Heavy passages

Their crossing is not as long as Zamora’s, but it is torture nonetheless. They are ambushed by a would-be Tijuana coyote, they are captured by Border Patrol agents (and fool those agents into releasing them by pretending, as Zamora does, that they are Mexican), and they meet a more honorable coyote. , which makes them crawl to San Diego through an old sewer pipe. This is where Nava unleashes the rats, in a sequence that plays like a claustrophobic horror film (a genre the director seems perfectly accustomed to).

Eventually they reach Los Angeles, where it seems for a while that they are going to carve out a small piece of the so-called American dream. Enrique gets a job at an upscale restaurant, where he impresses management with his work ethic, enthusiasm and charm. Rosa finds a mentor (the wonderful Lupe Ontiveros) and a decent job cleaning rich people’s houses. But it turns out that happiness is a mirage. A jealous Chicano busboy (a young Tony Plana, who, like Ontiveros, would have a long TV and film career) calls the Immigration and Naturalization Service and launches a raid on the restaurant where Enrique works. Even worse, it turns out that Rosa was bitten in that tunnel with rats.

El Norte gives us both the dream and the nightmare. It also creates a deep sense of displacement, lived by characters who strive for a safer life but remain emotionally rooted in a more organic past to which they cannot return. It’s a vividly devastating film that has been seared into my consciousness since I saw it upon release when I was 13, and it pays off with every subsequent viewing.

Some immigrant films skip the crossing and get right to the heart of the immigrant experience in America. In A better life (2011), Demián Bichir (who earned an Oscar nomination for his performance) plays Carlos, a landscaper and undocumented immigrant from Mexico. Carlos just wants to work hard and keep his teenage son Luis (José Julián) away from the Los Angeles gang scene. He sees a great opportunity when he buys a truck and wants to start his own business. Then that truck is stolen by another impoverished worker (shades of the Italian neorealist trait The Bicycle Thief).

The man who sells Carlos the truck tells him that he is not just buying a vehicle, he is buying the American dream. But Carlos can’t go to the police if the truck is stolen; he is in the country illegally. And his troubles are just beginning. Carlos wants what the title suggests: a better life, for him and his son. But this land of plenty offers not only opportunities, but also existential dangers.

Where El Norte And A better life take place in a short narrative burst, largely autobiographical by Barry Levinson Avalon (1990) takes a longer game, set over several generations in the lives of a Polish Jewish immigrant family in Levinson’s native Baltimore. The film opens with a turbo dose of nostalgia, as Sam Krichinsky (the great Armin Mueller-Stahl) describes the night of July 4, 1914, when he stepped off the boat and entered America. We see the fireworks light up the sky on this most patriotic of holidays; Levinson and cinematographer Allen Daviau create an almost stop-motion effect that gives the sequence an air of idealized unreality.

Sam loves America, but he can never quite make sense of it. He is furious when his adult son Jules (Aidan Quinn) changes his last name to the more Americanized (and discouraged) Kaye. Sam leads large gatherings in the “family circle,” at least until he gets into an argument with his brother Gabriel (Lou Jacobi), also an immigrant, over Thanksgiving dinner (Gabriel arrives late and the turkey is carved without him). Thanksgiving dinners provide a powerful motif Avalon. They start off boisterously and packed, full of stories and contested memories. As the years go by, they gradually decrease. Later in the film, Jules, his wife, and their two children sit quietly eating turkey in front of the television, presented here as a breakdown of the old ways of community (much like in Douglas Sirk’s 1955 masterpiece). Whatever heaven allows).

Beneath its nostalgic surface, Avalon is a rather melancholic film about how a close-knit family of immigrants and their descendants gradually find themselves in an isolated way of life, deprived of the rituals that once gave them meaning. America treats Sam Krichinsky and his family well; it also slowly drains their spirit. The film ends with a replay of Sam’s arrival on these shores, now shown after Sam’s adult grandson visits him in a nursing home. This is where he and his American dream will die.

None of these stories argue that the immigrant experience is hopeless or inherently tragic. They reveal different ways in which that experience is complicated and fraught with dangers – emotional, existential and otherwise. They also ask us to look beyond the headlines about borders and politics. They are profound stories about people and the journeys they make in search of a better life.•

Join us on June 20 at 5:00 PM Pacific Time when Zamora will sit down with CBC host John Freeman and special guest Ingrid Rojas Contreras to discuss Solito. Register for the Zoom call here.

Chris Vognar is a freelance culture writer. In 2009 he was the Nieman Arts and Culture Fellow at Harvard University.