Film

The Story of Our Age

A 17-Year-Old Masterpiece Examines the Sad, Scary Lives of Refugees

by Grant Cogswell

On our island of wealth, news of starvation, oppression, and genocide blurs into what seems like the current events of an alien race. Nava takes us so deeply into the political crisis of a Guatemalan village and one pair of siblings' desperate journey north that by the time Enrique (the beautiful, brilliant David Villalpando) enters the dining room of the upscale L.A. restaurant where he gets his first job busing tables, it's the white American diners who look like aliens.

Writer-director Nava does not ruin his cross-cultural story by putting accented English in his actors' mouths. The film begins in the Quichean dialect of Guatemala, and continues mostly in Spanish with subtitles. Only as the characters head north and encounter Americans do they begin to speak English. The back-and-forth between languages is handled smoothly; instead of emphasizing the presence of subtitles, El Norte does a better job of making you forget them than any foreign film I've ever seen.

The film is divided into three parts. The first introduces Enrique and his sister Rosa's family life in rural Guatemala, which they are soon forced to flee. The opening segment is visually breathtaking, full of misty green hills, candlelit altars, and bone-white ruins. An edge of magical realism comes across, positing political murder and economic exploitation as a kind of black magic.

The very real threat of death shadows the film throughout and gives its heroes' plight a dire poignancy. At several points El Norte is scary like a horror film; that the moments of supernatural fear rise out of the mundane details of day-to-day survival makes them doubly effective. Nava uses Villalpando's wide-open face -- one of the most naturalistic ever seen on a screen -- as a palette on which to mix sorrow, hope, and terrible acceptance.

The middle segment follows the siblings' trip to the U.S. In the contrast between the flat light of the drab, desolate landscape and the large-scale drama of an entire people moving through it -- a river flowing north -- Nava captures the border zone's peculiarly tragic flavor. Because Enrique and Rosa are afraid of being returned to Guatemala, where they are marked for death, they must pretend to be Mexican, a source of much of the film's comedy.

Told before leaving home that "Mexicans say 'fuck' ['chingada'] a lot," the shy and boyish Enrique fends off two immigration agents with a sweet-voiced hail of obscenities. We come to identify most strongly with the pair during this middle portion of the journey. A scene in which Enrique and Rosa are forced to crawl for miles through an abandoned sewer pipe is excruciating. Then the rats show up.

In the last segment, Enrique and Rosa arrive in America. They move into a rundown motel that serves as an illegal labor warehouse for the pragmatic but kindly Monty (Trinidad Silva), who soon reveals that the promised land operates on the same principles as the coffee plantation, even if its brutality is subtler and more insidious. The black magic of forces outside one's control soon makes its power known even in the world of highways and electric lights.

Into the Shadow World

Speaking to the director by phone, I learn that Nava grew up in San Diego's North Park neighborhood and used to cross the border between the U.S. and Mexico "three or four times a week," observing the flow of immigrants leaving one country and entering another. This "shadow world" held a fascination for young Nava as it flowed past his daily life, which was already positioned in between worlds.

"I grew up in this squeaky-clean, Republican, middle-American city," Nava says, "and right on our doorstep was this.... Tijuana is the only place on earth where the First World and the Third World meet. I wanted, by making El Norte, to give a heart and soul to the shadows."

I tell Nava his film has the intensity and epic significance of wartime stories told by my grandparents' generation, and that for most post-suburban Anglo-Americans, such drama is generations away. His film helps us to see people embroiled in life-or-death struggles right now, and transform their way of life before our very eyes.

"It's the story of our times," Nava replies.

Because it was too dangerous to shoot a film like El Norte in 1982 Guatemala, the first segment was shot in the Mexican state of Chiapas. And though Guatemala's political troubles have cooled, with the civil war now at a truce (some 500,000 desparecidos later), one can't help but note the terrible irony that makes El Norte so timely: The very difficulties depicted in the beginning of the film are now taking place in Chiapas, where that part was shot.

When I suggest that the L.A. of 2000, with its Central American immigrant majority, is a far more humane place than the white L.A. of my '70s childhood, Nava says of the new arrivals, "They bring something with them." The problems for refugees of political murder and economic hardship are worse now, in some ways, than when the film was made. "Changing cultures for these indigenous people is like being hit with a steamroller. Their kids assimilate -- as gangsters." The anti-immigrant backlash of a few years ago has simmered down, in response to the new economic good times -- but it was not long ago that California voters passed Proposition 167, which denied medical care and other basic benefits to illegals. And as Nava puts it, "little old Republican ladies still drive down to the border and park with their headlights on."

Though El Norte appeared on PBS and Showtime subsequent to its first theatrical run, the film has never been marketed to Latino theaters, so this re-release may be the first time that many of the people whom the film is about get a chance to see it. "Everything in the film is based on actual events," Nava says. "All of it happened to someone different, but it all happened."

The thing with the rats, too?

"Yeah. Those tunnels are actually closed now, but yeah."

Nava has just completed a pilot for a CBS television series, American Family, and is negotiating with New Line Cinema to sponsor a series of Latin-themed films for release next year. Though he sees his upcoming series as a continuation of some of the stories in El Norte, Nava acknowledges that sooner or later, he will be making another film about his home, the border, and the transformational experience of the millions who move through it.

"There are two ways to make money in the movie business," Nava explains. "You can build up the barriers between people, and people will pay to see that. Or you can break them down, bring people together, help them to understand one another's situations and problems, and people will pay to see that."