ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the spatial and conceptual divisibility of the border in Courtney Hunt's Frozen River and Philippe Lioret's Welcome. The frozen river splits into a thinning crust of ice and the rushing of its waters. Borders are always within, inside social space, which is not smooth, but is multi-linear, discontinuous and punctured. Negating the meaning of the geopolitical line, however, equals the cancellation of the historical dimension of the border, for there are Mohawks on both sides of the physically and metaphorically frozen divide. The official boundary between the two nations, Mohawk territory and the US, where Ray and the two Chinese women are surrendered to the state trooper, contrasts with the image of the organic domesticity in the trailer. Ray's aporetic welcome to the immigrants points at a deeper contradiction in her smuggling operations, for she alienates the borders of the nation-state at the same time that she reinforces them.
