El Norte
(1983)THE HISTORY This is one of the first films to look at illegal immigration from the immigrants' point of view. Here they're Guatemalan peasants who make their way to America, the ''north'' of the title.
THE STRUGGLE Siblings Enrique (David Villalpando) and Rosa (Zaide Silvia Gutierrez) escape a brutal military government in Guatemala to find hardship in Mexico (which is just as inhospitable to illegal immigrants as the U.S.) and finally crawl through a rat-infested tunnel to California, where the best they can do is find low-wage, black-market jobs. It seems they have merely traded one country's economic oppression for another.
WHY YOU'LL WATCH IT The immigrants experience a haunting Grapes of Wrath-like struggle at every stage of their journey, and Gregory Nava provides lush, epic-on-a-budget direction.
