This article was originally written about programming for the TCM Now Playing newsletter in October 2024.
Despite ongoing political discourse surrounding undocumented immigration along the Mexico-United States border, migration from south of the United States border has a long and complicated history. This Hispanic Heritage Month (September 15 – October 15), TCM humanizes the arduous and sacrificial journey across what has become the Mexico-U.S. border with two nights of films offering nuanced portrayals of Hispanics who must negotiate the possibilities and perils of the “American Dream.”
The United States’ modern border took shape as a result of the Mexican-American War. Upon Mexico’s independence from Spain in 1821, Mexico stretched as north as the Oregon territory. However, the secession of Texas in 1836 began the loss of Mexican territory that would become the present-day U.S. Southwest. With his commitment to fulfilling American “manifest destiny” – for the U.S. to stretch from the Atlantic to Pacific Oceans – President James K. Polk accelerated a war with Mexico that culminated with the capture of the Mexican capital in 1847.
The U.S. paid Mexico 15 million dollars for the future states of California, Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah and parts of present-day Colorado, Wyoming, Oklahoma and Kansas. Mexicans who once moved freely through Mexican territories soon found themselves enemies of war, even long after the war was over, or “illegal aliens” despite having resided in these areas. American Western films captured the history. These Westerns were so virulent in their xenophobia and racism toward Hispanics – representing them as criminals, particularly lewd bandits – that Mexico responded with its own “Golden Age” of cinema that aimed to dignify its people onscreen.
The legacy of the Mexican-American War has mediated American cinema and representations of Hispanics in U.S. pictures, in general, have not been favorable since. It seems that each new cinematic era recasts Hispanics as criminals in some regard. So-called “Narco Media” is the most recent iteration, owing to the “War on Drugs.” A current study analyzed 129 immigrant characters across 97 episodes of 59 scripted American TV shows in 2018-19 and found that undocumented immigrants continued to be heavily associated with crime.
TCM kicks off its focus on Immigrants and the American Experience with the TCM premiere of Robert M. Young’s independent hyper-realistic Alambrista! (1977). It follows a Mexican farmworker, Roberto (Domingo Ambriz), who crosses the border to California in order to send money to his family back home. Written, directed and photographed by Young, who was neither Hispanic nor spoke Spanish, he told this story from the perspective of Mexican laborers whose skills were needed and even solicited by the U.S. all while being disparaged, exploited and ostracized. Bringing a robust and balanced depiction of undocumented life to the screen, Alambrista! remains as significant today as it was in the 1970s.
Young had directed a short documentary on undocumented child labor, Children of the Fields (1973), which inspired him to make an even “truer” narrative film about immigrant life with Alambrista! Following the work of Italian neorealists who blended narrative and documentary elements, Young thought that social and political circumstances could be made even more compelling if given narrative form. Bringing viewers inside Roberto’s life as an immigrant laborer, Young used techniques he had developed for Children of the Fields but got even closer than his documentary film tripod would allow. His intimate camera-to-subject distance ensured an up-close-and-personal view of Roberto and the other immigrants working in the fields. A handheld camera allowed him to capture action spontaneously and permitted his actors to move about freely. Charles Ramírez Berg’s “Criterion” essay “¡Alambrista!: Inside the Undocumented Experience” poignantly states, “No American feature film had ever taken viewers as deep into the world of undocumented immigrants as Alambrista!.”
Young’s film was celebrated upon its release for its sympathetic, but not tragic, depiction of Roberto’s life. Janet Maslin, for The New York Times, described Alambrista! as “a gentle, beautifully made film about a subject that might, in more conventional hands, have received either harsher or more histrionic treatment.” It won the inaugural Caméra d’Or award for best first feature in 1978. Berg also noted that despite its acclaim, Alambrista! never received a national theatrical release in the U.S. It had disappeared from distribution by the mid-1980s and was considered lost until 1999 after two academics teamed up with Young and formed the Alambrista Multimedia Project to restore it.
TCM also screens Gregory Nava and Anna Thomas’s semi-autobiographical magical realistic triptych about Nava’s life, El Norte (1983). The film begins in a small Guatemalan village and follows a group of indigenous Mayans, the Xuncax family, headed by Arturo (Ernesto Gómez Cruz), a coffee picker who faces adversity when he tries to form a union to protect himself and his fellow laborers. Because of their strife, Arturo dreams of going north, to the United States, where “all the people, even the poor, have cars.” The second part, a comic respite, follows teenage Rosa and Enrique Xuncax (Zaide Silvia Gutiérrez and David Villalpando) as they are guided across the border by a Mexican “coyote.” The third and final installment follows Rosa and Enrique who face tremendous difficulty living in the U.S. without documentation. In his four-star review, film critic Roger Ebert wrote: "El Norte tells [the Xuncax’s story] with astonishing visual beauty, with unashamed melodrama, with anger leavened by hope. It is a Grapes of Wrath for our time." Nava and Thomas’s film was the first Latin American independent film to receive an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Screenplay.
Our celebration also includes Kurt Neumann’s film noir, The Ring (1952) about a Mexican-American boxer Tomas Cantanios (Lalo Rios) (who anglicizes his name under the more American pseudonym Tommy Kansas), who believes his success will gain him respect among American English-speaking whites. Unfortunately, he still faces rampant bigotry. The film is one of the early sports-related Hollywood films – like The Girl from Monterrey (1943) – that represents discrimination against Mexican Americans.
Additionally, on October 14 continuing Hispanic Heritage Month, TCM celebrates the prolific, eclectic and important career of Mexican and American television and film actor, Ricardo Montalbán. Though perhaps most often recalled by sci-fi fans for his late career work as Armando in the Planet of the Apes film series and as South Asian villain Khan Noonien Singh in the film Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982), Montalbán initially starred in several television films that more explicitly showcased the culture of his Hispanic heritage as well as suggested that Mexican immigrants were valuable members of U.S. society. These roles offered sophisticated Hispanic representation — especially for the 1940-50s.
Fiesta (1947) was Montalbán’s first credited role in a Hollywood film and resulted in him being offered a long-term contract by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. He plays a bullfighter who longs to be a composer opposite Esther Williams who plays his twin sister who longs to be a bullfighter. Montalbán and Williams had such wonderful chemistry that the studio went on to pair them in two subsequent films. In the romantic comedy On an Island with You (1948), Montalbán plays Ricardo Montez, fiancé to Williams’ Rosalind Reynolds. In Neptune’s Daughter (1949) Montalbán plays suave South American polo player Jose O’Rourke who wins the affections of aquatic dancer Eve Barrett played by Williams after a series of wacky incidents.
TCM also screens the celebrated World War II film Battleground (1949) in which Montalbán plays the endearing Private Johnny Rodrigues, a young Latino from Los Angeles, who, in one touching moment, is delighted to see snow for the first time while stationed in Belgium. And in the gritty Boston-set film noir Mystery Street (1950), Montalbán plays Massachusetts State Police Detective Lieutenant Peter Morales who is charged with finding out who killed a young woman whose remains have washed up on the beach.
Keeping with the overarching theme of immigration, TCM’s retrospective of Montalbán’s work is included on October 7, with the social problem film My Man and I (1952). Montalbán plays Mexican day laborer Chu Chu Ramirez who has just obtained his U.S. citizenship only to face hardships from the very Americans he learned to trust. Shelley Winters stars as the troubled alcoholic waitress with whom he falls in love.
