Jared Brooks
Films produced in both Mexico and the United States have explored the concept of traveling to the U.S. as an undocumented immigrant from both economic and social perspectives. The themes they addressed, similar to academic works on the history of undocumented migration, focused predominantly on community, economic opportunities, and the ways in which immigrant communities adjust to ideas about the American dream. Movies serve as one of the few means of diffusing key issues on wealth and poverty in undocumented immigration to transnational audiences. Films made through collaborations between production companies in the U.S. and Mexico such as Ya No Estoy Aquí (2019) and Sin Nombre (2009) have been provided to audiences via paid subscription streamers such as Netflix and Amazon. These films were then dubbed or subtitled in a variety of languages in attempts to make them accessible to wide audiences. Spanish-language films produced in the U.S. on undocumented immigration, such as El Norte (1983), also portrayed similar economic ideas about success which are interwoven with individuals in the films fleeing violence, poverty, and political strife. The films El Norte, Sin Nombre, and Ya No Estoy Aquí all swirl around the struggles of impoverished undocumented immigrants to make it in the United States. Each relies upon a rigid characterization of undocumented migrants as devoted to their hometowns, patiently absorbing economic exploitation, and attempting to reconcile economic exploitation with an unobtainable American dream.
Released to American Audiences in 1984, El Norte portrays a brother and sister traveling from Guatemala together to the United States. For many U.S. viewers, it was their first experience with a story of undocumented immigration from the perspective of those migrating. The plot of El Norte begins with Rosa and Enrique Xuncax, siblings in a Guatemalan Mayan family who encounter political violence in their village. The film focused specifically on tensions between the military government of Guatemala and laborers. Their father speaks to Enrique about the wealthy coming to Guatemala (though not specifying from where) and taking advantage of the land by exploiting the workers, who are treated as “just a pair of arms.” A military raid on the village leaves their father dead and mother arrested, and Rosa and Enrique, fearing for their own lives, decide they must flee Guatemala. Part two of the film focuses specifically on their travels through Mexico, encountering both helpful strangers and individuals critical of their Mayan heritage. Their economic situation also becomes harsher as they struggle to find the money for someone to smuggle them across the border. The third and final section of the film delves into the complexities that Enrique and Rosa discover as undocumented migrants in the United States, including issues of healthcare, employment, and the cost of living. In addition to its vivid cinematography, the enduring popularity of El Norte emerged from the pertinence of Rosa and Enrique’s experiences to every generation of undocumented communities. Both El Norte and Sin Nombre demonstrate the challenges to survive as an undocumented immigrant. Rosa, for example, dies from an infection she contracted after being afraid to go to a hospital and risk being deported to Guatemala. She works as long as she is able to, recalling the words of her mother: “they told us that in the north you could make a lot of money, but they never told us you had to spend so much.” The images of an idealized suburban home her neighbor described to her start to fade with the reality of wealth and poverty she begins to experience.
The release of Sin Nombre by director Cary Fukunaga introduced American audiences to a unique hybrid of documentary and storyline on the relationship between a former gang member named Willy and a migrant woman from Honduras named Sayra. The interconnected themes between El Norte and Sin Nombre have been noted by Yajaira M. Padilla, demonstrating how both films address the issue of “Central American Non-belonging” experienced by immigrants from El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala to the United States. Director Fukunaga took a different approach towards Sin Nombre by following firsthand a train from southern Mexico towards the U.S. border, aptly nicknamed “the beast” by migrants who travel on it. Fukunaga intertwined his narrative of Willy and Sayra with the experiences of the migrants on the train and demonstrated a clear binary of wealth and poverty to U.S. audiences. The plot of Willie focuses on him fleeing from the gang he is involved in, Mara Salvatrucha, colloquially referred to as MS-13, a notorious gang with roots in both Los Angeles, California, and El Salvador. Sayra, on the same train, is leaving Honduras with several of her family members while she comes to befriend Willie. The fictional narrative of Sayra and Willie, filled with gang violence, robbery, a lack of food and water, and an economically unsustainable situation was complemented by the real experiences of both migrants and Mexican residents who live along the path of the beast; some of the residents ostracized the ‘poorer’ migrants from Central America, while others offered whatever wealth and resources they had to those traveling on the beast. The experiences of migrants from Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala are portrayed in films as a synthesis of staying financially afloat while being subjected to a new transnational identity in Mexico, in which the entire nation becomes “an extended border zone.”
For U.S. audiences, films such as El Norte and Sin Nombre were made by their writers and directors to challenge rhetoric towards migrant communities deemed as either unworthy of economic success or the creators of their own poverty. These films also attempted to dispel a certain trope; the idea that “America is upheld as a nation to be loved and coveted by immigrants, who, if good to America, will be loved in return.” Ultimately, “the road and the final destination are the very sites of the continuous re-inscription of hegemonic norms and not a liberation from them.” The experiences of economic exploitation are not applicable solely to Central American migrants. Why then, was the film focus predominantly on undocumented immigrants from El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala? Certain authors have provided insights into how these communities in the U.S. shape associations with wealth and poverty. The storylines from Central American migrants touched on the transnational significance of that journey when migrants arrive in the United States. At the time Sin Nombre was released to American audiences, 68% of Honduran immigrants living in the U.S. were undocumented. Beginning in the early 1990s, many migrants from El Salvador arrived as either undocumented immigrants or as refugees. With the influx of Salvadoran migrants to Los Angeles, California, much of the U.S. media rhetoric on both refugees and undocumented migrants associated these communities only with deportations, gang violence, and poverty. As Elana Zilberg argues, the rhetoric that intertwined undocumented migrants with deportation and poverty “treated poverty as an individual pathology rather than as a consequence of the socioeconomic exclusion immanent in the economic system itself.” Films such as Sin Nombre shifted the focus away from individual poverty pathology towards larger socioeconomic structures. In Sin Nombre, it was neither Sayra nor Willy who were responsible for their own poverty, but nor was it the person robbing them either. For U.S. audiences, the issue of who to blame for poverty became a complicated issue. What was certain was that, in each of these films, the individual was not to blame for situations that were portrayed as inevitable. Main characters had to, instead, undergo a shift in their own identities to adjust to surviving the American dream. Films like Sin Nombre displayed the relationship between wealth, poverty, and the development of “this new transnational identity” produced by the clashing of a triple-border crossing with what was supposed to be an American promise for economic opportunity. The transnational dynamics of migrants on ‘the beast’ force a renegotiation of identity as well, in which the least poor are the most powerful while instances of solidarity between various migrants on top of the train sharing food, praying, and talking with each other are occasional opportunities to bridge national and class divisions.
The overview of wealth and poverty in the United States amongst undocumented immigrant communities normally did not include the physical crossing of the border itself. Of these three films, El Norte is the only film in which the actual crossing is a significant act. While the storyline of Sin Nombre focuses predominantly on the dynamics of wealth and poverty relative to both the travels of migrants and their arrival in the United States, Ya No Estoy Aquí delves into the life of a teenager from northern Mexico living undocumented in Queens, New York City. The film, made in Mexico by director Fernando Frías de la Parra and released to American audiences under the name “I’m No Longer Here,” provides a more immediate and direct context of what wealth and poverty look like for a teenager making attempts to reconcile his new life alone with his memories, hobbies, and family of his home in Monterrey. The story is about a seventeen-year-old named Ulises, who has to flee Monterrey after being caught in the middle of a violent misunderstanding between two rival gangs and putting his entire family at risk. He arrives in the United States, more secure of his physical safety but unsure of his ability to find work and be economically secure. The portrayals of Ulises, who attempts to bridge his economic challenges with his desire to return home, are expressed through his interactions with other Mexican and Colombian immigrants who offer words of advice. One of them, acknowledging his challenges, states “but in this country, you’re not the first nor the last.” Similar to instances from El Norte and Sin Nombre, this single phrase is interconnected with Yajaira M. Padilla’s description of being “subsumed within the ranks of an exploitable and invisible labor force” and Zilberg’s refutation of individual poverty pathology.
For each main character in the films, they must ultimately choose between economic security and physical safety. Enrique, in El Norte, must decide between taking a well-paying job in Chicago or being with his sister in Los Angeles while she is gravely ill. Sayra contacts distant acquaintances in New Jersey to establish herself in the United States, but loses all of her company on the beast, including her friend Willie. Ulises, unable to achieve economic security and feeling isolated while living alone in Queens, ultimately returns to Monterrey despite the physical danger it puts him in. Not all undocumented immigration experiences involve this rigid dichotomy between physical and economical security. However, these films did attempt to make a clear argument to their audiences; economic exploitation and uncertainty could be as intimidating as instances of physical violence. The threats of economic instability are absorbed by characters such as Rosa, who has her view of well-kept lawns with sprinklers, waxed cars in a driveway, and the Good Housekeeping magazines of her godmother more gradually shattered while, simultaneously, the nostalgia of her hometown erodes away when she accepts she cannot return home as an accused political dissident. Ultimately, these characters are portrayed as either having to bend under the economic exploitation they endure or return to the hometowns they fled. The lived experiences of undocumented immigrants cannot always be reduced to that ultimatum. These films did portray how a lack of citizenship created fewer opportunities for economic security. They attempted to dispel the myth of individual poverty pathology that was projected onto undocumented immigrants, heavily popularized in the 1990s that blamed each individual migrant for their own economic problems.
Bibliography:
Ettinger, Patrick. Imaginary Lines: Border Enforcement and the Origins of Undocumented Immigration, 1882-1930. University of Texas Press: Austin, Texas (2009)
Frías de la Parra, Fernando, dir. Ya No Estoy Aquí, 2019. Panorama Global, PPW Films, distributed through Netflix (2019).
Fukunaga, Cary, dir. Sin Nombre, 2009; Mexico City, Mexico: Focus Features LLC.
González, JesusÁngel. “New Frontiers for Post-Western Cinema: Frozen River, Sin Nombre, Winter’s Bone.” Western American Literature: A Journal of Literary, Cultural, and Place Studies. The University of Nebraska Press: Volume 50, Number 1, (Spring, 2015)
Maciel, David. El Norte: The U.S.-Mexican Border in Contemporary Cinema. Institute for Regional Studies of the Californias. San Diego State University: San Diego, California (1990)
Nava, Gregory, dir. El Norte. 1983; Tijuana, Mexico and San Diego, California, USA: PBS American Playhouse. Archived edition (2017)
Oliviero, Katie E. “Sensational Nation and the Minutemen: Gendered Citizenship and Moral Vulnerabilities” Signs, Vol. 36, No. 3, pp. 679-706. The University of Chicago Press (2011)
Padilla, Yajaira M. “Central American Non-belonging: Reading ‘El Norte’ in Cary Fukunaga’s Sin Nombre. The Latin American Road Movie: Edited by Verónica Garibotto and Jorge Pérez. Palgrave Macmillan US (2016)
Padilla, Yajaira M. “The Central American Transnational Imaginary: Defining the Transnational and Gendered Contours of Central American Immigrant Experience.” Latino Studies 11.2: pp.150-66 (2013)
Zilberg, Elana. Space of Detention: The Making of a Transnational Gang Crisis Between Los Angeles and San Salvador. Duke University Press: Durham (2011)
Select articles from The New York Times and The Washington Post attached below:
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/20/movies/dreamers-undocumented-immigrants-hollywood.html
https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/05/26/AR2006052600393.html
