My desire for the book had been, on the one hand, to code-shift between the borders of space and time, between the verbal and the visual; honoring lifeways particular to the region, even as portrayed in the past by humanitarian outsiders, while animating an untimely world parallel to the present-day political geography in the hostile ether of mass media depiction. I had written poems driven by voices willful or wishful to so persevere as to disrupt the technological landscape of surveillance, law enforcement, custody, and detention.
No poem in Carbonate of Copper was written in direct relation to the FSA photographs. The lyric sequence prompted me, however, to think poetic personhood in the present and in counterclockwise relation to a visual record from the past, now in a double exposure, so to speak, that allowed me to reconfigure the archive into a fable form whose time signature of belatedness could well refute the mood that holds the state of things as always and inevitable. How might existing poetic lines ventriloquize in reverse, as a choral propulsion cast back onto bygone lives in moments of everyday belonging? The poems in Carbonate of Copper had aimed to energize the first-person plural as a form of life mirrored on surfaces inclined to reflect my own distortions as a figure at once estranged from, and embedded in, the human and more-than-human landscape. To the degree that there is something akin to a voice in “Citizen,” or my voice for that matter, the poem’s cascading lines are given to infer the sensorial intensity of embodiment, its fluctuating temperature and altered respiration in light of circumstances that cut across one place in the hope of finding another. To endorse the physical metrics of a person so recast as to elide the dehumanizing machinery is to obtain the “profound / unruly blush” of a frenzy that borders on elation and on becoming adequate to the task of countering injustice, even as fueled by your innermost fires whose properties you can no longer altogether verify. To border on the feverish privacy of the self in all its ferocity is to come by the variable speed of aliveness—a citizenship that joins with the mineral and animal landscape—in a chorus of the undead voicing a song to that excessive, ineradicable quantity that cannot be contained by the violence of the here and now…
July, 2025: There are weeks I feel sufficiently equipped and committed to forming a picture of our very dangerous present as to respond or act as I am able. But then the day overwhelms with its onslaught of news items and video footage depicting the spectacle of cruelty enacted by ICE and other federal agents, on obscene display in cities across the country—a show of helmets and camouflage, riot shields and rifles, armored trucks and military gear. So I turn again to the frame by Russsell Lee and the society of Pharr, Texas 1939—as the Great Depression was giving way to the ascendancy of fascism and soon enough to the horrors of war—I turn, that is, for my own sake and that of the picture’s axis of time; one that will have so altered now the terms of my story as to lead anywhere else but these everyday scenarios of masked raids and rogue seizures accountable to no one.
1Natalia Molina, Fit to be Citizens? Public Health and Race in Los Angeles, 1879-1939 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), p 3.
* from Carbonate of Copper with a photograph by Russell Lee, “Waiting for the movie to open, Sunday afternoon, Pharr, Texas, February 1939”
(LC-USF33-011978-M4)
