Bordertown is a 2007 American crime drama film written and directed by Gregory Nava, and starring Jennifer Lopez (who also served as a producer), Martin Sheen, Maya Zapata, Sônia Braga and Antonio Banderas.

The maquiladoras hire mostly Mexican women to work long hours for little money in order to produce mass quantity products.

Lauren Adrian (Jennifer Lopez), an impassioned American news reporter for the Chicago Sentinel wants to be assigned to the Iraq front-lines to cover the war.

Instead, her editor George Morgan (Martin Sheen) assigns her to investigate a series of slayings involving young maquiladora factory women in a Mexican bordertown.

Worker Eva (Maya Zapata), originally from the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca, takes a bus to go back to her shanty-town home after work.

Adrian heads to Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, on the U.S.–Mexico border to investigate the murders, hoping that if she does well she will be promoted by Morgan to be a foreign correspondent.

The motion picture is based on a series of unsolved murders in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, a large Mexican border city across the Río Bravo del Norte (Rio Grande) from El Paso, Texas.

Bordertown places the blame for the murders upon the Mexican government, the United States and the maquiladora assembly plants that were brought rapidly into existence by the North American Free Trade Agreement.

"[7] The inspiration for the story, according to Gregory Nava, was the work of Guatemalan writer Miguel Ángel Asturias, the magic realism of novelist Gabriel García Márquez, and the social dramas of Britain's Charles Dickens.

[5] Mobius Entertainment, the production company, borrowed money to complete the project from the New Mexico State Investment Council (NMSI) but was late in paying back the loan in March, 2006.

Kirk Honeycutt, in The Hollywood Reporter, wrote: "It wants to be a thriller, a piece of investigative journalism, a political soapbox and a vehicle for Jennifer Lopez.

][10] The film was also criticized for a gratuitous musical performance and cameo by the Colombian recording artist Juanes, seen by many as pandering to a Latino audience.