The Last Conquistador of El Paso, Texas: Valadez and Ibarra’s Documentary Portrait of a Paradigmatic City

The Last Conquistador (2008) records the anger and hurt that arises in El Paso, Texas between the city’s Anglo, Hispanic and Native American communities when sculptor John Houser obtains funding from the City Council to complete an equestrian statue of Spanish conquistador Juan de Oñate (1550–1626). In this article, we argue that the documentary portrays El Paso as a “paradigmatic city” (Glick Schiller & Çağlar), i.e. a specific urban locality through which the entire nation-state is generalized, and makes a point of El Paso’s naïve but nevertheless discriminatory efforts to reimagine itself as exemplary of the supposedly spatially and societally wholesome United States.

Publication year:2019

Accessibility:Open