Americans’ fascination with the frontier has its origins in Dime Novels. The frontier was the setting of this literary form of pop fiction. The tales that hooked readers to these books have also lured Americans to see films about the America West and the US-Mexico border. Frontier movies that dramatized violence, drugs, smuggling, and lawlessness, just to name a few, kept moviegoers returning to theaters in the 20th century.

You can see traces of frontier tales in silent films, talkies, film noirs, westerns, comedies, Sci-Fi’s, and, lately, War on Drugs and War on terrors flicks. While film genres have evolved, to convey the stories making headlines during a specific time, storylines share similarities. Even in the 1935 New Deal classic, “Bordertown,” featuring a young Bette Davis, the frontier is a place where a person can make lots of money in gambling and booze. Likewise, the only way you can regain order and re-establish civilization at the US-Mexico border is by exterminating “bad hombres” with extreme prejudice as in both Sicario films.  

Motion pictures about the frontier have not only created movie fans, they have also criminalized the people and culture of the US-Mexico border region.

Together, the novels and short story collections in the reading lists below are not only tales of successes and failures, but also of who we are. 

Not sure where to begin, I skimmed through the volumes on poetry.  I read quickly a few poems, tried to digest others, but it was his prose that truly beckoned me.  I paused skimming midway through his oeuvre and read the first two short tales in depth.  I knew then, as I do now, that I had found a literary gold mine because weeks later, I’m still digging through the Simple stories in volumes 7 and 8.

Originally published in the Chicago Defender from 1943 to 1965, the Simple stories read more like weekly columns on race relations in the U.S. The tales are narrated in a conversational form to engage readers on multiple levels.  On one level, the stories are comical and reader-friendly, designed to show the human soul of Jesse B. Semple, or Simple as he is known, and draw the reader in.  Readers get to see and feel Simple’s failures and successes as well as his frustrations and dreams.  On another level, the stories portray the complex world that evolved in the Jim Crow era in a non-antagonizing way.  Simple’s conversations with his bar buddy not only lured readers into the national dialogue over race, but they also engaged readers in a constructive conversation over racism—the ideological foundation that defined the racial boundaries of Simple’s life and, by extension, African Americans.

Though it has been sixty-five years since Langston Hughes published the first Simple stories in book form, the ideas in these tales still resonate.  Racial progress has been made, but we still have a long way to go.  Both fictional characters would probably nod their heads.  Yes, over a cold beer.  Still, such ideas, now more than ever, need to be part of a national discourse.