Which Way Home

As the new Oscar nominations are being discussed, it's time to close the book on last year's with the Best Feature Documentary Which Way Home, just released on DVD. It's an unflinching look at the plight of Mexican and Central American children who attempt to get into the United States. It doesn't have a point of view, but it would be difficult to watch this film and then listen to the heartless palaver of the American right-wing about the so-called illegal immigrant menace.

Directed by Rebecca Camissa, the film focuses on a handful of children as they traverse Mexico by train. They don't buy a ticket--they hop freights and sit on top of the cars. The train is called "the Beast," and they are told it can be their best friend or their worst enemy, as more than one child has been killed, either by getting hit by a tunnel, or chewed up underneath the wheels.

Some of the children are from Guatemala and Honduras, and they must first get into Mexico. It was kind of ironic to see that Mexican immigration officials were deporting people out of their country. But Mexico seems to have a much more humane system--they have an agency that does not enforce the law, but instead provides food, water, medical attention, and advice to migrants.

The kids, some of them as young as nine, travel unaccompanied. Some are headed to their parents in the U.S., while others have left their homes, hoping to find better lives. They think of the U.S. as something like the Emerald City, where everything will be fine. One ends up in a detention center, disabused of his dreams, and says that he made a big mistake. But after briefly returning to his family in Guatemala, he ends up trying to get back to the States again. What stories like these tell us is that no matter the hardships these people endure--one figure is that ten percent of those who try to cross the border will fail, and some will die in the desert--they keep coming, because the alternative is worse.

This is a nonfiction film, but it reminded me of William Wyler's movie of the Great Depression, Wild Boys of the Road. The kids in this film are subject to not only exposure in the desert, but corrupt smugglers and cops (who rob the kids of their meager possessions). I couldn't believe that a ten-year old boy was traveling alone across Mexico. When I was ten I could barely cross the street by myself. Then we see a nine-year-old girl who is trying to get to her mother in Minnesota. She is all smiles, but breaks down when she says she just wants to be with her sisters again. At the end of the film we are told her whereabouts are unknown.