UC San Diego

This dissertation explores how Mexican efforts to construct a national identity shape representation of identity at home, and how, in turn, domestic cinema is forged in the context of foreign relations and nation-building. I argue that the idea of nation as home in cinema is inextricable from political, economic, and cultural movements that construct and unsettle borders between domestic and foreign spaces. I study six cases where cinema registers rhetorical enactments of bordering in moments of democratic transition. These efforts are visualized through the psychological effects and limits represented through the characters’ traumas and interactions with domestic spaces.