Michael Dear

I grew up with an inexplicable childhood attachment to Mexico. It was nurtured by watching ‘cowboy’ films set in Western landscapes and I became habituated to seeing Mexico and Mexicans through film. After arriving in the US, I lived in Canada for over a decade, spent a year in Australia, and became a US citizen. Always I returned to Mexico. In 2006 I began a journey of 4,000 miles on both sides of the US-MX border, taking 4 years to complete. This book is the culmination of a lifetime’s learning about the borderlands based in personal experience and representations in film. I am author/editor of fifteen books and have published widely in popular media. My work is translated into many languages, and I’ve lectured in over 20 countries on 4 continents. I helped prepare amicus briefs relating to US-Mexico border issues before the US Supreme Court; and my research led Europe’s largest cement manufacturer to refuse supplying cement for constructing border walls between the US and Mexico. I began scribbling notes about border film when my curiosity was piqued by the gap between what I saw firsthand in the borderlands and what filmmakers portrayed onscreen. My scribbles soon spread over hundreds of pages. There was much more to say than I expected.