This article traces the workings of the border in Carlos Fuentes’ La frontera de cristal, Alejandro Morales’ The Rag Doll Plagues, Alex Rivera’s film Sleep Dealer, and Rosaura Sánchez and Beatrice Pita’s Lunar Braceros 2125-2140. All the narratives can be considered borderland texts that illustrate the dialogue between literature and issues such as globalization, technology and colonial relations of power. While the border is still a place of detention and interdiction in Fuentes’ novel, it mutates into virtual crossings in The Rag Doll Plagues and Sleep Dealer, to return to barbed wire in Sánchez and Pita’s novella. From the logic of the border as a mechanism that may open or close, the article moves on to address the liminal situation of those who, although situated within the new versions of the nation-state, are considered permanent outsiders. This redrawing of boundaries allows us to revisit traditional categories of distinction such as the inside and the outside, and is evidence of the way colonial models of subjugation boomerang to the present
