ABSTRACT
In contrast with the primary emphasis on time in Chapters 2 and 3, this chapter is extensively spatially as well as temporality oriented. It is concerned not only with layers of time but also with how cinema can illuminate the spatial practices associated with geopolitical border contention. It is focused on the geography of the U.S.-Mexican border and begins with a reading of Alex Rivera’s film Sleep Dealer (2008), which imagines a future with an impermeable military-defended border wall between the United States and Mexico. of the U.S.-Mexican border. After providing a geology of films that have figured the U.S.-Mexican border in alternative ways, the chapter ends with an extended reading of Gerardo Naranjo’s feature film Miss Bala (2011), which exposes the complicity of law-enforcement apparatuses with the drug operations in Latin America. The film is read along with Charles Bowden’s investigatory texts, which show the way law enforcement has amplified narco violence. Naranjo’s film evinces a critique that effectively challenges the “truth weapons” of official policy discourse by using as his primary aesthetic subject, Laura Guerrero, a beauty queen suborned by both Mexican authorities and narco gang members. The film opposes the macropolitical frame that articulates the big lies of reasons of state and nation-to-nation initiatives of policy solidarity and cooperation with a micropolitical gloss in which a victim reveals the nature of the place in which “policy” is experienced.
