Visualising Vulnerability: The U.S.–Mexico Border as Palimpsest in Gregory Nava’s <i>El Norte</i> and <i>Bordertown</i>

<p dir="ltr">Separated by nearly a quarter century, Latino filmmaker Gregory Nava’s Oscar-nominated second film El Norte (1983) and his (at the time of writing) most recent Bordertown (2007) foreground the U.S.–Mexico border as a site at which conditions of risk and vulnerability are amplified. El Norte follows K’iche’ siblings Enrique and Rosa Xuncax (David Villalpando and Zaide Silvia Gutiérrez) north as they flee a massacre and the destruction of their village home by the Guatemalan military. Bordertown follows Chicago-based journalist Lauren Adrian (Jennifer Lopez) as she investigates the so-called ‘Juárez murders’, the waves of real-life feminicides recorded in the ‘infamous’ border town of Ciudad Juárez, Mexico since the early 1990s. These film testimonies produce the conditions for viewers to witness vulnerabilities found at the same border but absent from official state narratives. Both testify not only to real vulnerabilities made legible at and because of the U.S.–Mexico border but also guide viewers to visualise the ways in which these crises are produced and maintained by that very same border and the narratives that govern it. Visualising vulnerability in El Norte and Bordertown reveals new ways of conceptualising the U.S.–Mexico border, offering a reappraisal of Nava as an activist border filmmaker, and proposing a novel way of reading the U.S.–Mexico border: as a palimpsest of vulnerability.</p>