El Camino Hacia El Norte

Sin Nombre is a movie about people trying to get to the United States. The title refers to the nameless thousands that make it or don't across the Mexican border.

From an American perspective, the movie is another tale in the immigrant genre portraying the hardships and determination required to arrive in the New Jerusalem of the promised land. Elia Kazan's lyric America! America! from several decades ago comes to mind.

From an Hispanic perspective, however, the movie is another saga in the genre of pilgrim tales recounting the haphazard encounters of humans with evil and good and good mixed with evil at the hands of fellow men as in John Sayle's Hombres Armados or Motorcycle Diaries.

I do not mean to suggest that the movie presents an interpretative choice. Every destination implies a pilgrimage as every pilgrimage seeks a destination. From both perspectives the story is one of survival -- the difference in accent depends on whether one thinks success lies in the travelling or in the arrival.


El Caspar is a young gang member who has been to the United States -- where he apparently earned his "tear drop" -- and who is now having second thoughts about the career path he has chosen. A flickering love of woman is casting a different light on the shadowy bondage rituals of men.

Sayra is a young woman whose father by a previous marriage convinces her and her cousin to make the trip back to the New Jersey where he has left his wife and children. For Sayra's father, the quest is as much aimed at re-uniting his family as getting back to it.

As an immigrant story, the hardships are real and appalling, engendering disgust at those arm chair xenophobes who disparage them "illegals" while stuffing their faces with Cheez O's.

The disgust goes deeper when it is remembered that the squalour these people are fleeing is the direct result of the policies of the country they are fleeing to. There is a vicious circle here. Not only does the United States plunder Hispanic America, what it gives back in return is brutality be it in the form of thug dictatorships or gang violence. Criminals have existed always everywhere, but the gang culture now rife in Mexico and Central America is a direct export from American inner cities. In this sordid dynamic, the United States perpetuates a double-despoliation.



The despoliation has in fact become environmental, although it is probably not so shocking to those who never knew how Mexico was. Poverty too has always existed in Mexico and like poverty everywhere it shows a harsh and ugly face, classically captured in Luis Buñuels Los Olvidados. But it was one of Mexico's many existential paradoxes -- which had to be suffered through like some sort of school drill -- that there was beauty in poverty. That phrase inescapably suffered the embarrassment of a moral piety, until one saw with one's own eyes that poverty could be not only beautiful but was, at times, aesthetically exquisite.

However, poverty and squalor are not the same thing. Today what metastasizes from the Rio Bravo to the Panama Canal is just an unremitting, garbage strewn squalor in which it is a godsend -- like a cloud burst in the dusty heat -- to come upon occasional pockets of the old style poverty.

For those who get their messages from movie trailers, the moral of this story might be that those who perservere are rewarded with finding their "better life". One can do better ... The moral lesson of this social and environmental despoliation is that what goes around comes around. The vintage is always trampled out, eventually. "What shall sinful men be pleading when the just are mercy needing?

The moral lesson from the hispanic pilgrimage is something else. There is no reason for any good to come out of this cultural, economic and environmental wasteland where everything from music to water is a species of sewage. And yet, somehow, in this wasteland and even while pursuing their own desperate self-interests, people do manage to escape -- not to America but into helping someone else at cost to one's self.

It is this kaleidoscope of human selfishness and generosity, softness and brutality, tumbling together amid mixed and pure motives that comprises the pilgrimage of the movie. The tumblings occur both inexplicably and expectedly as when in one scene children run alongside the train and pelt the migrants huddled on the roofs with free oranges while, quite naturally and seamlessly a few scenes later, Mexican police drive by and just as pointlessly spray the train with bullets.


Driven by their respective journeys, El Caspar and Sayra encounter one another on the train. One might say that Caspar befriends Sayra but, just as truely, she befriends him, as the two, their fates entwined, make their way north.

The moral lesson here is not that good wins out in the end but that whether it does or doesn't, whether one arrives or not, amidst all the despoliation and evil, there was still self transcendence and good, like those pockets of old time impoverished beauty.

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