ABSTRACT
My childhood memories sometimes seem unsettling to other people. I remember helicopters hovering overhead as I labored in fi elds of fruit, spending the night in a sleeping bag in the hallway of a two-bedroom apartment shared by my thirteen family members, storing all of my earthly belongings in a cajón (cardboard box), watching two of my sisters get caught by the INS as I hid in an orchard, sitting terrifi ed in a moving vehicle after my cousin jumped out of the driver’s seat and ran into a fi eld of corn to avoid la migra (U.S. Border Patrol). When asked, I always answer that I had a happy childhood. Movies, particularly Mexican cinema, provided a rich refuge for me and for my imagination. I vividly remember a family trip to a dilapidated movie theater in Fresno, California. For the price of admission, my parents got free or reduced-rate counsel from a paralegal in an upstairs offi ce next to the projectionist. While my parents and other Mexican illegal immigrants obtained assistance with the challenge of legalizing their status in the United States, we children were captivated by the fi lm being screened-La banda del carro rojo/The Red Car Gang (Rubén Galindo, 1976)—a fi lm about four Mexican men struggling to survive in the United States with limited fi nancial, social, and cultural resources. As one of eleven children of a Mexican family of migrant workers, I could well understand the desperation of these four characters that fi ght by all means necessary to attain a better standard of living, a life free from the hardships of racial or class prejudice, what you call a Mexican immigrant or migrant version of the ‘American Dream.’
