By Sarah Danielzadeh
Chicano filmmaking was an essential part of reforming the ways Americans view Central American and Mexican immigrants, says Mirasol Enríquez, who teaches Mexican American and Latina/o Studies at the University of Texas at Austin.
Enríquez joined UC Santa Barbara’s Carsey-Wolf Center last week alongside Colin Gunckel, a Latina/o and Mexican media historian from University of Michigan, to discuss the groundbreaking 1983 film El Norte. The virtual event was moderated by UCSB film professor Ross Melnick.
El Norte, directed by George Nava, was restored in 2019. It explores the story of two Indigenous siblings from a Maya village in Guatemala who leave their home for a perilous journey to the United States after a massacre that kills their family. They hope for a better life, but are met with illness, including typhoid, and are reported to immigration authorities. The film humanizes cross-border migration and exposes the brutalities of the immigrant experience.
Latina/o studies and media experts Colin Gunckel, top right, and Mirasol Enríquez, bottom, join Carsey-Wolf Center moderator Ross Melnick, top left, to discuss the 1983 film El Norte.
“El Norte is really such a great film in terms of making audiences really aware of the struggles of immigrants in terms of fleeing poverty and corruption and coming here out of desperation and looking for a better life. But also just to survive,” said Enríquez.
Enríquez said that El Norte’s theme is compassion, but the film stops short of clarifying some of the conditions that led Central American immigrants to flee. “What we don’t see here is the huge role the U.S. played in creating these horrible conditions,” she said.
Central American companies like the United Fruit Company owned huge amounts of land, railroads, shipping lines and communication networks and the United States viewed this as a threat to U.S. investments, Enríquez said. As a result, the U.S. deployed covert intelligence and carried out clandestine operations that were meant to overthrow the Guatemalan government.
“Civil War goes on for decades. You see kidnappings, assassinations. But Indigenous communities supported the rebels,” Enríquez said. “The U.S. helps to train death squads that come through and massacre, a genocide of Indigenous people. Eighty-three percent who were killed and disappeared were Mayan.”
Co-panelist Gunckel said that Nava, who lived in Los Angeles, felt inspired to direct a film from the immigrant’s perspective when he realized that his city relied on immigrant labor. Because he filmed El Norte during Guatemala’s civil war, his film crew met with a series of obstacles.
“While Indigenous communities are being tortured, oppressed and massacred by the military forces in Guatemala, filming there was impossible so they had to move to Chiapas in Mexico, which also has a large indigenous population of Mayan descent,” Gunckel said during the virtual panel.
A poster for Gregory Nava’s 1983 film El Norte, which was restored in 2019.
But, Indigenous communities there resisted cooperating because they were suspicious that the film crew was in cahoots with Mexico’s repressive government, Gunckel said. On the flipside, the crew also faced surveillance from the Mexican government, which suspected them of being up to something with the Indigenous villagers.
After film footage was stolen and sold for ransom in a Mexico City parking lot, the crew of five had to finish the film in Southern California.
When the film was released in 1983, it succeeded with multiple audiences. “At this time, marketing to a Latino audience was just uncharted territory for a distributor or a major studio,” Gunckel said.
Enríquez referred to the 1980s as the “Decade of the Hispanic.” “The demographics are changing and the advertising industry is changing and the media industry is all recognizing the political and economic power of the Latino community,” she said.
Gunckel believes that films like El Norte catalyzed activism that led to institutional change, such as the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act, which granted asylum to around six million individuals who had been in the U.S. since 1982.
“That was a generational transformation,” he said. “Although it involved balance with border security and other measures, it does suggest a more humane approach towards immigration and recognition of the place of immigrants within the U.S. social and economic life.”
American policy at the time said you could not extend asylum to Guatemalans and Salvadorians because it would be admitting that the U.S. had something to do with the Civil War crisis. But this shifted in the 1990s, when asylum rules were extended to include those from Guatemala and El Salvador, Gunckel said.
“Activism had a lot to do with this shift. El Norte brought this issue to a broader consciousness, that was shown on public television. These issues became part of public discourse,” he said.
Sarah Danielzadeh is a fourth year English major and Professional Writing minor. She is a Web and Social Media intern for the Division of Humanities and Fine Arts.