This panel uses early twentieth-century young boy's adventure fiction novels to explore how popular outlets constructed an idea of Indigenous peoples, the borderlands, and Mexico. Caricatured portrayals of Mexico and Indigenous peoples had by then a firm imprint in the American imagination. By the early nineteenth century, when its southern neighbor gained independence, Americans were well into the journey to craft a critical portrait of Mexicans as heirs of Spanish brutality, fanaticism, and backwardness. At mid-century, popular sensational literature incarnated in mass-produced dime novels exploited stereotyped representations that found a ready-audience thirsty for adventure novels with American heroes in foreign settings. The turn of the twentieth century witnessed the rise of a new genre, the young boys' travel series novels, which rehashed timeworn textual and visual tropes. More than a mere "source of entertainment and technical knowledge," these novels provided a growing young audience a passage to partake in imperialist dramas, embodying masculine traits, and disseminating technological progress to those in need of American instruction—all of these to dream from the safety of their couches. Through lively scenes, the U.S.-Mexican border and the Mexican hinterland became ideal sites, playgrounds really, for fictional young boys to play adventures, detective work and triumphantly save the day from menacing forces or providing civility through instruction. The three panelists take individual novels set along the US-Mexico or the latter's hinterland as the prism to investigate how they constructed a vision of Mexico, Indigenous, and Mexican populations as they responded to anxieties over masculinity and race, and empire.