Abstract
For a new vision of the relations across the Mexican-U.S. border, one could try to imagine scenes like these: a Spanish-speaking Anglo-American who goes through a lot of trouble travelling with the body of his dead Mexican friend in order to find a place to bury him, or members of the California border patrol who celebrate the arrival of undocumented Mexicans with hugs and kisses. Besides sounding somewhat utopian, the scenes are what they seem to be: fictional. They appear in two recent films that treat the question of Mexican-U.S. relations and the border problem in a somewhat different way, from an aesthetic as well as an ethical, moral, and political point of view.
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Notes
This vision of the boundary belongs to a general theoretical framework of semiotics that combines basic aspects of Peircean thinking with elements of a more structurally oriented semiotics, including concepts like discourse and notions of narratology. The discussion of this framework is not possible within this article. See, for example, Umberto Eco, A Theory of Semiotics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976); James Lizska, A General Introduction to the Semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996); or Daniel Chandler, Semiotics: The Basic (London: Routledge, 2002). Also the dialogical thinking of Bakhtin is part of this framework. Cf. Mihail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981); Michael Holquist, Dialogism: Bakhtin and His World (New York: Routledge, 1990); and Tzvetan Todorov, Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogical Principle (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984). For further discussion of the concept of the boundary and its place within a semiotic idea of culture, see Jan Gustafsson, “Culture and Interculturality as Signs and Boundaries-a Semiotic Approach,” in Bridges of Understanding: Perspectives of Intercultural Communication, ed. Øyvind Dahl et al. (Oslo, Unipub Oslo Academic Press, 2006).
Fredrik Barth, Introduction to Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The Social Organisation of Difference, ed. Fredrik Barth (Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 1969), 15.
Yuri Lotman, Universe of Mind: A Semiotic Theory of Culture (London: Tauris, 1990), 131–32.
Néstor García Canclini, Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering and Leaving Modernity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995).
Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation (New York: Harper Perennial, 1992), 233ff.
Michael Shapiro, The Sense of Grammar (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983), 17–20. See also James Lizska, The Semiotic of Myth (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1989), ch. 2. The idea of transvaloration of terms comes originally from Roman Jakobson, Selected Writings (The Hague: Mouton, 1971).
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© 2007 Edward Ashbee, Helene Balslev Clausen, and Carl Pedersen, eds.
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Gustafsson, J. (2007). Boundaries in Border Films: The Other as Our Redemption. In: Ashbee, E., Clausen, H.B., Pedersen, C. (eds) The Politics, Economics, and Culture of Mexican-U.S. Migration. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230609914_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230609914_11
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