A reporter visits the scene in California ?Border towns always bring out the worst in a country,? says Charlton Heston. He is talking to his wife, Janet Leigh, his voice shaking with the tetchy conviction of an embarrassed patriot. ?This,? he goes on, ?isn?t the real Mexico,? and we understand at once that here is a man who knows whereof he speaks: for Charlton Heston is a real Mexican.
Orson Welles?s decision to cast the decidedly Anglo actor as Detective Miguel Vargas in his 1958 noir classic Touch of Evil was not the filmmaker?s finest hour. The mistake was only compounded by the application of a quarter inch of ruddy foundation to Heston?s face, as well as his inability to pronounce even such rudimentary Spanish words as ?sí? and ?no.? Yet the bit of dialogue with Leigh seems, in retrospect, oddly prescient. Vargas is apologizing to his gringa bride for the tawdriness and violence endemic to ?Los Robles,? a rotten little ?burg standing in for Tijuana, and portrayed, for production purposes, by Venice Beach, California. (Not the real Mexico indeed.) He may be saying more than he means; certainly he may be saying more than Heston, in his later role as icon of American conservatism, would have wanted to mean.

Borders have two sides, after all, and on the American side of the U.S.-Mexico line today there lies a town that is not exactly a credit to the great republic. It is not that there?s anything all that bad about the Otay Mesa section of San Di...