Absolutely Brilliant!

A Masterpiece!

All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

Blistering performances.

Mayan Indian peasant siblings Enrique and Rosa live in the small mountain village of San Pedro, Guatemala. Their father and other labor organizers are killed by the military. Their mother is taken by the same forces. Rosa insists on joining Enrique who journeys north to El Norte or United States.This is an early crossing the border film. It's an indie without any big names. It's early in the subject matter so that it's more compared to the Grapes of Wrath. It's not quite as harsh as some that comes later. There is a naivety to some of this but it's very insightful for its times. The two leads have a great everyday feel. It's great for the era.

Low-budget epic from '83 about two ethnic Mayan refugees from the highlands of Guatemala who end up in East LA. Seems dated now, but it's still quite watchable: nowadays our protagonists would prob'ly qualify as asylum seekers, since they're fleeing from ruthless landlords and genocidal death squads in their (otherwise idyllic) mountain village. The two leads, both born in Mexico City, don't seem much like "indios," but they're quite appealing. The journey through Mexico is mostly played for laughs—much is made of the Mexican propensity for adding obscene phrases like "de la chingada" to every utterance, and a half-hearted mugger at the border is easily dispatched with a well-placed kick. After one more hideous obstacle (difficult to film convincingly with such slender resources), they're in El Norte… Interesting that the native-born "pochos" (English-speaking Chicanos, including Trinidad Silva, the dude that played Jesus Rodriguez on "Hill Street Blues") tend to be portrayed as shifty and treacherous; the final scenes in SoCal alternate gentle social satire and melodrama in a kind of Dickensian way that I found quite involving. W/d director Gregory Nava went on to direct mainstream fare like "Selena"; an earlier film, an Héloïse and Abélard thing called "The Confessions of Amans" set in medieval Spain (and using leftover costumes from "El Cid"!), sounds like it might be more interesting. PS—Soundtrack weirdly mingles Guatemalan folk instruments with bombastic classical chestnuts… What's Mahler's Fourth doing in there!?!?

I've never been surprised that this masterpiece and work of art has never truly received the recognition it deserves. Although it was stylized and even a bit anachronistic for the 80's, it came out during a period when to mention the US-sponsored violence in Central America was on-par with sympathizing with Communism. The film tread very lightly on this subject matter, and instead focused on the characters fleeing from their homeland in terms of their own personal situation-- it didn't matter WHY the violence was happening, just that it was happening to them...and they needed to find a way out of it. The blurring of fantasy and reality brought the viewer inside the perceptions and minds of the characters. My only critique is the negative portrayal of Mexicans bordered on shallow, and really took away what could have been an extremely unbiased work of art.

Indian, Latin and Italian directors make the best movies since they have compassion and empathy for the human kind as opposed to the human rats in the emergency rooms, who rather see the woman dead than another illegal but productive immigrant, without whom the economy will collapse (they treat the Green Card rather than a human being and they are agents of the immigration than graduates of medical school-the scumbags of modern day medicine. The doctor is shown as more caring, but both the nurse and the doctor were merciless lowlifes that should be doing autopsy on dead bodies). These scums have no ethics or compassion, and they are worse than the rats in the sewer line. As the sister Rosita says in "Gauntemala you get killed, in Mexico it is poverty and in America you are not free." Gregory Nava, who made one of the most poignant movies like "Selena" is better director than this over-hyped Spielberg and this movie should have won awards. The movie shows depths of despair and the great escape to freedom, only to realize that the roads in the land of liberty, are not paved with gold, in fact there are no roads but the poor immigrants have to build the roads, if they ever make it beyond the "coyotes" and the paranoid and homicidal border agents.