I just saw this film at a local college with a friend (I'll call him Fred) who has spent his career as a botanist managing and consulting for agricultural facilities in Southern California and in Mexico. More than just being fluent in the language he has a natural affection with the workers, both "illegals" in this country and those living below the border. When the film ended, I turned to him and asked, "Well, is this reality as you know it? Given that the plot could only illuminate one of many possible outcomes, the question is of plausibility, accuracy of character, and realism of depiction of the human beings who make up this perennial "social political issue."
This film is an odyssey of only a week's length by a nine year old boy, Carlitos, who was forced by events to try to cross the border to join his mother living in L.A. The people who he came in contact with ranged from those who were about to bind him into sex slavery (my reasonable guess) to those who gave him a job washing dishes and grew to treat him like their son.
Meanwhile his mother, Rosario, was torn between working two jobs to save up enough money to try to get documentation to bring him to America, or going back home, accepting the poverty that would await them both. This film depicts the underworld of the "Coyote industry" of smuggling Mexicans across the border, both professionals and free lancers, one who ended up taking Calitos. It also showed those who prey on illegals here. This included a stereotypical wealthy woman who fired Rosario withholding her back pay, mocking her remonstrations with "go ahead, call the police!" (As an aside, just this year California made this exact kind of extortion illegal) Fred had seen many Immigration raids over the years, but never with the violence depicted in the film. But the one in the film was in Texas, where the same federal agency, now called ICE, has a reputation for such violence, so this also was accurate. Finding creative hiding places to evade discovery is common, and he told me he would help to find such out of the way spots in the greenhouses he managed. Fred told me that decades ago border control was so lax that some of the workers who were picked up in the morning and dropped off in Tijuana where back at work by late afternoon.
Borders are heart breakers, especially when two countries have widely divergent standards of living. The sacrifice of a mother for her child is a common occurrence among Filipino women who spend their children's childhood working in foreign lands, knowing them only by weekly phone calls as were depicted in this film, as being the only way to give them an education that would raise them out of poverty.
As the film was nearing the ending, and the Rosario was about to go back to her son n Mexico, not knowing that he was only blocks away in America, and that that circumstances would allow them to remain together in this "Promised Land," I fervently hoped for a "Hollywood Ending." Whether or not I got one, I won't divulge, since I want to leave off the spoiler alert. But I can convey that this film gives you a slice of reality that is an issue that the U.S. and other countries will face continuously, whether or not we pass Immigration Reform at this time.
It is a part of the world we live in, some countries blessed with wealth and opportunity and others on a treadmill of poverty, a reality made very human by this admirable cinematic presentation.
This film is an odyssey of only a week's length by a nine year old boy, Carlitos, who was forced by events to try to cross the border to join his mother living in L.A. The people who he came in contact with ranged from those who were about to bind him into sex slavery (my reasonable guess) to those who gave him a job washing dishes and grew to treat him like their son.
Meanwhile his mother, Rosario, was torn between working two jobs to save up enough money to try to get documentation to bring him to America, or going back home, accepting the poverty that would await them both. This film depicts the underworld of the "Coyote industry" of smuggling Mexicans across the border, both professionals and free lancers, one who ended up taking Calitos. It also showed those who prey on illegals here. This included a stereotypical wealthy woman who fired Rosario withholding her back pay, mocking her remonstrations with "go ahead, call the police!" (As an aside, just this year California made this exact kind of extortion illegal) Fred had seen many Immigration raids over the years, but never with the violence depicted in the film. But the one in the film was in Texas, where the same federal agency, now called ICE, has a reputation for such violence, so this also was accurate. Finding creative hiding places to evade discovery is common, and he told me he would help to find such out of the way spots in the greenhouses he managed. Fred told me that decades ago border control was so lax that some of the workers who were picked up in the morning and dropped off in Tijuana where back at work by late afternoon.
Borders are heart breakers, especially when two countries have widely divergent standards of living. The sacrifice of a mother for her child is a common occurrence among Filipino women who spend their children's childhood working in foreign lands, knowing them only by weekly phone calls as were depicted in this film, as being the only way to give them an education that would raise them out of poverty.
As the film was nearing the ending, and the Rosario was about to go back to her son n Mexico, not knowing that he was only blocks away in America, and that that circumstances would allow them to remain together in this "Promised Land," I fervently hoped for a "Hollywood Ending." Whether or not I got one, I won't divulge, since I want to leave off the spoiler alert. But I can convey that this film gives you a slice of reality that is an issue that the U.S. and other countries will face continuously, whether or not we pass Immigration Reform at this time.
It is a part of the world we live in, some countries blessed with wealth and opportunity and others on a treadmill of poverty, a reality made very human by this admirable cinematic presentation.