The US-Mexico Border in American Movies: A Political Geography Perspective

The region surrounding the US–Mexico divide is probably one of the most frequently screened landscapes of North America. Since the beginning of commercial cinema, the border has been a leading or secondary character in dozens of movies, ranging from the obvious westerns to the less obvious horror, science fiction and film-noir categories. The connotations given by the American film industry to the cross-border experience – both from the south and north –connotations, and the meaning of the border that has been assumed to support such interpretations can be considered, from a ‘critical geopolitics’ perspective, as popular forms of expression of a geopolitical discourse pertaining to the role and standing of the United States relative to its southern neighbour. In order to detect the frames and assumptions of this popular geopolitical narrative, the author takes into account the scripts and the visual representation of the borderscape of a miscellany of about 30 movies, all produced in North America over a period of 65 years.