The southern border between the United States and Mexico remains a highly contentious arena for concerns over external threats to American culture and values. This is evidenced in the recent strengthening of border regulations and passport restrictions by the implementation of the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative (WHTI). A border, by definition, is not only a symbol of containment (a dividing line that represents the boundary of a given territory), but also one of exclusion – the same boundary is symbolic of a blockade meant to limit entry into the territory. Yet the southern border has historically harbored more xenophobic fears than its northern (Canadian) counterpart. Camilla Fojas examines the southern frontier as it has been represented in Hollywood film, observing that “the U.S. media depict the border as a necessary barrier to unwanted traffic while the borderlands are often represented as a repository of all things illegal” (2). Her focus is on border films, a genre that is preoccupied with the southern frontier as an area that represents American anxieties over immigration and integration.
Fojas examines the Hollywood depictions of the southern frontier in three distinct categories: the western, or more appropriately the southwestern; films that feature the border patrol as protagonists; and drug-trafficking films. Each of these cross-genre areas, the author states, is primarily “concerned with fortifying U.S. national identity during times of cultural transition” (16). These “cultural transitions” are thoroughly explored by Fojas prior to her analysis of specific film texts. Her foregrounding of the historical and cultural contexts of the postwar western, the US Immigration Act of 1965, and the creation of the Drug Enforcement Administration by President Nixon in 1972 contribute significantly to her critical assessment of such wide-ranging and diverse films as The Comancheros (1961), Borderline (1980), and Traffic (2000), as well as others. It is this cultural relationship between the historical events and how they are reimagined by Hollywood genre filmmaking that is the strong point of the book.
Los Angeles, as “schizopolis” containing borders within its own boundaries and because of its large Latino population, becoming “the epicenter of the immigration debate,” is the subject of a lengthy and insightful chapter that provides interpretive analysis of El Norte (1983), Star Maps (1997) and Bread and Roses (2000). Fojas argues that these films “dramatize and work through anxieties about immigration in the popular imaginary” (147). Fojas's assessment of their importance as reflections of the traumatic experience of exclusion within the boundaries of a nation noted for being inclusive are the highlights of her noteworthy study. In the concluding chapter, the author returns to the trope of the American West by considering two recent films: Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain (2005) and Tommy Lee Jones's Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (2005). Both films are representative of how the contemporary western has become an instrument for reexamining US national identity within contemporary cultural issues. Border Bandits is a solid and well-researched exploration of the cultural and historical impact of the southern frontier in mainstream Hollywood and the ways it has been adapted to genre filmmaking.
