U.S./Mexico Cultural Hybridization: The Emergence of a New Culture as Seen through the Directors Lens

Sharing the interdisciplinary perspective on cultural hybridization on the U.S./Mexico border as evidenced on Film precipitated discussions with various specialists that underscored the relevance and importance of understanding how cultures fuse and transform. As a result of the sessions attended, discussions, and suggestions, I am organizing a session at the RMMLA conference in Boulder Colorado in October 2012 that focuses on the cinematographically evidence of cultural hybridization in this borderland region.The U.S./Mexico border has long been a cultural, economic and linguistic divide and the disjunction between the two worlds has been a source of literary inspiration to many artists on both sides of the border. An ongoing literary and cinematic tradition from both sides of the cultural divide has presented the political, economic, and cultural changes occurring in the U.S./Mexico border region and the resultant immigrant life. This cinematographic documentation of border issues provides us with a window into cultural processes in a region that is politically and economically divided, and yet has a cultural coherence that ignores these borders. In analyzing the dramatic production on both sides of the border political, social, psychological, religious, and linguistic boundaries will be crossed and interwoven to approximate the hybridized tapestry envisioned by the directors of the various movies