The 1985 drama Alamo Bay, set on the Gulf Coast of Texas, deals with the cultural conflicts that arose when Asian fishermen and shrimpers immigrated to the area in the years after the Vietnam War.  The story centers on a white Vietnam vet named Shang, played by Ed Harris. He is an outspoken, hard-nosed leader among his friends and within the fishing community— call him an alpha-male. This role is made more complex by the fact that his wife Glory, played by Amy Madigan, is the daughter of one of the area’s main buyers of their catch. The plot begins with the arrival of Dinh, a young Vietnamese man who becomes part of a growing immigrant presence. The white locals don’t like the new arrivals, in part because many of them served in the war and are wary from their experiences, and that tension is increased by the number of Vietnamese men who become their competitors in the industry. The film, written by a woman from Chicago and directed by a man from France, explores those tensions, which are largely based on racist and xenophobic beliefs and narratives.

In the beginning of Alamo Bay, we see a bright and optimistic Dinh hitchhiking to the place that will be his new home, and things seem good . . . until he arrives. The white delivery driver who picks him up is friendly and open, but as soon as he gets there, Dinh encounters Shang. Bearded and wearing a Confederate flag baseball cap, Shang is a surly working-class dude who tells Dinh to get off his lawn. This sets the tone, since in Shang’s mind, the whole community is his property. Audiences of the mid-1980s would have had a fresh memory of the fall of Saigon in 1975 and the waves of immigration that followed, so this white community’s frustrations would have been familiar political territory back then, even for those who disagreed with the sentiment.  As the film’s story continues, we see greater and greater tension, especially as Dinh attempts to work and then to buy his own boat. That move proves to be something of a breaking point for the white locals, and it isn’t long before they are getting organized. The movement against the immigrants reaches a fever pitch when a couple of boatloads of Ku Klux Klan arrive, with Shang at the helm of the lead boat. Most Americans would have recognized the Klan’s race-hate toward black Southerners, but this might have been a startling aspect for the average viewer, whose narrative may not have included nativist, anti-immigrant intimidation. In the end, we see Shang and the local boys resorting to full-on violence, a tactic that could be his last ditch effort to regain white supremacist, patriarchal control over his town, his livelihood, and his wife.

Forty years after the release of Alamo Bay, these anti-immigrant narratives are alive and well, as are attempts to create myths that explain the tensions in either-or ways. Yet, the film gives a reasonably well-rounded and nuanced look at one scenario. In the character of Shang, we see a man who is racist and who employs the power structures that support racism, which lead to problems and to violence, but these tendencies are part of his larger desire to control everything around him, including his wife, his friends, and the local economy. His main gripe is one that working-class white men have had for a long time, and still do today: the way things are isn’t working for me. His character is emblematic of a kind of white Southern male in the late twentieth century— the kind who leaned hard into the political messages of Ronald Reagan. On the other hand, while it may be tempting to see Dinh as the counterweight in this story, Shang’s wife Glory is a more notable figure. We expect Dinh to do what he does – arrive hopefully, work hard, build a life as best as he can, defend himself when attacked – but Glory’s behavior is unexpected. A local herself, this white woman chooses a totally different response than her husband by accepting Dinh, maintaining a relationship with her father, and seeing Shang’s selfishness holistically. In mythic terms, Glory is “good white people.” At its core, Alamo Bay is a case study in post-Vietnam, Reagan-era local politics, providing a scenario of post-Civil Rights Southern intolerance that has little to do with narratives that reduce the culture to black-versus-white in a mythic interpretation of the region.