Movie Review – El Norte

El Norte (1983)
Written by Gregory Nava & Anna Thomas
Directed by Gregory Nava

The United States will never seal up their southern border. They will never stop using it as a political football, either. The States rely heavily on cheap, undocumented labor as part of capitalism. Allowing these workers to enter the country (even through illegal means) helps the wealthy squeeze native-born workers out of fair wages in exchange for compromising for lower pay to “be competitive.” This is a problem created by America as they additionally spend taxpayer money through the defense budget to continuously keep Central & South American countries economically & politically destabilized. They get to extract valuable resources from these regions and pay almost nothing, which leads to refugees seeking work elsewhere. The cruelty of this system is not an accident; it’s the catalyst that keeps the engine of capitalism running. It cannot be reformed; it must be abolished. In El Norte, we follow one such pair of economic refugees desperate to find a new life north of their home.

Told in three parts, El Norte begins in rural Guatemala, where the residents of San Pedro work in the only job available in the region, coffee picker. The Xuncax family is one of many who dream of a better life that isn’t under the bootheel of the government troops that help control the workers. An attempt to organize is thwarted, and the Xuncax patriarch is killed. His two teenage children, Enrique (David Villalpando) and Rosa (Zaide Silvia Gutiérrez), choose to flee when their mother goes “missing” after troops sweep the village. Traveling into Mexico, the siblings seek out a trustworthy coyote who will help them cross into the States. That journey is harrowing and has consequences the two haven’t entirely realized until it is too late. Once in America, they are exploited and given jobs that pay poorly and work them far beyond what a human being should. They also realize that there is no solidarity between workers in America to the point that fellow Latin Americans quickly turn on them when they see it will benefit them. It’s made in the style of a fairy tale but does not have a happy ending.

The film came to co-writer/director Gregory Nava from reflections on his childhood, growing up in San Diego and crossing the border several times a week to visit family in Tijuana. Nava wondered about the lives of the people who lived in cardboard houses on the Mexican side of the border. Through years of research into the lives of indigenous Guatemalan refugees, Nava came to learn how brutalized they were in their native country, only to be exploited further when they went to the place that had been promised a hopeful new start. Instead of going to studios with his script, Nava sought funding from Public Television (PBS) and the UK’s Channel 4. In this way, he could ensure more creative control of the project and not have corporate executives softening the blow of his story. 

One element Nava insisted on putting into the film was magical realism, found in much Latin American literature. The most notable instance would be Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s work, particularly One Hundred Years of Solitude. While not an invention of this culture, it resonated with the people, a way of looking at the world that allowed for the presence of both the harsh realities of life and the notion that there is a layer to our existence that we cannot truly define or understand. This is first glimpsed when Rosa, searching for their mother, rushes into the home only to find it populated with a flock of butterflies. The siblings never directly comment on it, and the subtext emphasizes that we’re in a moment where reality is stretched. The semi-safe, predictable world the teenagers knew is gone now; we’ve entered a realm where what comes next cannot be predicted.

The spirituality of these people is not wholly wrapped up in colonial religious imagery. Instead, they practice tenets of Mayan spiritual life. At their father’s funeral, Rosa sings about the cyclical nature of existence, how life is momentary & dreams are where we go when we die. Their place as native people is a mark against them in the eyes of almost every person they meet. The Mexicans make racist comments about the siblings being “Indians” and how they are assumed to have a backward view of the world. Rosa & Enrique have to lie about their ethnicity when traveling through Mexico, but very few people they encounter actually buy it. Their accents and clothing give them away most of the time. While filming in Mexico, Nava had the set stormed by military troops who wanted bribes to allow production to continue. Nava claims he had a gun pointed at his head by one officer. The film’s accountant was kidnapped and held for ransom, and the film was smuggled out of the country to avoid being confiscated, resulting in more bribes. The filmmaker got to experience close-up how brutally cruel this whole system had become, and it was getting worse.

I found the film good but not as impactful as I had hoped. The production quality hinders the movie in many ways; it sometimes feels closer to a television production than a film. The acting is also more telenovela-like, which comes across as an odd tone to someone like me with American acting sensibilities. I would be interested to know if someone from the cultures depicted in the film doesn’t have that clash of tones because they are used to a different acting style. El Norte’s greatest strength is how thoroughly it documents the migrant experience. Every step of the journey is here, and the film never shies away from how awful it is. 

I can imagine for the time this was made, there were not many mainstream films addressing the plight of migrants, especially not from the perspective Nava is working from. The film never has outright villains, but there are a lot of angry, spiteful, unthinking characters populating its cast. What the story powerfully highlights is how the people trapped within this system are made cruel by it, and in this way, the system perpetuates itself through that violence. When people feel atomized from each other, there is very little chance of robust worker movements emerging. Everyone is always trapped in survival mode, and therefore, they can’t imagine a future. Instead, they exist, as the siblings’ father says early in the film, “to the rich, the peasant is just a pair of strong arms.” The sad thing is how little has changed in the forty years since this film came out; workers are more exploited than ever, and none worse than the undocumented migrant. We live in a world where seeking a refugee, a place to be safe from harm, to have shelter and food, is used as a cudgel to beat people into submission. It’s not a world that deserves to go on existing anymore.