Immigration and the Expanding U.S. Southern Border: Casa en tierra ajena (2016)

Abstract

The question of the U.S.-Mexico border has been discussed extensively by various media in different contexts, particularly within the last few years. The debate concerns both the border as the political line dividing two nation-states, its physical marker-the infamous wall-as well as the life of those who live in its shadow and have to face the challenges it posits on a daily basis. There is also a separate category of newspaper articles and reports that address the question of migration across the border and the plight of undocumented migrants both in the U.S and on their way to fulfill el sueño americano. These publications in turn can be divided into several subcategories, each of which refers to a particular problem related to the immigration across the U.S.-Mexico border, including legislative issues, or what Jeffrey Toobin calls aptly the "American Limbo" (30), militarization of the border and the resulting criminalization of migrants, or the growing number of deportations and conditions in detention centers, to mention just the most frequently appearing themes. 2Those exemplary cases of border stories related recently in the media signal the shift in immigration patterns from Central America and consequences of those changes for the whole region. They also demonstrate the trajectory of transformations at the U.S.-Mexico border, including the change of the concept of the border from la línea separating two nation-states into an ever-expanding zone that exceeds political lines and turns Mexico into the great south border. Those issues are also the focus of the documentary Casa en tierra ajena or Home in a Foreign Land (2016) 1 based on the book No más muros. Exclusión y migración forzada en Centroamérica (Exclusion and Forced Migration in Central America: No More Walls) by Carlos Sandoval García and directed by Ivannia Villalobos-Vindas. The purpose of this article is twofold: to examine how Villalobos-Vindas represents the complexity of the process of forced migration from Central America and to analyze how the documentary illustrates the appearance of the