Border Trash: the markings of Latinas as foreign bodies

Abstract

This article studies the subgenre of border pornography and examines how Latina hypersexuality is represented. The author asks: what does border pornography say about borders, Latinas, and its political and historical pasts? What can we say about the different deployments of border pornography? Do some videos affectively carry racial stereotypes more than others? Lastly, how do brown spectators along with the actresses make sense of these border narratives? Using a performative discursive analysis, the author shows that the use of the word “Border” in pornography shifted throughout three decades. In the early 1970s border titles often centered on white women's sexual adventures to Mexico, but after 9/11, the border became synonymous with a racial-sexual difference of the Latina body and their brown carnality. The author argues that Latina adult stars find moments of possibilities despite the subjugation and racial mockery that they are expected to perform. The creativity of Latinas is evident when they challenge the fixity of their characters by refusing to stay quiet during sexual acts, incorporating nonscripted sexual dialogue, and by challenging the ideological concept of the shoots during behind-the-scene interviews. These sexual tactics trans-code new meanings about what it means to be a brown body on screen. A close study of these films shows that pornographers deploying the term border were always intentional about commenting on the political moment. Border pornography was never just about the sex; it was about how the sex could deploy racial differences vis-à-vis geographies of the border.