The Nation : Nativism on Film: A World of Bandits and Crooks : Culture: Mexicans have long been portrayed in movies as less than equal to Americans, mirroring an attitude prevalent in white society.

Most of the reasons why many Americans oppose the North American Free Trade Agreement have been put on the table. But the Al Gore-Ross Perot debate illustrated there’s another factor lurking, one people don’t like to mention in polite company: Sadly, many Americans distrust Mexicans and hardly see them as equals.

Why else could Perot dismiss an entire race, as when he said of Mexicans, “People who don’t make anything can’t buy anything”? Intentionally or not, when Perot talks about that giant “sucking sound” of jobs heading south, where “factory workers dream of one day having outhouses and running water;” or when Patrick J. Buchanan talks about how the treaty “would merge our country with Mexico,” they are playing on nativist sentiment--the same attitude fueling the backlash against immigration.

Sure, there are major economic differences between Canada and Mexico, but they don’t account for the fact that no one is going around talking about how trade links to the north--as opposed to the south--would somehow end Western civilization as we know it.

No, the real problem is Americans consider Canadians to be something like them and Mexicans to be anything but. If you doubt it, just check the products of the funhouse mirror of popular sentiment--Hollywood.

In the warped world according to the entertainment industry, Mexicans and Mexican-Americans have always made great bandits, terrific gardeners and outstanding businessmen--as long as the business is drugs. For every heroic Juarez, Zapata or Victor Sifuentes of “L.A. Law,” there have been hundreds of banditos, Mexicans asleep in the town square or young boys offering to sell their sisters to Anglos. In the world of pop culture, mariachi bands often appear to be the only path to upward mobility.

As for Mexican women, their depiction as seductive cantina singers for whites became so stereotyped that film scholars developed a name for it--”the Cantina cutie” or “the Chiquita.” Alfred Richard counted 35 films between 1936 and 1955 in which a beautiful maiden played this role--including “Sunset in the West,” with Estelita Rodriguez in the supporting cast for Roy Rodgers and Trigger.

In the few instances when a Latino was a hero, until recently an white actor got the role--sending a not-so-subtle message about white supremacy. It was Paul Muni, after all, who played Benito Juarez and Marlon Brando who portrayed the rebel Emiliano Zapata in “Viva Zapata.” That practice has changed in Hollywood, but thanks to television and cable, the past is far more than prologue.

In fact, such stereotypes are hardly a thing of the past. As in “Colors,” a 1988 film in which Latinos and blacks fight for L.A. drug turf, the Latinos on screen during the past decade have often been violent gang members or in the drug trade. This year, we’ve seen Michael Douglas in “Falling Down,” in which Latinos are among the most vicious of street criminals, while a cable movie, “Extreme Justice,” portrayed three Latino ex-cons as horrible rapists.

A 1991 study of TV content found Latinos are still among the most stereotyped groups. Comprising only about 2% of all TV roles, they are four times as likely as whites to portray unskilled workers. Between 1975 and 1991, an astounding 22% of Latino characters on fictional TV had committed a crime--though once “Miami Vice” left the air so, mysteriously, did at least some of that Latino crime.

To be sure, these prejudices did not originate with the movies. Many white prejudices against Latinos date back to the conflict between England and Spain in the 16th Century. The United States also fought a war against Mexico, as anyone knows who has seen one of the dozen or so cinematic versions of “The Alamo”--where a small brave band of American frontiersmen succumbs to a group of bloodthirsty Mexicans in too-tight pants. No one should forget the baby boomers’ first hero was Davy Crockett.

But whatever xenophobia was present before 1900 became magnified once Hollywood made its more than 6,000 films about events or people in Latin America, many set in Mexico. It began in the silent days with a series of popular films--”Tony the Greaser,” “Bronco Billy and the Greaser,” and “The Greaser’s Revenge”--in which Mexicans were portrayed as the kind of villains who would throw the hero’s child into a river.

By and large, according to film scholars, these portrayals continued into the ‘30s, when the Production Code Administration finally began forcing filmmakers to clean up their depictions of Mexicans and other Latinos because they were undermining the film export market. The result was a series of musical comedies glorifying Latin America, including “South of the Border” and “Down Mexico Way.” These efforts were reinforced in the early ‘40s, as Hollywood turned to the Japanese and Germans as the major source of villains.

But since World War II, things may have gotten worse. Sure Ricardo Montalban and Cantiflas made it. And, recently, there has been an occasional film sympathetic to Mexican-Americans--such as “La Bamba,” “Stand and Deliver” or “The Milagro Beanfield War.” But the more prevalent image for Latinos has still been the bloodthirsty frontier thug in the Westerns of Sam Peckinpah and Sergio Leone, or an urban thug in the movies of Chuck Norris.

Though often violent in movies and on TV, however, Mexicans are rarely as strong as Americans. In “Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia,” an American is able to engineer the assassination of a Mexican landowner despite the attempts of hundreds of locals to stop him, while “Two Mules for Sister Sara” shows how an American (Clint Eastwood) won the Mexican revolution for people who could hardly win it for themselves.

Mexican authorities still often come off looking sinister--in contrast to their typically heroic American counterparts. In 1967’s “The Wild Bunch,” a Mexican general is the paradigm of evil--even when compared with American thugs--because he’s using the revolution to make his own profit and torture his followers. Even in a 1983 comedy such as “Losing It,” Mexican law enforcement is depicted as corrupt. Old stereotypes die hard.

Which means they affect the debate on issues such as NAFTA and immigration. It’s one thing to become an equal trading partner with the country that produced Neil Young, Peter Jennings and Lorne Michaels. Mexico is another story--we can’t escape the stereotyped images of bandits, drunks, corrupt government officials and enticing servile maidens. Remember the Alamo? Thanks to Hollywood, the NAFTA debate shows we can’t remember anything else.