Transnational Representations of the U.S. Borderlands. Outlaw Women in Contemporary "Border Cinema"

Book excerpt: Master's Thesis from the year 2014 in the subject American Studies - Miscellaneous, grade: 1,0, Humboldt-University of Berlin (Department of English and American Studies), language: English, abstract: The Mexican Revolution of the 1910s alone is considered to have inspired some hundreds of border films, mostly documentaries and docudramas. The Mexican film industry has a nearly equally long history of representing the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. According to Norma Iglesias-Prieto, one of the leading scholars in the field of Mexican border cinema, more than 300 border films were produced in Mexico between 1936 and 1996. “By the 1930s, Mexican producers were beginning to view the border as a profitable theme for Mexico’s national film industry” (Iglesias-Prieto 1998). Referring to Iglesias-Prieto’s classic book-length study "Entre yerba, polvo y plomo: Lo fronterizo visto por el cine mexicano" (1991), Fregoso argues that Mexico produced 147 border films in the decade between 1979 and 1989 alone (cp. 2003). Charles Ramírez Berg also points to a boom in 'cine fronterizo' in the 1980s: "Border films have flourished on the lowest end of the economic and aesthetic Mexican moviemaking scale for decades. The 'narcotraficante' film, a Mexican police genre, is the most popular (...)