The Magic Curtain: The Mexican-American Border in Fiction, Film, and Song

Borderlands—especially the United States-Mexico borderland—have long served as backgrounds for depicting social instability, according to Thomas Torrans. And borders—or magic curtains—have readily been fashioned into exotic backdrops for films, novels, ballads, and tales in which characters shift easily from one culture to another. The protagonists are equally at home in both societies, or, at worst, at home in neither.

True border novels form a literature that deserves a category all its ow...