The 1,954-mile-long U.S.-Mexico border has been a recurring theme in U.S. popular culture, including music, television, and film. In movies, in particular, the border has been cast as a shadow zone and place of contrasts where struggles between light and dark, law and order, legality and illegality, freedom and detention, purity and indecency, enlightenment and ignorance, and democracy and communism take place. As a region of flourishing contradictions, state officials—especially those on the U.S. side of the line—have deemed the border in need of surveillance, policing, and protection from the lawlessness, alienation, and desire that threatens national boundaries as well as the body politic. The borderlands have also been represented as what Tejana queer theorist Gloria Anzaldua calls a “third space,” an area of multinational, multi-racial, and multi-ethnic cultural influences, meanings, and hybridity as well as struggle and survival unlike that found in either the United States or Mexico. As an independent yet bifurcated enclave, the border has taken on a life of its own, despite the many attempts to define and capture it on screen, specifically.
It is these cinematic interpretations, representations, and understandings about the U.S.-Mexico border that this class seeks to examine and analyze through a series of films produced over a broad sweep of time—from the l950s to the 2010s. Using lecture, readings, and class discussions, this course asks students to interrogate the ways in which commercial U.S- and Mexican-cinema as well as independent filmmakers, locals, migrants, and visitors of all racial, ethnic, and cultural backgrounds, have rendered the U.S.-Mexico border. Finally, the class will spend time thinking about how these films have influenced our understanding of the past, present and future of border peoples, the borderlands, and larger U.S. history.
About the Instructor: Professor Miroslava Chávez-García is Professor of History at UCSB and holds affiliations in the Departments of Chicana/o Studies, Feminist Studies, and Latin American and Iberian Studies. She is currently the Faculty Director of the McNair Scholars Program. Author of Negotiating Conquest: Gender and Power in California, 1770s to 1880s (University of Arizona Press, 2004) and States of Delinquency: Race and Science in the Making of California’s Juvenile Justice System (University of California Press, 2012), Miroslava’s most recent book, Migrant Longing: Letter Writing across the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands (University of North Carolina Press, 2018), is a history of migration, courtship, and identity as told through more than 300 personal letters exchanged across the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. In addition to her books, Miroslava has published numerous articles on related topics of migration, juvenile justice, and Chicana history as well as on mentoring young scholars of color in academia.