Crossing frontiers – Presenta la cruda realidad de la migración
They were sitting under the tree to keep out of the heat. They were hungry. They hadn’t eaten anything in days except the fruit they found on trees. They were terrified and they were wildly hopeful.
They were five men and a woman. They were from Belize and I came across them in a small town in southwest Mexico, just across from Tecun Uman in Guatemala. They were waiting their chances to jump aboard the train – la Bestia – the horrible train that immigrants would take from the border northward through Mexico on the way to the U.S.
I was walking along the tracks with a middle-aged Mexican priest who was new to the community and wanted to see what was happening to the immigrants victimized by the gangs and corrupt police and crooks and the brothels in town. I remember them asking him to pray for them and the way they stood and bowed in stunning silence as he did so for them.
The arrival of a new movie – Sin Nombre - here brought this suddenly back to me. But it also reminded me how many immigrants have powerful stories to tell about their crossing, their terrible frontiers, their days of hunger and doubt. And I wonder how these stories can be told, as in this movie, by ethnic newspapers and radio stations here.
Some suggestions for print, radio and television
Wouldn’t it be stirring if there were a regular feature where people could record their passage?
This is the soul of reporting, and story telling.
I imagine it could be a digital audio box on a website, or a three-minute program on the radio. I can see pictures and possibly videos recounting these stories. Not all of them of the horrors, but some of the joys of the journeys. It could be a project involving interviews for youth radio or articles written by young reporters or a long open invitation on a community blog for others to share their histories, and their legacies. Think crowd-sourcing and social media.
This is what the ethnic news media did 100 years before and now and what it will most likely continue to do. We cannot turn our faces away from what we left behind. Whether from Honduras or Senegal or Bosnia or Vietnam. The passage will never leave us.
Here’s a trailer for the movie:
http://www.hulu.com/watch/60270/movie-trailers-sin-nombre
And here is an article from Hoy (the headline is above) that tells about the movie:
http://www.vivelohoy.com/entretenimiento/vlh-vh-portada-0403apr03,0,6197374.story
And here is an interview with the movie’s director.
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