Borderlands Tales: Representations of the U.S.-Mexico Border in The Bridge (2013-2014)

Even though border scholars have for a long time reached a consensus regarding arbitrariness of borders as artificial human constructs, it seems that in the second decade of the twenty-first century “political borders separating peoples remain pervasive and problematic” (Ganster 2016, xv). Globalization and people’s flows at the beginning of the twenty-first century both opened some borders to international trade or services and at the same time turned other borders into almost completely impenetrable territories with its status reinforced by legislation and militarization, with the U.S.-Mexican border as the best example of the play between those antagonistic forces pulling together and pushing apart at the same time people and spaces on both sides of the border. As such the U.S.-Mexico border “provides a paradigmatic case of global border development” (2016, xvi) and hence the purpose of this paper is to analyze how the transformations of the concept of the border that took place at the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries are reflected in American popular media on the basis of the TV series, The Bridge (2013-2014). In addition, the article will also examine the way the region is presented in the series, thus creating specific borderlands tales and contributing to the scholarship on the border.

Abstract licence: CC BY

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