Wednesday, March 29, 2017

E pluribus unum, or what a documentary by Roxanne Frías says about Hispanics in the U.S.



Roxanne Frías, an American filmmaker based in Paris for the last 25 years, came to the film school at UCLA on March 22,  to present her latest documentary, Latino: the Changing Face of America. Produced in 2016 for two French television organizations  - Point du Jour, specializing in documentaries and investigative journalism, and Arte, the renowned French German cable station – the documentary describes the Hispanic Americans primarily to the European audience for which it was made. 

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 documentary interviews two high school students from Mexico and Honduras in Montebello and Bell Gardens, voicing their aspirations and describing backgrounds of love and hardship; and distinctive members of a newly formed Hispanic community in Ottumwa, Iowa, working hard for a shot at the American Dream.  Framing the spontaneity of these interviews are the comments of well-chosen experts, like a demographer from the Brookings Institution; Jorge Ramos, the influential journalist and news anchor for Univisión; a representative of a large school district in Southern California; the priest in the Iowa parish; and a state senator from Texas.

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.

A conversation with Roxanne Frias at UC Santa Barbara about her film, on October 6 of last year, is worth watching in YouTube, http://www.uctv.tv/shows/Latino-The-Changing-Face-of-America-31623