This chapter analyzes how representations of Mexico and Mexican-descent people have been used as foils for rendering whiteness as Americanness. Exploring literary, musical, and cinematic representations of Latinx people, this chapter examines four critical US cultural tropes of Mexico, Mexicans, and Mexican Americans (and Latin America and Latinxs more broadly): the greaser, the sexy señorita, the Mexican Problem, and the infernal paradise. Together these tropes and others work to fashion white American masculinity as heroic and desirable; white American womanhood as pure, good, and in need of protection; the United States as a beacon of equality and justice; and its whiteness as under threat of invasion. Through these tropes and their racial logics, the chapter exposes how ideas about whiteness and Americanness are coterminous.