Immigrants head north and south in films

February 5, 2006

By CHRIS VOGNAR / The Dallas Morning News

PARK CITY, UTAH — When 23-year-old Pablo Véliz was a small child growing up in Mexico, his father would vanish for six months at a time. "He would disappear, then he would come back and he'd have Christmas presents," recalled Mr. Véliz after the Sundance Film Festival premiere of his debut film, La Tragedia de Macario. "I didn't really get it. Why does he leave?"

Mike Wilson services water stations on an Indian reservation in Crossing Arizona.

He gets it now. The elder Mr. Véliz was broke and frequently headed north for work so he could send money home. It's a set of circumstances that could be found throughout films in Park City, in the new Tommy Lee Jones movie The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, and even on the cover of the latest Time magazine.

Mr. Véliz, now a fine arts and communications student at the University of Texas at San Antonio, eventually came to Texas, legally and with his family, under amnesty granted by the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) of 1986. His film, a drama about two friends who try to make the trek from Sabinas Hidalgo to San Antonio, was inspired by those distant memories, and by the 2003 Victoria, Texas, smuggling tragedy in which 19 Mexican migrants suffocated in the back of a truck.

Park City was loaded with immigration sagas this year, a reflection of the issue's urgency throughout the United States and particularly in the Southwest.

Letters From the Other Side, Austin resident Heather Courtney's documentary about the women left behind in Mexico when their sons, lovers and husbands seek a better life in Los Estados Unidos, played the Slamdance Film Festival. Crossing Arizona, a doc about the current immigration crisis in Arizona, played Sundance, as did the documentary DeNADIE, in which the journey to America is just the final leg of a trip that begins in South and Central America.

The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, which played the Cannes Film Festival last year, actually features a reverse border crossing as a ranchman (Mr. Jones) keeps a promise to take his friend's body back to Mexico from Texas for burial.

But the movie actually shares common traits with the Park City immigration films, particularly an insistence on viewing the border through humanitarian eyes.

"I believe the movie takes a humanistic point of view on issues that are sometimes met inhumanely by governments," says Mr. Jones by phone. "I'm not raving against any particular government. I'm just trying to expose ethnocentricity for the stupidity that it is and looking for some humanity along the border."

Sony Pictures Classics Julio Cedillo (left) and Tommy Lee Jones star in The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada.

There's certainly no shortage of that. Illegal immigration is a divisive issue, as we see in Crossing Arizona, which gives voice to those who want to stop it by any means necessary. But even Crossing is more interested in the human dimension of crossing the border.

And few stories are more universally human than a family trying to stay together when opportunity beckons elsewhere.

Ms. Courtney's Letters From the Other Side brings this drama home with the most immediacy. Her thesis film for the University of Texas film program, Los Trabajadores, is about Mexican day laborers in Austin. The project introduced her to workers and the women they left behind, and it gave her an idea for her next film: She would tape video letters from each side of the border and take them back and forth to show each party.

The results carry an enormous emotional impact. We watch 18-year-old Enrique as he watches a tape of his mother, Eugenia, who hasn't seen him in years. As she explains that she has started a storefront business making baked goods with cacti, Enrique's face goes white with grief — he looks as if the oxygen has been sucked from his body.

Enrique likes his job in America, which affords him the luxury of air conditioning. But his mother, a part of him, is back home, and this fact brings him palpable guilt.

"These stories are basically stories of heartbreak, and everyone has had their heart broken in one way or another," said Ms. Courtney in Park City. "I think anyone who watches the film will make that connection."

Statistics tell you plenty about the current immigration crisis. In Letters, we learn that the number of undocumented Mexican workers in the United States was 2 million in 1990. In 2004, it was 6 million. In a graphic that ran with Nathan Thornburgh's story in Time, we learn that illegal Mexican immigrants sent $1.7 billion home from the U.S. in 2005.

But numbers don't hit as hard as faces and stories of struggle, and that's where these films enter the picture.

In Crossing Arizona, for instance, we hear a lot from Chris Simcox, co-founder of the anti-illegal immigrant Minuteman organization, a sort of citizens' vigilante border patrol group. Roaming the border between Mexico and Arizona, sometimes with guns, the Minutemen see illegal immigration as a violation of the Constitution and a drain on resources. Indeed, Arizona has become the prime political and media hot spot in the immigration debates.

But the thrust of the doc is more basic: hundreds of migrants are dying of thirst every year as they attempt to cross the Sonora Desert into Arizona.

That's what matters most to Mike Wilson, a member of the Tohono O'odham American Indian tribe who provides water and food to migrants. A former Presbyterian lay pastor, Mr. Wilson, who is featured in Crossing Arizona, doesn't see immigration as a political or economic issue. He sees it as a matter of life, death and, most important, compassion.

"I'm coming at it more from faith than from humanitarianism," says Mr. Wilson, putting down a biography of Jesus Christ for a brief interview at Sundance. "Faith begets humanitarianism."

But as the country becomes increasingly Latinized, there's a chance that some of the immigrant films can beget some business.

Charles Acosta of Dallas-based Arrival Pictures snapped up distribution rights to La Tragedia de Macario shortly after seeing it at Sundance. With its simple but powerful story (and its singing Virgin Mary), it could find a healthy niche audience.

"I think there's going to be a tremendous amount of support from Mexican-American organizations that are debating these issues. The wonderful thing is that we have a targeted audience that will create that base support, then from there hopefully we'll have a crossover from art house audiences."

That would be great news for Mr. Véliz. From wondering where his daddy went to joining him in the States to landing his first film at Sundance, he has lived the ultimate immigrant experience. Now he gets to share that experience with moviegoers everywhere.