The US–Mexico borderlands have lived in the popular imagination as the locus of danger and horror, as the “other side” poses violent and unimaginable threats to those who dare cross the border. Situated in the outskirts of both the American and Mexican nations, the binational borderland region embodies ambivalence, otherness and a loss of civilization or humanity. Borderland monsters often play with a wilful monstrosity, as they express the ambiguity, resistance and resilience necessary to cope with their inherent in-betweenness, marked by their gender, ethnicity, legal status and/or cultural assimilation.
Crossing the Boundary: The US–Mexico Borderlands in Contemporary Horror tackles the most recent evolution of borderland representation in horror texts, focusing on popular culture and including films, comic books and TV series, to provide an insightful review of themes and tropes specific to the binational region and its highly politicised discourses.
Examines US-Mexico borderland representations in horror films, TV series and comics.
Foreword (by Frederick Luis Aldama)
Introduction
PART I. MIGRANT HORROR
1. Hunting Down and Torturing Migrants
2. Border Violence Footage Film
3. Female Bodies on the Border
PART II. BORDERLAND MONSTROSITY
4. Monstrous Mexican Heritage and Folklore
5. The Patriarchal Creation of the Female Monster
6. Undead and Cannibals in the Borderlands
PART III. WEIRD SOUTHWEST
7. Monsters Traversing the Borderlands
8. Haunted Frontier
PART IV. CRIME AND EXPLOITATION ACROSS THE BORDER
9. Evil Forces and Satanic Narcos
10. Cross-Border Medical Exploitation
Bibliography
Anna Marta Marini is currently a postdoctoral researcher for Latinx Studies at Instituto Franklin-UAH, from which she holds a PhD in North American Studies with a focus on Film Studies. Her main research interests are connected to popular culture and critical analysis of political discourse, in particular in the North American context and related to ethnoracial violence and discrimination. In the field of Mexican studies, her work has been focused in particular on state repression, racism, post-revolutionary political discourse and national identity construction especially in film, as well as representations and discourses related to the assassination of Luis Donaldo Colosio.
