http://home.hamptonroads.com

Border Patrol: Country music's obsession with Mexico
By KEITH HARRIS, Associated Press (ASAP)
© June 15, 2006
Last updated: 6:49 PM

This spring, the United States plunged into a ferocious debate over the subject of illegal immigration. But amid heated chatter about guest workers and Minutemen and whatnot, important details were overlooked. For instance: If we build a fence between the U.S. and Mexico, how will our own outlaws ever escape south of the border?

OK, so maybe that's not a burning concern for most law-abiding folk. But in country music, the ability to slip away to Mexico in search of an easier life has long been a cherished right. Even as protests for and against immigration reform swept across America, George Strait's version of the old Merle Haggard tune, "The Seashores of Old Mexico," crept its way up the country charts. A hard luck Tuscon fellow who's "runnin' from trouble and the jail-term the judge had in mind," the song's narrator beelines toward Mexico for a simple reason: "The border meant freedom, a new life, romance."

Freedom, a new life, romance -- that's what Mexico has always symbolized in American music. And though, with its plucked Spanish guitar and its B-movie strings swaying in waltz-time, Strait's hit is a deliberate throwback to a simpler era, country music still uses Mexico as a safety valve for letting off the pent-up anxieties of life in these United States. Nashville's increasingly middle-class suburban identity, along with the changing realities of the global economy, has given rise to a new breed of imagined U.S. emigrant. Lawbreakers on the lam haven been replaced by ordinary folks fed up, either temporarily or permanently, with their lives and -- especially -- their loves.

Such are the disgruntled middle class gringos who populate the 2003 Tim McGraw creation myth "That's Why God Made Mexico." In the first verse, Roy dumps his nagging mate Margie; Bettie leaves her ungrateful husband Joe in the second. "You change your name, maybe change your face," McGraw sings of the privileges that Mexico affords a refugee, in a language that'd certainly resonate with yesterday's outlaws. But "You learn to live and love/ Life in the slow lane" is a promise aimed directly toward the harried everyday Americans who buy Tim McGraw records. Mexico has been divinely ordained as "a place where we can lay low" -- and if you have to ask who "we" are, it probably ain't you.

What's generally missing from Nashville's imaginary Mexico is, after all, Mexicans. Mexican men are in particularly short supply -- when they do appear, it's often to provide speechless local color. Beguiling, obliging senoritas, however, are not uncommon. In "The Seashores of Old Mexico," for instance, the fugitive runs into two beautiful women. The first makes off with all his cash, but he later wakes to an unhappily married young lady who decides to spend her life with him. Similarly, on Blaine Larsen's new "I Don't Know What She Said," our young hero falls for a cutie who, unfortunately, no habla ingles. Are you surprised that he doesn't mind a bit?

These romantic idylls suggest why God really made Mexico -- for a guy like Kenny Chesney. Despite all the macho bluster in Nashville, Chesney's beach bum is the real 21st century equivalent of the outlaw, choosing a life that regular folks envy but don't follow. And Chesney isn't oblivious to what uptight Americans might consider the pitfalls of life in Mexico. If, as he sighs contentedly on "No Shoes, No Shirt, No Problems," there's "no boss, no clock, no stress, no dress code" on the other side of the border, that easy life can also be a trap. On "Beer in Mexico," he laments that he's "Too old to be wild and free/Still too young to be over the hill," that he's settled into an inactive limbo and lost his goals and ambitions. Poor Kenny -- he's just a modern day Odysseus tempted to slacker oblivion by the Lotus Eaters.

And though today's mainstream country is fluent in the language of tourism, with its breezy promise of a temporary escape, beneath these blithe Mexican travelogues there often lurks a fear of going native. After all "there's things down here the devil himself wouldn't do," Toby Keith warns on "Stays in Mexico" -- as in "What happens down in Mexico..." The song tracks a vacation fling between two strait-laced types: Steve, a married insurance salesman from South Dakota, and Gina, a Phoenix schoolteacher. In a playful mood set by music that'd do any touristy hotel's house band proud, Keith seems to excuse the affair as a kind of moral time-out, unrelated to real life back home. But when Gina misses her plane and falls back into Steve's arms after one more tequila shot, you have to wonder: What if she "Stays in Mexico"...forever?

So even as contemporary country songwriters try to adapt the theme of the Mexican getaway to their cleaner-living audience, they can't quite scrub away the lingering residue from the music's outlaw past. In the process, they capture a distinctly American mind-set, as the guilty conscience of an ingrained work ethic tries to puncture fantasies of a carefree life. If the "Mexico" that is cast consistently as the id to our gringo superego is just a projection of country music's hopes and fears, maybe these same hopes and fears are projected whenever we debate immigration.

asap contributor Keith Harris is a writer in Philadelphia. Want to comment? Sound off at soundoffasap@ap.org.