Before Javier Zamora began his arduous immigrant’s odyssey from El Salvador to Northern California, before he left his childhood behind in a quest to reunite with his parents, he dreamed of fast food and pop culture. “At recess, my friends and I talk about eating our first pepperoni pizza like the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, eating lasagna like Garfield, eating McDonald’s, watching the new Star Wars inside a theater with air-conditioning, eating ‘popcorn’ with butter,’” he writes in his memoir, Solito. In nine-year-old Zamora’s mind, this is America. Then he walks 400 miles to get there, including a treacherous stretch through the Sonoran Desert, and immediately wonders, Where the hell am I?
Solito is among the most visceral and honest immigration sagas on record, a book that makes it possible for the reader to walk far more than a mile in the writer’s shoes. It also inspires memories of some of the best films about the immigrant experience, films that dramatize both the journey over and the life that awaits on the other side. These works, like Zamora’s, overflow with empathy and veracity, removing immigration from the realm of politics and policy and placing it in a more human realm.
The most pertinent of these might be El Norte, Gregory Nava’s masterful 1983 drama about a Guatemalan brother and sister forced to leave their home when their father, an organizer of local farmers trying to get their land back from wealthy usurpers, is murdered by the military. Enrique (David Villalpando) and Rosa (Zaide Silvia Gutiérrez) have heard stories about el norte, or the North. Everyone drives a fancy car. Everyone lives in a nice house and wears nice clothes. Plus, the toilets flush.
Their crossing doesn’t take as long as Zamora’s, but it’s torturous nonetheless. They’re mugged by one prospective Tijuana coyote, they’re picked up by Border Patrol agents (and fool those agents into releasing them by pretending, as Zamora does, that they’re Mexican), and they meet up with a more honorable coyote, who has 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 movie (a genre to which the director seems perfectly acclimated).
Finally, they make it to Los Angeles, where, for a short time, it looks as though they might carve out a little piece of the so-called American dream. Enrique gets a job at a high-end restaurant, where he impresses the management with his work ethic, enthusiasm, and charm. Rosa finds a mentor (the wonderful Lupe Ontiveros) and a decent gig cleaning rich people’s homes. But it turns out that the good fortune is a mirage. A jealous Chicano busboy (a young Tony Plana, who, like Ontiveros, would go on to have a long TV and film career) calls the Immigration and Naturalization Service and initiates a raid on the restaurant where Enrique works. More gravely, it turns out that Rosa was bitten in that tunnel of rats.
El Norte gives us both the dream and the nightmare. It also creates a profound sense of displacement, lived by characters who aspire to a safer, more secure life but remain emotionally grounded in a more organic past to which they can’t return. It’s a vividly devastating film that has remained etched in my consciousness since I saw it upon its release, when I was 13, and it pays dividends with each return viewing.
Some immigrant movies skip the crossing and cut 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 an undocumented immigrant from Mexico. Carlos just wants to work hard and keep his teen son, Luis (José Julián), away from the Los Angeles gang scene. He sees a big opportunity when he buys a truck and looks to start his own business. Then that truck is stolen by another impoverished worker (shades of the Italian neorealist hallmark The Bicycle Thief).
The man who sells Carlos the truck tells him that he’s not just purchasing a vehicle but buying the American dream. But Carlos can’t go to the police when the truck is stolen; he’s 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 just opportunity but also existential danger.
Where El Norte and A Better Life take place in a short narrative burst, Barry Levinson’s largely autobiographical Avalon (1990) plays a longer game, unfolding over multiple generations in the life of a Polish Jewish immigrant family in Levinson’s native Baltimore. The film begins with a turbocharged dose of nostalgia, as Sam Krichinsky (the great Armin Mueller-Stahl) describes the Fourth of July night in 1914, when he got off the boat and entered America. We see the fireworks lighting up the sky on this most patriotic of holidays; Levinson and cinematographer Allen Daviau create an almost stop-motion effect that lends the sequence an air of idealized unreality.
Sam loves America, but he can never quite make sense of it. He’s irate when his grown son, Jules (Aidan Quinn), changes his last name to the more Americanized (and deracinated) Kaye. Sam presides over large “family circle” meetings, at least until he has a falling-out with his brother, Gabriel (Lou Jacobi), also an immigrant, over Thanksgiving dinner (Gabriel arrives late, and the turkey is carved without him). Thanksgiving dinners form a powerful motif in Avalon. They start off boisterous and jam-packed, full of stories and disputed memories. As the years progress, they gradually dwindle. Later in the film, Jules, his wife, and their two children sit silently eating turkey in front of the television, presented here as a detriment to the old ways of community (much as in Douglas Sirk’s 1955 masterpiece All That Heaven Allows).
Beneath its nostalgic surface, Avalon is a rather melancholic movie about how a tight-knit family of immigrants and their offspring gradually settle into an isolated way of life, devoid of the rituals that once gave them meaning. America treats Sam Krichinsky and his family well; it also slowly drains away their spirit. The movie ends with a reprise 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 by definition tragic. They do show various ways in which that experience is complicated and fraught with danger—emotional, existential, and otherwise. They also ask us to look beyond headlines about borders and politics. They are deeply resonant stories about people and the journeys they take in search of a better life.•
Join us on June 20 at 5 p.m. 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 conversation here.
