This point of view, both intimate
and mediated by the director’s French experience, is what makes Latino: the Changing Face of America a
thought-provoking documentary. At its
core is the director’s autobiographical impulse: as the daughter of a Mexican
immigrant born in the border near El Paso, her family story reflects the
experience of being an American of Hispanic descent. But as Frías noted in an
interview with the magazine Angelus
in Los Angeles: “It’s not about me. I’m merely the vessel.” So her first-person narration is subtle and
only to sustain the two key building blocks of the film: the personal stories and the insightful
interviews with experts, that place the growth of the Hispanic population in
the US in the context of its social, political, economic and cultural
impact.
The small-scale stories and the
larger picture provided by these experts work very well together to produce an
expository documentary in the Grierson tradition. They offer the basics to understand,
emotionally and intellectually, the issues at stake, first and foremost the
integration of this new wave of immigrants to the fabric of the American
life. A virtue of this outsider’s point
of view is that there is no polarization, no parti pris, no ax to grind, in examining a topic that became a bone
of contention during the last presidential elections. Through the sequence of the small
Spanish-language radio in Ottumwa, we get to see the ugly and bombastic
anti-immigration rhetoric of a certain
presidential candidate, a foreshadowing of what came to pass. But in the climax of the film, the glowing
faces of immigrant parents and children celebrating the 4th of July displays
a confident view of the future.
When one becomes American by choice
not by birth – as is my case – this documentary, through the many voices heard,
rings true to experience. Observing how
previous waves of immigrants have inexorably, indelibly, become part of the
American fabric, it is not difficult to understand that the multilayered
Latinos – regardless of their ethnic and cultural specificities spreading the
Americas – will also become integrated.
Many of the films of John Ford describe precisely how that happened, how
the many become one, e pluribus unum. Interestingly, Roxanne Frías finishes the
documentary along these Fordian lines: the school superintendent notes that in his heavily
Hispanic district the children of immigrants begin kindergarten with limited
English skills but when they reach high school they want to be cheerleaders,
football players, or play in the march band, quintessentially American things.
They have become American but with a flavor.
Warm and elegant in its execution Latino: the Changing Face of America
offers an excellent point of departure for an intelligent discussion of how
Hispanic are doing exactly that. I would love to see Roxanne Frías’ next
documentary be about how this process of integration unfolds, following the
young people interviewed here, a few years down the road, in the steps of
Michael Apted and his Up series.
