Thursday, February 04, 2010

2 báwrdərs


báwrdər a film by victoria delgadillo

Victoria | MySpace Video


I've never had personal experience with the U.S. Mexico border. In fact, when I was brought to my adoptive home, I was asleep, told to pretend to be my cousin and that my aunt and uncle were my parents. Next thing I know I wake up in Boyle Heights, walking up the stairs to my uncles house and sleeping in the race car my cousin called a bed. Fast forward to last year to the Cal State L.A. Rasquache film festival. I saw some great movies, but Victoria Delgadillos movie, "báwrdər" stuck out like a sore thumb to me. Flash forward to a few weeks ago and I find myself watching National Geographics "Border Wars." Two different sides of the same border.

Artistic interpritation versus sensationalized reality is what I see it coming down to. I can only take away so much from either one because this is something I'm completely unfamiliar with. I hove no experience with it and that limits in what I can truly say without sticking my foot in my mouth. Border Wars truly is a border version of the television show "Cops." Pushing the premise that what is caught on film and what makes it on television is what really goes on. My ass, at best it's just a partial, biased, half truth from Nat Geo and the production crew and executives at Nat Geo present to the world. With Victoria, I know I'm getting her view of the border, her artistic view that comes from within herself and her experiences with the border growing up and living in San Diego. She doesn't even have any kind of dialogue in her video, just scenery of the border from the high way to the beaches. Showing families reaching out to each other through the fences and gates, not here or there, just in between. 

With Border Wars, I honestly am intrigued at what goes on, even if it biased because it's foreign to me. Watching now, I feel I can get pass agents at the entry gates and the drive through because they explain what they look for, what tips them off and how to get people to slip up. One the show they say that Homeland Security is worried about drugs and terrorist, so why are they giving them a window as to how the operate ? Dumb asses. Sensationalizing the militarization of the border isn't suppose to make anyone feel safer or reassure them that the government is doing their job, but to some people it does have that affect. 

In the end it's about keeping out those "illegal foreigners" right ? All for me and none for you mentality. On February 2 1894, with the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, Mexican Citizens went from being in their home country to suddenly being outsiders in their own land. Stripped away from everything they worked for and made in to second class citizens. That's when this so called border was created. An imaginary line that separated Mexicans from the north with Mexicans from further south. Now it's what people are dying for and risking everything to have a better. All for one and one for none, that's how American does it when reaching out to it's neighbors.