"Why are borders continually produced in the imagination?"

The second part of our interview with Dr. Vanessa Angélica Villarreal

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Aug 21, 2025

The Kens building a wall between the real world and Barbie land after Ken starts taking over. Alan tells Sasha and Gloria, “As soon as they figure out how to build that wall sideways and not just up, no one is gonna be able to get in or out. So if we want to leave we better make a run for it.”

One of the things that I have become more conscious and aware of since speaking with Dr. Vanessa Angélica Villarreal is the many ways that borders show up in not only my life as an immigrant but as a consumer of entertainment, films, and books. It seems, as Dr. Villarreal pointed out in this part of our interview, that we are unable to consume media that doesn’t have some kind of reproduction of borders, and more specifically the US Mexico Border, that has not only become a site of violence, death, and white supremacist ideology but used for plot engines or central metaphors in children’s movies or spicy romance novels about faeries with wings and rock hard abs.

It’s like no matter where we turn for entertainment, comfort, or simply some escape from the ICE raids and the southern border and its politics, there is a white writer repackaging it and imagining it for the white imagination to consume. Can a girl just read some questionable fantasy smut without a literal border wall as an important plot device? In my experience the answer unfortunately is no. Like Dr. Villarreal says in our conversation we have to be more critical of these texts, video games and movies if we want to ensure that our collective understanding of our histories are not plagued by the influence of the white imagination and begin to reimagine a world without borders and make movies and write books and create video games of such worlds.

Can a girl just read some questionable fantasy smut without a literal border wall as an important plot device?

CHRISTIÁN PEÑA: My first encounter with fantasy was ACOTAR and this was also the first time that I came across border politics in this kind of fictional genre written by a white person that has no personal connection to its affects. I’m wondering if you have seen other examples recently of this romanticization of borders in books or pop culture?

VANESSA VILLARREAL: So one of the essays that I’m putting together for this next proposal is called “Even Barbie has a Border Wall.” Barbie is the biggest white feminist. I think my next book may just be a project against the project of white feminism. There is no reason for us to imagine Barbie land as somehow requiring a border wall, for the Kens to be building a border wall after Ken has taken over Barbie land. They are going in and out of Los Angeles where Barbie initially arrives. So it implies not just a border wall, but the US-Mexico border wall.

Same with Beetlejuice: the first thing we see in that the afterlife used to just be a bureaucracy.

Scenes from BEETLEJUICE BEETLEJUICE 2024 with Jenna Ortega. Astrid goes to immigration and customs. Her father is an immigration officer and Astrid being detained and deported to the Great Beyond.

ANTERO GARCIA: Oh yeah, but there’s customs now.

VV: Yeah, now it’s immigration and customs. Jenna Ortega is “illegal” in the afterlife, and she has to go to immigration and customs, and then the border patrol arrests her and takes her away and detains her in the afterlife.

CP: So essentially the border wall extends itself beyond the southern border, and can be found even in the things that we consume for entertainment?

VV: Right in the imagination. Why are borders continually produced in the imagination? Because the imagination is where politics play out, where our understanding of history and the future is.

Immigration and customs and a border as a major plot device in the movie Coco.

Why are borders continually produced in the imagination? Because the imagination is where politics play out, where our understanding of history and the future is.

CP: That’s honestly terrifying. If borders are increasingly being produced in the imagination and we are consuming these narratives in films and even fantasy smut how does that shape not only our understanding of our stories as immigrants but for those that only encounter border politics through these mediums?

VV: This is something that I want to continue writing about. We keep hearing that there is a decline in literacy. I was talking to a friend about how we read The Old Man and The Sea, the Ernest Hemingway novel, a problematic fave, but I love Ernest Hemingway. I read him in fifth grade. Now there is almost no infrastructure for literacy to continue. As critical as I am of Western canon and how white and male and western it is, even that is eroding. And so what is replacing literacy and home libraries, and a working understanding of literature are these fantasy franchises: Star Wars, Game of Thrones, Lord of the Rings, and ACOTAR. Those Fantasy franchises are what becomes sort of the way we model the world in our politics.

These texts become the baseline of literacy, and as real literacy is declining it becomes so crucial that we begin to criticize the politics of these fantasy franchises, but nobody takes them seriously enough. They’re not seen as real texts.

CP: No, they are not being taken seriously because they are fantasy smut, or just fantasy. In my reading of the ACOTAR series, sure there are a couple of sex scenes or “spice” sprinkled throughout — but hey what about the wall that separates two worlds and gets crossed and taken down at some point?

VV: It gets so much worse in video games. Which I believe is the new popular literature, popular literary text that is surpassing books and even surpassing film. There are really popular gamer influencers who are determining the discourse and people like Asmongold, who are transphobic who are white supremacists and believe things like, “the false promise of equality is what keeps us behind.” They have mass followings while public media like PBS have about 1,700 followers. It’s like, “Okay let’s do a real metric. Who is really determining the discourse for young people who are gamers?”