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Maria Full Of Grace Summary

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In El Norte and Maria Full of Grace, border and border crossing are the key themes. These films provide not only a vivid image on how people cross the ‘physical’ borders, but also reveal the other ‘abstract’ borders, racial, cultural, and classed, that intersect lives. The siblings in El Norte, Enrique, and Rosa Xuncax, have travelled through the abandoned tunnel in Tijuana, Mexico to go to the Promised Land, the U.S., in the hope of getting a better life. In the same boat, Maria in Maria Full of Grace is risking her life as a drug mule successfully crossing the U.S. border. Again, her decision to commit such a risky act is because she wants to improve her family’s economic circumstances. What is coming in their narratives is another heart-breaking episode of their struggles to cross another border in the ‘North.’ Racial, cultural, sexual, and classed …show more content…

Taking the protagonists’ experiences as portrayed in El Norte and Maria Full of Grace as a first step in understanding a singular word border, I aim to compose a literature review and investigate how border develops into a wider issue concerning borderland, border crossing and border theory. Having knowledge of the plethora of the term border such as border theory is believed to be beneficial for people look critically at issues on wider topics such as identity. Collecting and reading literatures on borders and border crossing will be the next step to do to understand better the context embedded in those terms. Many scholars such as Gloria Anzaldúa has initially started defining border and its complexity. In addition, by looking at what the protagonists in EL Norte and Maria Full of Grace have undergone, the concept of the physical and abstract border is in line with what Anzaldúa argued in her book, Borderlands/La Frontera, where she contends that border connotes both concrete and nonconcrete

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