The declining sovereignity of nation-states intensifies the symbolic functions performed by physical borders. The frontier between Mexico and the U.S. is one of these ideologically charged places: it plays a defining role in national identities and narratives, and contributes to their hybridization. Nevertheless, in films involving a partnership between the U.S. and Mexico, critical discourse is predominantly shaped by separate “national” paradigms. The paper considers as case studies two films concerned with border narratives: The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (Tommy Lee Jones, 2005) and Sin nombre (Cary Fukunaga, 2009). Their critical reception is traced by examining reviews, articles and interviews both in the U.S. and in the Mexican press. The central premise of the two movies is, in fact, a journey towards the opposite side of the frontier (South-bound in the former, and North-bound in the latter). Concerns regarding the permeability of the national territory – which characterize contemporary surveillance culture – are filtered through the movies’ genres and their different mise-en-scène. Migration emerges as the primary geopolitical framework through which the films are interpreted: the emphasis lies on the economic dimension and/or the “national security” issues; hence, the dynamics of cultural hybridization are significantly overlooked.
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Cinéma & Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal
Moving Pictures and People across the U.S.-Mexico Border: The Critical Reception of Sin nombre and The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada
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Cinéma & Cie
Valerio Coladonato
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Moving Pictures and People across the U.S.-Mexico Border: The Critical Reception of Sin nombre and The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada
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Moving Pictures and People across the U.S.-Mexico Border
the Critical Reception of Sin Nombre and The Three Burials
of Melquiades Estrada
Valerio Coladonato, Sapienza Università di Roma




  Abstract
  The declining sovereignity of nation-states intensifies the symbolic functions performed
  by physical borders. The frontier between Mexico and the U.S. is one of these ideologically
  charged places: it plays a defining role in national identities and narratives, and contributes
  to their hybridization. Nevertheless, in films involving a partnership between the U.S. and
  Mexico, critical discourse is predominantly shaped by separate “national” paradigms. The
  paper considers as case studies two films concerned with border narratives: The Three Burials
  of Melquiades Estrada (Tommy Lee Jones, 2005) and Sin nombre (Cary Fukunaga, 2009).
  Their critical reception is traced by examining reviews, articles and interviews both in the
  U.S. and in the Mexican press. The central premise of the two movies is, in fact, a journey
  towards the opposite side of the frontier (South-bound in the former, and North-bound in the
  latter). Concerns regarding the permeability of the national territory – which characterize
  contemporary surveillance culture – are filtered through the movies’ genres and their different
  mise-en-scène. Migration emerges as the primary geopolitical framework through which
  the films are interpreted: the emphasis lies on the economic dimension and/or the “national
  security” issues; hence, the dynamics of cultural hybridization are significantly overlooked.




   Journeys between Mexico and the United States are a long-established cinematic trope: as
Adrián Pérez-Melgosa has recently shown, throughout the history of this medium a continuous
flow of “transnational affect” has been carried by moving images across the American continent.1
As part of a complex network of cultural productions dealing with the frontier, “border films” play
a fundamental part in shaping opposed national identities, while paradoxically contributing to the
hybridization of cultures. These cinematic journeys are deeply involved in contemporary issues
of geopolitics and international relations, to the extent that “each appearance of a new policy to
regulate relationships between Latin America and the U.S. shows rhetorical strategies similar to
those present in a series of films concurrently produced.”2 My paper will focus on two films among
the many that, in the last decade, have portrayed journeys between Mexico and the U.S.: The
Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (Tommy Lee Jones, 2005) and Sin nombre (Cary Fukunaga,
2009). In particular, I will address the critical reception of these two movies, highlighting how the
discursive formation that stems from “border films” is also embedded in geopolitical dynamics.

Cinéma & Cie, vol. XIII, no. 20, Spring 2013                                                      77
Valerio Coladonato

   In addition to the journeys depicted in the movies, the other relevant movement is that of films
themselves – as they are distributed internationally, shown in festivals and theaters, and in their
subsequent life on multiple media platforms. Focusing on the specific interpretive community of
film reviewers and journalists, it is possible to highlight a key passage in this process: as Ulf Hedetoft
has argued, film critics act as “mediatic gatekeepers,” and play a fundamental part in determining
the national belonging of a cultural product within public discourse. This categorization, in turn,
further contributes in shaping the films’ reception among the wider audience.3
   My primary sources are a sample of 94 articles which appeared in the U.S. and Mexican press.
These can be roughly divided in the following categories: movie reviews (45); interviews with the
director, screenwriter, or cast member (19); reports of festival award ceremonies (15); reports of
film pre-production (8); editorial pieces discussing the film in relation to other political issues (7).
The articles were either all published at the time of the films’ commercial releases, or else they
coincided with their screenings at international film festivals – in particular, the 2005 Cannes Film
Festival for The Three Burials; the 2009 Sundance Film Festival and Guadalajara International
Film Festival for Sin nombre.4
   Borrowing Janet Staiger’s expression, we could define reviewers as “perverse spectators:” 5
their interpretations depend only to a certain extent – if at all – on the normative reading suggested
by the filmic text. Rather, the critics emphasize selected elements of the films, according to both
individual and contextual factors. Staiger claims that a key operation in cinema reception is that of
“rehierarchizing” cultural elements.6 I find her suggestion particularly useful for the purposes of
this paper. My goal will be to observe how reviewers interpret The Three Burials and Sin nombre
– and in particular what elements they stress, omit, or rehierarchize while providing a national
categorization of the films, and discussing issues of migration and cultural identity.



The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada

   In The Three Burials, Melquiades (Julio Cesar Cedillo) is an undocumented Mexican migrant
whose accidental murder along the Texan border is concealed by patrolman Mike (Barry
Pepper). When Melquiades’s friend and fellow cowboy Pete (Tommy Lee Jones) discovers the
circumstances of the murder, he forces Mike to exhume the corpse, and carry it on a perilous
South-bound journey. They travel across the desert in the attempt to locate Melquiades’s family
and home village in Mexico, and to give him a proper burial there. The journey proves to be
transformative both for Pete, who reconsiders his ruthless treatment of migrants, and for Mike,
who has to face the unreliability of the information provided by Melquiades.
   The Three Burials is the directorial debut of Tommy Lee Jones. In a career spanning over four
decades, the Texan actor has built for himself a loner, tough guy star-image, upon which this
movie builds and expands. As all reviews point out, Lee Jones conceived the project as a creative
partnership with acclaimed Mexican screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga, whose previous works
included internationally awarded films such as Alejandro González Iñarritu’s Amores perros
(2000) and 21 Grams (2003). In interviews and public appearances, both Lee Jones and Arriaga
have stressed the equality in their working relationship, which has been described as “an excellent


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example of Anglo-Hispanic co-operation.”7 The balance of this relationship, though, seems to
shift in the accounts of reviewers from the two different countries.
   In the U.S., the majority of articles focus on the leading role of Tommy Lee Jones, as well as
on his transition behind the camera and his successful effort in directing actors.8 By highlighting
Lee Jones’s domineering and intimidating persona, the articles depict him as “in control” of
the set.9 Some accounts emphasize the friendship between director and screenwriter, based on
the common passion for hunting in the border area; in doing so, they implicitly draw a parallel
between Lee Jones and Arriaga on the one hand, and the characters of Pete and Melquiades on
the other. Conflating Lee Jones’s directorial role and the character he plays onscreen, the articles
seem to deny the central premise of the film, which is to undermine the dominant position of the
Anglo man in the Hollywood western genre. As Camilla Fojas shows in her study of Hollywood
portrayals of the Southern frontier,10 The Three Burials stands in a revisionist position with regard
to the genre: the film exposes and subverts U.S. fantasies on Mexico, and their foundational role in
American identity. Fredric Jameson has argued that in the age of globalisation “individual narrative
representations through which the national destiny can be fantasized” undergo significant changes
in their form and structure.11 Such a deconstruction of the “national allegory”12 is not registered by
U.S. reviewers of The Three Burials: on the contrary, the “hierarchical interracial and transborder
relations”13 between the protagonists of the film remain largely unnoticed.
   Conversely, in Mexico most of the critical attention for The Three Burials was raised by the
award to Arriaga’s screenplay at the 2005 Cannes film festival. This event was framed as the
recognition of a national talent in a highly prestigious setting. Nevertheless, the commentaries
are quite paradoxical: Mexico’s “pride” often seems dependent on foreign recognition, as in
the “praise” to the Mexican cast received from Lee Jones.14 Overall, these reviews highlight the
national belonging of successful professionals in the film industry, but do not touch upon the
Mexican identity of the film’s characters, and the related issues of immigration and discrimination
(which on the contrary are widely discussed in U.S. articles).
   The Mexican press’ celebration of Arriaga’s success is quite striking, considering that The Three
Burials was a U.S. and French coproduction.15 In comparison, similar achievements by other co-
productions which actually involved Mexican companies were substantially overlooked – such
as Rodrigo Plá’s La zona (2007), which garnered awards both at the Venice Film Festival (2007)
and at the Toronto International Film Festival (2008). One possible explanation for this different
treatment is that, whereas La zona overtly criticizes surveillance culture and the class system
within the country, The Three Burials displaces social conflict into foreign territory.
   An interrelated element was the film’s positioning within the contemporary debates on U.S.
immigration policies. The Three Burials was released at a particularly delicate moment:16 the
construction of the security wall along portions of the U.S. Southern frontier was being planned,
within the framework of the militarization of the border area. In her poignant analysis of the wall’s
political effects, Wendy Brown writes: “by shifting migration to more geographically challenging
areas, the barrier has dramatically increased both migrant deaths and the rate of permanent, rather
than temporary migration into the United States.”17 Embedded in the surveillance culture that
followed the events of 9/11, these policies “set the stage for the abuse of power by police and rise
of paramilitary groups.”18 With its focus on the violent actions of a border patrolman, the film was
interpreted as a protest against the U.S. government projects19 – a reading that seems influenced


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Valerio Coladonato

and facilitated by Lee Jones’ public statements.20 Additionally, Sony Classics studios re-released
the film in occasion of the economic boycott organized by undocumented immigrants on the 1
May 2006, and destined five percent of the profits to the protests’ organizers.21
  In both cases, the U.S. press coverage of the film makes no mention of the responsibility of
the Mexican government in the policies concerning immigration, therefore treating the issues as
internal affairs, rather than as a matter of international relations. Another striking absence is the
failed recognition of the transnational affective ties exemplified by the return of Melquiades’s body
to Mexico. Adrián Félix has analyzed the implications underlying the practice of the posthumous
repatriation of migrants in the light of the widespread references in Mexican popular culture to the
desire to return to the homeland.22 By downplaying this aspect, the articles simultaneously remove
The Three Burials from this broader cultural framework, and overlook one of the central devices
of the movie’s potential engagement with global audiences.



Sin nombre

  Sin nombre details the North-bound journey of migrants from Central America and Mexico,
in their attempt to reach the United States traveling on freight trains. Among them, we find
Sayra (Paulina Gaitan): her father has returned to his native Honduras with the goal of bringing
her with him to New Jersey. We also meet Casper (Edgar Flores), a teenager who is escaping
from the violent Mexican gang of Mara Salvatrucha with which he is affiliated. On the train,
migrants are exposed to robberies and physical dangers, such as the risk of falling on the tracks.
Sayra and Casper help protect each other along the journey, but at a river crossing, while the
girl makes it to the opposite shore and enters the U.S., the boy is reached by a gang member
and fatally shot.
  Sin nombre was also the debut feature for then 31-year-old Cary Fukunaga.23 In the articles on
the film, one of the most frequently scrutinized issues is that of the director’s mixed “identity.”
Fukunaga’s complex background is defined through several and at times contradictory labels.
Whereas U.S. articles tend to frame him as a “national” director (“California-born, NYU-
schooled”24), there is a tendency of the U.S. Spanish-language press to highlight the diversity
of Fukunaga’s origins.25 Such discrepancies eloquently show the relational aspect of identity: as
Stuart Hall puts it, cultural identities are “the unstable points of identification or suture, which are
made, within the discourses of history and culture,” therefore they do not constitute “an essence
but a positioning.” 26
  In this specific case, the origin of the director appears relevant because, in the journalists’
discourse, it is supposed to guarantee the “authenticity” of the film: in other words, it is inextricably
connected to the dialectics between “realism” and “entertainment.” This symbolic opposition is
what most clearly differentiates the Mexican from the American reviews. Critics from south of
the border praise the accurate portrayal of teenage gang life,27 and of the difficulties and dangers
of the migrants’ journey. Most of them relate this accuracy to the fact that, while researching for
the screenplay, Fukunaga embarked on the same perilous journey.28 Such an aesthetic judgement
minimizes the formulaic aspects of the plot, which draw consistently on the tropes of migration
narratives in recent cinema;29 the sanction of the film’s aesthetic value and “originality” can be

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seen as a self-legitimating strategy that simultaneously validates the reviewers’ position30 and
inscribes the film into the canon of national cinema.
   U.S. articles also highlight the “authenticity” of the film which “feels very real,”31 but at the
same time they compare such a characteristic with what they identify as its other constitutive if
somewhat diverse element: melodrama. On the one hand, due to its brutal depiction of violence and
the attention to the details of the immigrant experience, Sin nombre is framed as a “political” film:32
its “documentary” look, achieved through a reliance on long shots and natural lighting, certainly
contributes to this.33 On the other hand, the focus on the romance between Sayra and Casper,
as well as the carefully crafted thriller plot, relate to the conventional structures of Hollywood
genres. A review compares Sin nombre to a high-grossing film which also dealt with the reunion of
a hispanic immigrant family: “where Patricia Riggen shamelessly milked Under the Same Moon’s
melodrama, Fukunaga’s startlingly impressive first feature is almost ruthless.”34 A complex set of
symbolic oppositions is at play here. First of all, we find a gendered and hierarchical division of
roles and genres – an opposition between feminine emotional excess versus the more culturally
legitimate masculine restraint, and between the escapism of melodrama and the “ruthlessness”
of the political film. Secondly, these categories also imply a contrast between what is considered
American and non-American cinema. Sin nombre, then, appears troubling because it stands both
within and outside of the paradigms of American cinema – it acts, in a way, as an intruder.35
Nevertheless, the hybrid cultural condition of the film is hardly ever recognized.36
   A different approach can be observed in Mexican reviews which try to locate the film within
a discourse of pride for the resurgent national cinematography.37 For instance, they emphasize
the role of producers Diego Luna and Gael García Bernal,38 who supported Sin nombre with
their company Canana; but the same reviews often omit the fact that the project was developed
within the Sundance Labs, and the film’s visibility was guaranteed by the awards for directing and
cinematography at the 2009 Sundance film festival. Hence, Sin nombre is rarely discussed as a U.S.
and Mexican productive partnership. Only during its pre-production a certain degree of economic
collaboration between the two countries was acknowledged.39 Once the film was released and its
plot and aesthetics took center stage, the public discourse around Sin nombre became increasingly
concerned with the attribution of a singular national framework. To understand this shift, Stuart
Hall’s encoding/decoding model still seems relevant: the moments of production and reception of
a cultural text are not necessarily characterized by the same power relations, and therefore each one
of the different practices that articulate the process of communication “retains its distinctiveness
and has its own specific modality, its own forms and conditions of existence.”40
   As a general tendency, the reviews and articles on The Three Burials and Sin nombre show a few
common features on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border: they discuss and re-frame the films’
meanings in the light of several extra-filmic elements, such as the background of the directors,
screenwriters, cast members and crews, as well as the circumstances of the films’ production.
Both movies are perceived as being composed of heterogeneous, conflicting cultural elements:
in addressing their aesthetic value, the critics suggest (often implicitly) a resolution to these
underlying tensions. Their judgement, then, is closely related to contextual factors.41
   The most recurring signifier around which this resolution occurs is that of the “nation.” This
can undoubtedly be related to the territorial dimension of the newspapers, and to the role that
traditional media play in maintaining a sense of imagined social homogeneity, even in the age of


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Valerio Coladonato

globalization.42 As Andreas Hepp writes, suggesting a “transcultural approach” to media reception,
“the borders of the cultural thickenings people belong to do not necessarily correspond with the
territorial borders, while at the same time territories still have a high relevance as a reference
point of constructing national community.”43 This ideological ambivalence helps to explain the
insistent concern of the media on physical national borders: also in its cinematic representations,
the U.S.-Mexico border is “a space that resonates with trauma, a wound that refuses to heal, and
so it becomes the object of tremendous cultural work.”44
  According to Wendy Brown, the recent global tendency to erect spectacular barriers along the
borders is a way to compensate for the declining sovereignity of nation-states: “[t]he new walls
often function theatrically, projecting power and efficaciousness that they do not and cannot
actually exercise and that they also performatively contradict.”45 Walls such as the one on the U.S.-
Mexico frontier do not secure political or economical boundaries – in fact, they often aggravate the
conditions of insecurity that they are supposed to minimize. Nevertheless, widespread consensus
on their necessity can be attributed to the sense of stability that they deceptively promise.46
  The overarching geopolitical dynamic that shapes the two films’ reception, then, is the pattern
of migration between the two countries. As Fojas writes, media coverage of the border area often
“den[ies] the realities of economic and political interdependence between Mexico and the United
States and act[s] as symbolic blockades to cross-border dialogue.”47 I would argue that, among
the articles that I have considered, this is particularly true in the case of film reviews, whereas
interviews with directors and reports of the films’ production tend to partially acknowledge such
an interdependence. Where the disavowal is most evident is in the discussion of the hybrid cultural
status of the two movies: as I have pointed out, the formal and narrative features of the two films
cannot be contained within a singular aesthetic tradition, but the reviews tend to overshadow the
degree to which both films exceed and redefine national paradigms.
  Furthermore, in its framing of the potential spectatorship for The Three Burials and Sin nombre,
the discussion of the films does not fully recognize the potential link between their narrative, and
those subjects who lead predominantly transnational lives (for instance, those who possess dual
citizenship).48 A few articles mention the potential appeal of these movies for the latino community
in the U.S., whose very presence is a “challenge to the neat binary opposition between Anglo and
Latin America.”49 On the whole, however, “American” (as in belonging to the United States) and
“Mexican” are construed as two distinct and unequivocal categories. In this sense, the articles
mostly provide negotiated readings of the films – although the “particular and situated logics”50
to which these readings respond do not give them an oppositional value, but rather deploy the
categories of the hegemonic viewpoint. Regardless of their diverse political attitudes towards
migratory issues and policies, in fact, the articles frame migration either as a primarily economic
phenomenon, and/or as a “national security” issue; but they fail to discuss its cultural implication,
and the profound transformations of subjective and collective identity that it sets in motion.



1    Adrián Pérez-Melgosa, Cinema and Inter-American Relations. Tracking Transnational Affect, Routledge,
     London-New York 2012.
2    Idem, p. 5.
3    Contemporary cinema is caught in a “tension between its transnational forms of production, dissemination


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     and (sometimes) contents, and its routinely national modes of reception, decoding and interpretation,
     based on national identities, cultural history and aesthetic traditions, as well as on particular readings
     of the world informed by a given national habitus and certain foreign stereotypes.” Ulf Hedetoft,
     Contemporary Cinema: Between Cultural Globalisation and National Interpretation, in Mette Hjort,
     Scott Mackenzie (eds.), Cinema and Nation, Routledge, London 2000, p. 262.
4    The period considered for The Three Burials is the month of May 2005 (Cannes Film Festival), and
     the months between December 2005 and February 2006; for Sin nombre, the articles date to the period
     spanning from January to April 2009. I have focused on general-interest newspapers, positioned across
     the political spectrum and based in diverse locations within the two countries – for Mexico, El Norte, El
     Universal, Excélsior, La Jornada, Milenio, Mural, Reforma, Unomàsuno; for the United States: Boston
     Globe, Chicago Tribune, Denver Post, Deseret News, Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Philadelphia
     Inquirer, San Francisco Chronicle, USA Today, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post; despite their
     relatively limited outreach, I have included some U.S. based Spanish-language newspapers: El Diario
     La Prensa (New York), El Mensajero (San Francisco), El Sentinel (Fort Lauderdale), La Voz Nueva
     (Denver), La Opinión (Los Angeles).
5    Janet Staiger, Perverse Spectators: The Practices of Film Reception, New York University Press, New
     York 2000.
6    On these aspects, see in particular chapter 2, The Perversity of Spectators: Expanding the History of the
     Classical Hollywood Cinema, in Idem, pp. 28-42.
7    “[U]n excelente ejemplo de cooperación anglo-hispano,” Hernando Olivares, “Western con realismo
     magico,” in El Sentinel, 25 February 2006.
8    See for instance Susan King, “In a word, ‘fascinating;’ Tommy Lee Jones proves an unconventional
     director in his first time out, ‘Three Burials,’” in Los Angeles Times, 15 December 2005; the focus on Lee
     Jones is so strong that one reviewer writes: “Tommy Lee Jones has gotten such a huge bolt of attention
     off ‘The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada,’ it’s easy to forget the screenwriter. That would be a
     mistake and an injustice.” Stephen Hunter, “‘Three Burials’: A Jones for Justice on the Border,” in The
     Washington Post, 10 Febraury 2006.
9    Sam Allis, “In his latest film, Jones is just where he likes to be: in control,” in Boston Globe, 2 February
     2006.
10   Camilla Fojas, Border Bandits. Hollywood on the Southern Frontier, University of Texas Press, Austin
     2008, in particular pp. 187-195.
11   Fredric Jameson, The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System, Indiana University
     Press, Bloomington 1992, p. 37.
12   For a critical discussion of Jameson’s concept, which was was originally formulated in relation to Third-
     World literature, see Imre Szeman, Who’s Afraid of National Allegory? Jameson, Literary Criticism,
     Globalization, in Caren Irr, Ian Buchanan (eds.), On Jameson. From Postmodernism to Globalization,
     Suny Press, Albany (NY) 2006, pp. 189-211.
13   Camilla Fojas, Border Bandits, cit., p. 25.
14   See Adan Garcia, Gustavo Arechiga, “Elogia Tommy a mexicanos,” in Mural, 8 October 2005; and
     Elizabeth Hernández, “El cine mexicano se ve bien bonito en el extranjero,” in El Universal, 23 May 2005.
15   Although the credits do not list Mexico among the countries of production, a reviewer ironically asks:
     “Estados Unidos/Francia y – por que no? – Mexico” (“United States, France and – why not? – Mexico”),
     Gustavo Moheno, “Obra Maestra,” in Reforma, 18 November 2005.
16   See for instance Noe Sotelo, “El cine ha sido muy conservador,” in Reforma, 24 February 2006.
17   Wendy Brown, Walled States, Waning Sovereignty, The MIT Press, Cambridge (MA), 2010, p. 38.
18   Anna Ochoa O’Leary, “Close Encounters of the Deadly Kind: Gender, Migration, and Border (In)
     security,” in Migration Letters, vol. 5, no. 2, October 2008, p. 113.
19   For example in Stephen Hunter, “‘Three Burials,’” cit.
20   In several interviews, Lee Jones voiced his opposition to the immigration policies of the Bush
     administration. See Don Bain, “A timely tale of border relations/Un cuento apropiado sobre relaciones
     fronterizas,” in La Voz Nueva, 21 June 2006.


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Valerio Coladonato

21 Nora Alicia Estrada, “‘Los Tres Entierros de Melquiades Estrada,’ dirigida por Tommy Lee Jones. Alistan
   en Los Ángeles su ‘Día sin Mexicanos,’” in El Norte, 30 April 2006.
22 Adrián Félix, “Posthumous Transnationalism: Postmortem Repatriation from the United States to
   Mexico,” in Latin American Research Review, vol. 46, no. 3, 2011, pp. 157-179.
23 Fukunaga’s script obtained the support of the Sundance Labs for his script for Victoria Para Chino (2004),
   “a short movie based on the true story of a group of immigrants smuggled into Texas in a refrigerated
   truck only to be abandoned there,” causing the death of 19 of them. Ellen McCarthy, “Director Is Making
   a ‘Nombre’ For Himself,” in The Washington Post, 3 April 2009.
24 Dan Zak, “A Disarming Debut,” in The Washington Post, 3 April 2009.
25 Among the labels attached to him, we find: “cineasta americano-japonés” (“Japanese-American
   filmmaker”) and “mitad japonés y mitad sueco” (“half Japanese and half Swedish”); the most elaborate
   account reads: “Cary Joji Fukunaga, de raíces asiáticas y escocesas, creció en Oakland, en el Este de la
   Bahía. No lleva sangre latina, pero tuvo un padrastro chicano y una madrastra argentina” (“Cary Joji
   Fukunaga, of Asian and Scottish roots, grew up in Oakland, in the East Bay. Latin blood is not in his
   veins, but he had a Chicano stepfather and an Argentinian stepmother”), Katia Fuentes, “Sin nombre,
   una historia como la tuya,” in El Mensajero, 29 March 2009. The reference to the missing sangre latina
   unveils widespread cultural expectations that, given the topic of the film, a specific “ethnic” origin of the
   director would be demanded.
26 Stuart Hall, Cultural Identity and Cinematic Representation, in Robert Stam, Toby Miller (eds.), Film
   and Theory. An Anthology, Blackwell, Malden (MA) 2000 (1989), p. 707.
27 Several reviews include passages such as this one: “No hay nada falso en la descripción de los infiernos
   sociales en los que se desarrollan las pandillas centroamericanas” (“There’s nothing fake in the portrayal
   of the social hell in which central American gangs develop”), Ernesto Diezmartínez, “Un ángel con cara
   sucia,” in Reforma, 15 May 2009. See also Carolina Martínez, “Gana realidad a ficción,” in Mural, 8 June
   2009.
28 For instance, see Ana Cristina Enríquez, “Vive director su propia película,” in Reforma, 9 March 2009.
29 An overview of these narrative tropes is in Thomas G. Deveny, Migration in Contemporary Hispanic
   Cinema, Scarecrow, Blue Ridge Summit (PA) 2012.
30 Similarly to the strategies described by Pierre Bourdieu in La Distinction. Critique sociale du jugement,
   Minuit, Paris 1979 (eng. ed. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, Routledge, London-
   New York 1984).
31 Jeff Vice, “‘Sin Nombre’ tells harsh and vivid tale,” in Deseret News, 17 April 2009; see also Reed
   Johnson, “Crossing borders. Director Cary Joji Fukunaga found the gritty essence of ‘Sin Nombre’ by
   following the immigrants’ tracks,” in Los Angeles Times, 8 March 2009.
32 Hernando Olivares, “De lo políticamente correcto al cine documental-cormercial,” in El Sentinel, 25
   April 2009.
33 Dan Zak, “A Disarming Debut,” cit.
34 Steven Rea, “Stark brutality of crossing the border,” in Philadelphia Inquirer, 10 April 2009.
35 Writing from the U.S. city with the largest community of latinos, the Los Angeles Times reviewer opts for
   a metaphor that explicitly recalls the surveillance of the U.S.-Mexico border: he describes Fukunaga as
   “a post-racial filmmaker, who can slip easily past the stolid walls of movie genres and steer clear of the
   cultural sentinels who stand guard over language barriers.” Reed Johnson, “Crossing borders,” cit.
36 According to Marwan M. Kraidy, the hybridization of cultural products offers “foreign media and
   marketers transcultural wedges for forging affective links between their commodities and local
   communities.” Marwan M. Kraidy, Hybridity, or the Cultural Logic of Globalization, Temple University
   Press, Philadelphia 2005, p. 148. For a different perspective, see Homi Bhabha’s important theoretical
   contributions on hybridity as a strategy of resistance in postcolonial and global scenarios: Homi Bhabha,
   The Location of Culture, Routledge, London-New York 1994.
37 See for instance Nora Alicia Estrada, Ana Cristina Enríquez, “Llegan a EU rudos y con nombre,” in El
   Norte, 9 March 2009; Dalila Carreño, Carolina Martínez, “Entienden el alma y la vida de los Maras,” in
   Reforma, 17 May 2009.


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                                       Moving Pictures and People across the U.S.-Mexico Border

38 On the star figure of Gael García Bernal as “symbol of a transnational, post-national, and diasporic new
   Mexican cinema” (p. 20), see Sergio de la Mora, Cinemachismo. Masculinities and Sexuality in Mexican
   Film, University of Texas Press, Austin 2006.
39 See for instance Liliana Lejarazu, Jesús Díaz, “Unen fuerzas Canana y Universal,” in Reforma, 7
   December 2007; John Jurgensen, “Filmmakers: An Outsider’s Look Inside Mexico - A U.S. director’s
   immigration drama wins backing from Mexican cinema stars,” in Wall Street Journal. Eastern edition,
   13 March 2009.
40 Stuart Hall, “Encoding/Decoding”, in Id., Dorothy Hobson, Andrew Lowe, Paul Willis (eds.), Culture,
   Media, Language, Hutchinson, London 1980, p. 128.
41 Such dynamics has been widely discussed in ethnographic studies on intercultural media reception,
   starting from the seminal work of Tamar Liebes and Elihu Katz, The Export of Meaning: Cross-Cultural
   Readings of Dallas, Oxford University Press, New York 1990; an overview of the development of these
   studies can be found in Shaun Moores, Interpreting Audiences. The Ethnography of Media Consumption,
   Sage, London-Thousand Oaks (CA) 1993; for a discussion of the ethnographic approach in the context
   of globalization, see Marwan M. Kraidy, Patrick D. Murphy (eds.), Global Media Studies. Ethnographic
   Perspectives, Routledge, London-New York 2003.
42 See David Morley, Home Territories: Media, Mobility, and Identity, Routledge, London-New York 2000.
43 Andreas Hepp, “Transculturality as a Perspective: Researching Media Cultures Comparatively,” in
   Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung / Forum: Qualitative Social Research, vol. 10, no. 1, 2009, http://
   www.qualitative-research.net/index.php/fqs/article/view/1221/2657, last visit 4 August 2013. The author
   refers to the concept of “cultural thickening” as formulated in Orvar Löfgren, “The Nation as Home or
   Motel? Metaphors of Media and Belonging,” in Sosiologisk Årbok, no. 1, 2001, pp. 1-34.
44 Camilla Fojas, Border Bandits, cit., p. 13. Here the author is referring to Gloria Anzaldúa’s fundamental
   book Borderlands/La Frontera. The New Mestiza, Aunt Lute Books, San Francisco 1987.
45 Wendy Brown, Walled States, Waning Sovereignty, cit., p. 24.
46 Ibidem, see in particular chapter 4, Desiring Walls, pp. 107-134.
47 Camilla Fojas, Border Bandits, cit., p. 2.
48 On this aspect, see Michael Peter Smith, Matt Bakker, Citizenship across Borders: The Political
   Transnationalism of El Migrante, Cornell University Press, Ithaca (NY) 2008.
49 Adrián Pérez-Melgosa, Cinema and Inter-American Relations, cit., p. 143. The all-encompassing category
   of latino or Hispanic is problematic when applied to subjects with diverse backgrouds; furthermore,
   the critics’ discourse significantly overlooks the subjects who identify with Chicano culture, whose
   deconsruction of current ideas of “nation” is even more radical.
50 Stuart Hall, Encoding/Decoding, cit., p. 137.




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