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This article analyzes how the image of Mexico has been constructed in the United States based on the idea of risk, and the border's special role in this process. This analysis seeks to explore the way limits between societies prevent possible threats for a group In this process the definition of otherness plays an important role. However, in this work we explore the way in which the other (Mexico) has been defined and constructed flora the United States' point of view. By way of an analytical example, we'll use movies filmed in North America using Mexican or Latin American images. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite Mexico sharing borders with three other countries, as recently as the beginning of the 1970s, there still predominated the idea that the only important border was the one with the United States. Chiapas, at the southern end of Mexico, constituted a territory apart, to which one could always turn in search of natural resources and political favors, but about which federal officials had little interest. As new variables appeared on the horizon—connected to both petroleum and hydroelectric exploitation and the Central American conflicts, as well as to the adjustments within the Mexico's political class—the scene began to alter, and the region went from abandonment to being of strategic interest. This work focuses on these considerations, and it seeks to prove that, by the beginning of the 1990s, the relationship between the federal and the state government spheres had already changed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]