Heterotopia on the Border: Context, Text, and Subtext

In the shared production of cultural memory, border town Laredo has been constructed as an exotic wild space, a heterotopia or even a dystopia, where the Native Americans, Spanish, Mexicans, Tejanos, and the Anglos collided to subjugate the frontier. This paper analyzes the popular perception of Laredo in the cultural landscape. The projections of borders through country songs and TV serials are uncovered as a layered process—the erasure of history and community, the projection of chaos, and the balancing of paradoxes in the imagined no man’s land.