Bordertown - A filmic example of investigative media

Outline

0. Introduction

1. Vignette on Bordertown
1.1 Gist
1.2 Excerpts and quotes from the movie
1.3 Relevance for our seminar
1.4 Study questions
1.5 Personal assessment
1.6 Bibliography tips and links

2. Review

3. Bibliography

0. Introduction

Since the 1990s, in Juárez, Mexico, there have taken place scores of murders of young Mexican women. They are chased by their murderers on their ways home from the so called ‘maquiladoras’, which are factories where they work for a little sum of money and produce TVs or computers for the USA at the assembly lines. The young women are violated and raped by their kidnappers and later their dead bodies are buried somewhere in the desert of Mexico. Nevertheless, the police and the whole government of Juárez try to camouflage these events. The number of victims, published by the police, is about 375 women, whereas the estimated number of unreported cases is about 5000.

Gregory Nava made these true events to the story of his movie Bordertown from 2006. The tortures the women of Juárez have to experience and the underlying topic of border-crossing are the essential subjects of Bordertwon. Furthermore, within his movie, he has chosen a special way of communicating these topics to the viewer: he makes use of media, respectively investigative media, in order to show how hard it is to explore this subject. So, not only he himself uses media as an organ of communication but he moreover embeds the investigation of certain matters into his movie.

Nowadays media is the most important institution of distributing and communicating information and of transmitting one’s own perspective about certain topics. This is not only done by directors like in the case of Gregory Nava but by everyone who stands in the centre of a certain field – for instance politicians or celebrities. As Wilma de Jong, Martin Shaw and Neil Stammers have formulated in their introduction of Global Activism, Global Media (2005):

“Media appear to be increasingly globalised, as national television, press, etc. are subsumed in gigantic worldwide flows of information and ideas, symbolized by the internet which offers social and political actors new opportunities for more direct communication.”^[1]

So, media – in our time better said ‘mass media’ – stands for a direct but widely spread transmission of information to the audience. People, who decide to transmit certain messages through media – in this case for instance Gregory Nava and his protagonists from Bordertown – have a special aim by acting this way: they want to make a change within the field they are working for. Whether Nava did this successfully or not will be discussed later on in this paper.

But talking about the topic of border-crossing it is to say, that in Bordertown this action is illustrated in a somehow traditional way. Here, the Rio Grande serves as the natural border that has to be traversed in order to start a new life. This is not only the case in this situation but it can be related to an event that happens in all of our lives. As Salman Rushdie is quoted in Renate Brosch`s and Rüdiger Kunow`s Cultural Interventions in the Global Manifold (2005), there he says:

“The first frontier was the water’s edge, and there was a first moment, … […] Our own births mirror that first crossing of the frontier between the elements. … In its victorious transition we recognize and celebrate the prototype of our own literal, moral and metaphorical frontier crossings, […].”^[2]

So, each person somehow experiences a form of border-crossing in his/her own life. But nevertheless, in the case of our seminar and a exemplary movie like Bordertown, the crossing of a border plays another – somehow ideological – and important role.

In order to explore the topic of the movie and the movie itself briefly, in the following the analysis begins with a film vignette to Bordertown, containing a gist, a list of excerpts from the movie, a discussion about the relevance for our seminar ‘Migration Matters 2: Media Interventions’, study questions about the topic, a personal assessment and further bibliography tips concerning the movie and the women of Juárez. The second and final analyzing part is made up by a review with reference to the movie itself.

1. Vignette on Bordertown

1.1 Gist

The movie Bordertown (2006) is based on the true events of the young Mexican factory workers from Juárez/Mexico. In order to reveal the truth about the violent occurrences, the determined American journalist Lauren Adrien (Jennifer Lopez) is ordered to explore the murders in Juárez and write a story about it. She works for the Chicago Sentinel and having in mind her potential job as foreign correspondent, Lauren Adrien agrees to the order of her boss and flies to Juárez. There she gets to know Eva (Maya Zapata); she is one of the victims but she survived the attack of her two rapists. Eva’s story arouses Lauren’s interest and it seems to be the perfect one for her article; so she decides to help Eva. In order to have a helping hand aside, Lauren meets her former colleague Alfonso Diaz (Antonio Banderas) who is the editor of the local newspaper. Together – and with the help of Eva – they want to find out who is responsible for the attacks on the young women. Later on Lauren somehow changes her position from the American journalist into a Mexican woman fighting for justice.

In order to get right into the events, Lauren comes to the decision that she has to become like one of these Mexican women, working in the ‘maquiladoras’. She dresses up like one of them and after her shift she is also kidnapped on her way home, like Eva. Their plan works out, at least so far, that Lauren`s kidnappers are the same like Eva`s. Lauren manages to escape from the two men and hides in a dark corner on a scrap yard. After all these events Alfonso Diaz is shot by the opponents of his newspaper. Back in Chicago and now, looking from a different perspective on the events, she hands in her story which is not accepted by her boss at the Chicago Sentinel. Lauren returns to Juárez and takes over the newspaper of Diaz.

[...]

^[1] De Jong, Wilma, et al., eds. (2005): Global Activism, Global Media. London: Pluto Press. P. 1

^[2] Rushdie, Salman: “Step Across this Line.” Step Across this Line: Collected Non-Fiction 1992-2002. In: Brosch, Renate and Kunow, Rüdiger, eds. Transgressions: Cultural Interventions in the Global Manifold. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2005. P. 7.