Buddy, it turns out, took a piece of others people's action, like Charlie before him, just not blatantly. Envelopes of cash never changed hands as far as we know, but Buddy as mayor didn't see a problem with taking a piece of a real estate development that used eminent domain to seize other people's land. Nor did he have a problem with using a prisoner on work release to build a deck onto his home for no pay. Charlie was the devil people knew, old and grizzled and hateful, a bad guy who acted like a bad guy: you could practically smell his rottenness. Buddy was the devil, too, in his way—a devil in a white hat, blond and blue-eyed and square-jawed. Maybe he didn't realize what he truly was. Maybe he just did things, acting on instinct. The new sheriff and future mayor proved a skilled coalition builder and kingmaker, using his official power for private and political gain, securing the political support of Otis Payne and Mercedes Colon by discouraging other entrepreneurs of color from opening businesses that might compete with ones already in existence. He gave people money that wasn't Buddy's money to give. There were strings attached, or implied agreements. Buddy's good deeds always benefited Buddy. He encouraged other people to be Buddy, too. And now many of the adults in Frontera are in relationships of mutually assured destruction based on shared knowledge of each other's fear, hunger, and guilt. It's been said that behind every great fortune lies a crime, but "Lone Star" indicates that the same thing can be true of houses, bars, and restaurants.
The murder of Charlie Wade is just one skeleton that Frontera would prefer stay buried, so that money can keep flowing from one end of town to the other, over the border and back. As on HBO's "The Wire," corruption persists not because people are evil, but because they're weak and lazy and would rather not risk discomfort by dismantling the status quo. People in this movie talk about systemic change, but almost nobody actually wants it because it's too hard. They'd actually be content with getting a bigger slice than whatever they have at the moment. Marginalized outsiders, too, want to tear down the system until someone inside the system offers them a small piece of the action so that they'll quit yelling. More often than not, they take it. Sayles' script establishes early that Sam is opposed to building a new prison in Frontera because the town already profits from the state renting local jail cells (Sayles was ahead of the curve in warning audiences against the burgeoning prison-industrial complex). When his Mexican-American chief deputy Ray (Tony Plana) asks his blessing to run for sheriff when Sam's term expires (something that we gather was going to happen no matter what, and was engineered because local power brokers were tired of Sam back-talking them) Sam asks him what he thinks about the scheme to build a new prison. "It's a complicated issue," Ray says. "Yeah, Ray," Sam says, "you'll be a hell of a sheriff."
There are always three or four things going on in every scene of Sayles' script beyond the delivery of plot information. One of the richest is the notion that most major decisions in Frontera—as in Texas, and the United States generally—are driven by ideas of whiteness and white exceptionalism, even though the idea of "whiteness" is as much an agreed-upon lie as the notion of a border. Whiteness is provisional, for one thing. The label can be granted to a person not previously described as such, but it can be revoked if the beneficiary rattles the establishment. Whiteness, as presented here, is about the willingness to join the existing power structure and adopt as many of its customs and practices as you can without repudiating your own people.
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