Dos Vatos Palabras

“Imagine giving up everything…,” begins the trailer for Beyond the Border.   Everyday my students come into contact with immigrants who have “given up everything”.  But their stories remain invisible, hidden behind labels and preconceptions about the reasons why Latinos come to this country. 

Beyond the Border gives my students a glimpse into the lives behind the labels and statistics.  The film presents a rich tapestry of complex daily issues, economic motivations, and competing tensions all centering around the pain of migration and the need to adapt to a new culture while preserving one’s heritage, a tapestry that takes us beyond the talking points of our current debate on immigration. 

Beyond the Border gives my students the tools to examine immigration in the US with a critical and humane eye.  Once they’ve seen Beyond the Border, they know that the immigration debate can’t be reduced to anecdote, sound bites, or black-and-white, law-and-order analysis.   

Beyond the Border is the most effective vehicle I have found for providing students with a sense of the human dimension of the immigrant’s saga today, the key dimension to them someday making an informed decision about the fate of people like the Ayala brothers.

Dr. Richard Pyrczak

Instructor, Spanish and French

Moravian Academy

Bethlehem, PA

TO ORDER DVDs of BEYOND THE BORDER please visit:

www.dosvatos.com

 On rare occasion, a documentary not only delivers rich and fascinating personal drama, but real educational content and purpose without preaching or propagandizing. 

Más allá de la frontera (“Beyond the Border”) achieves all this and more.   Beyond the Border tells the captivating story of the Ayala brothers, four men from a small town in Michoacán, Mexico who immigrate to the US.  Their story is told in a simple, direct style.  The film interweaves interviews with the four brothers, allowing each to tell his story and the story of his brothers in his own words and at times highly visible emotions. 

After following Marcelo, the youngest of the men, to the US border and beyond, to a thoroughbred horse ranch in Kentucky, the film works through the very different experiences of Marcelo’s brothers, who have been in the US for varying lengths of time.  We bear witness to the struggles of Gonzalo, the oldest of the Ayala brothers, with alcoholism; Juan Ayala’s pride at having made a good life for himself with his American wife, while lamenting that his children don’t speak Spanish and have lost an essential part of their heritage; Horacio’s nostalgia for his homeland but recognition of the necessity to continue working in the US; and Marcelo’s harrowing trip over the Mexican border and back just to visit his family at Christmas. 

Beyond the Border brings alive the human side of “illegal” immigration, perhaps the most hotly debated issue on the American political scene today. 

Dr. Richard Pyrczak

Instructor, Spanish and French

Moravian Academy

Bethlehem, PA

TO ORDER DVDs of BEYOND THE BORDER please visit:

www.dosvatos.com

by Dr. Gregory A. Waller

Chair and Professor

Department of Communication and Culture

Indiana University

 Beyond the Border is an excellent documentary—insightful, timely, accessible, and deeply committed to telling the important story of contemporary immigration and border crossings in fully human terms.   Focusing on one family whose four sons journey north from a small village in Michoacan, Mexico to find work in Central Kentucky, Eren Isabel McGinnis and Ari Luis Palos skillfully manage to honor the real lives of their subjects and to raise a host of complex social and political issues without ever settling for easy answers or melodramatic simplifications.  The result is a moving, engaging, insightful documentary that will be sure to generate valuable discussion in the classroom.

I was amazed at how much McGinnis and Palos are able to accomplish in this hour-long piece.  Not only is their documentary fully up to the highest broadcast quality standards in production and post-production values, but they have managed to locate and gain the trust of an entire family, whose situation personifies the implications of US immigration policy and dramatizes key changes in the social and economic landscape of Kentucky over the past two decades.   In Beyond the Border, this family lives; they are not reduced to being stereotypical victims or faultless heroes.  We see them taking up different lives in Kentucky; we see them at home, listen to their parents, hear of their aspirations and problems, their homesickness and adaptation to life in the United States.  At the same time, Beyond the Border draws pointed contrasts across generations and across nations, moving from Michoacan to Lexington, Kentucky.  Through its interviews and location filming it documents the emergence of a Latino culture in the Bluegrass.

I think that students from middle school up would find the intertwined stories of the Ayala brothers a fascinating introduction to topics that can only become more important over the coming years.

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A group of 11th graders in France had this to say about BEYOND THE BORDER

• We learned a lot about how the Mexicans live and their integration in the US.

• Seeing the dirty jobs the Mexicans do helps us understand what they go through.  When we read about their plight, we don’t really understand. Seeing helped a lot.  In Europe we often complain about how hard life is, but we didn’t see the Mexicans complaining about their jobs. We find the Mexicans admirable because they are prepared to work very hard to help their families.

• The close up shots and interviews bring us closer to make us feel closer to the family.

• It’s a very touching film.

• We get the feeling of their hard ships; both physical and emotional.

• The Mexican immigrants seem close knit and helpful to each other.

• I really enjoyed it, I think the music added to the melancholy, and I appreciated the dignity with which the story was told.

• A great teaching tool!

Gracias, Thank You, and Merci!

By (FR.) Chuck Niehaus

SJCatholic priest working in pastoral ministry in Lexington, Kentucky

Beyond the Border is the very human face of Mexican immigration to the United States.  I was touched profoundly and personally by this 56-minute bilingual documentary.   The video was filmed in Mexico and in the United States by Mexican American filmmakers, Ari Luis Palos and Eren Isabel McGinnis, who are currently working in the border region of Tucson, Arizona.  The filmmakers traveled back to the hometown of Marcelo Ayala, the principal character portrayed in the video.   The documentary recounts the true story of Marcelo as he travels across a dangerous border to work in the thoroughbred horseracing business in the Bluegrass of Kentucky.  In images, Marcelo recounts how difficult it is to leave his large family and his community…and we see their tears of separation and loss.   I personally know Marcelo and have visited Marcelo’s family in his native state of Michoacan in central Mexico.

Our local Lexington, Kentucky police have used this excellent documentary to provide their recruits with cultural sensitivity and to provide better understanding as they progress with their police training.  Beyond the Border illustrates the complex history and the concrete problems of the Mexican community as they immigrate to the United States.

Additionally, the video has been used effectively in our parochial school (middle school students) as they take language classes.  The other possible uses of the documentary are countless and would be of great use in University and high school libraries, as well as public libraries.  The Beyond the Border documentary is excellent, realistic, well developed, and deeply human.

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Bryan R. Pearce-Gonzales

Ph.D.Shenandoah University

Winchester, VA

Since its premiere screening at the Kentucky Theater in Lexington, Kentucky, Beyond the Border / Más allá de la frontera has continued to be enthusiastically received by crowds everywhere, provoking a profound dialogue centering on the realities of immigrant workers. 

During the present time, when immigration is fueling many of the political debates around the country, Beyond the Border has proven to be an ever-important educational tool as it offers an intimate perspective of migrant worker life in the United States.

I have used the documentary in many classes and in conjunction with a University Film Series entitled “Celebrating the “Other:” Overcoming Us and Them.” University students, many of whom have no personal contact with the immigrant population, relate well to the stories of the Ayala brothers and have commented publicly that, as a result of watching the film, their views on immigrant workers in the United States have been changed.

Beyond the Border succeeds in giving a voice to Hispanic immigrants and their stories, universal stories that stretch beyond political and national borders to speak of family, love, and the American Dream.Beyond the Border, as a unique, profound depiction of immigrant life in the United States, possesses the ability to change one’s preconceived notions of a very important group. For this reason, it should be made available in every public library and school system in the nation.

- Bryan R. Pearce-Gonzales, Ph.D.Shenandoah UniversityWinchester

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By Altha J. Cravey, Associate Professor

Geography Department UNC at Chapel Hill

This film will make you laugh and cry and empathize with Mexican migrants whose lives are caught up in the winds of globalization. Your students will identify with the hopes and dreams and fears of the families’ younger brother Marcelo as his story unfolds. They will want to know why Marcelo’s parents cannot make a good living in Mexico and why Marcelo feels compelled to risk life and limb in his “illegal” journey to Kentucky. The intimate family portrait highlights love, despair, loneliness, and resilience. In the classroom, the video can be linked to a discussion of migration, globalization, labor and immigration policy, transnational connections, or such topics as NAFTA, CAFTA, the Bracero Program, and Latinos. The human story of four brothers in the video will breath life into these abstract topics and will provoke your students to pursue a deeper understanding of Mexican immigration to the US. Class discussion can feature one or more topics and, depending on the nature of the course, you can adapt classroom activities, assignments, or individualized research.

The video will be useful and provocative for courses about globalization, migration, Latin America, or Latinos. It would also be effective in introductory courses on Human Geography, American Studies, or International Studies. The PBS website for the video has a wealth of resources that may be helpful in designing specific classroom activities.

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by Dr. Joseph Nevins

Associate Professor of Geography

Vassar College 

Beyond the Border is a powerful and instructive look at the impact migration has had on one family that straddles the territorial boundary that unites and divides Mexico and the United States. In focusing on one of four brothers who have migrated from their home town in Michoacan, Mexico to rural Kentucky and telling the story of the larger family, the film offers a complex portrait of the human ties that bind seemingly distant locations across the U.S.-Mexico divide.

Both inspiring and sobering, this documentary poignantly illustrates how migration simultaneously maintains and tears apart a family, while demonstrating the rootedness of Mexican migrants in the U.S. socio-economic fabric. I strongly recommend this highly unique documentary for classroom use, and for high school and university library collections.

-Dr. Nevins is the author of Operation Gatekeeper: The Rise of the “Illegal Alien” and the Making of the U.S.-Mexico Boundary (Routledge 2002),and Dying To Live: A Story of U.S. Immigration in an Age of Global Apartheid (forthcoming in 2008 from City Lights Book). 

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