Today's Stories

May 8-10, 2009

Paul Wolf
Obama's Axis of Obedience

Neve Gordon
Jailed for Caring

May 7, 2009

Paul Craig Roberts
Criminalizing Criticism of Israel

Chris Floyd
A Full-Court Press for Pakistan War

Andy Worthington
Mixed Messages on Torture

Alan Farago
No Place Like Home: a Stress Test for Land Use, Not Just Banks

Ray McGovern
Deux ex Machina on Torture?

Dave Lindorff
Stain Removal: Impeaching the Torture Judge

Eric Toussaint /
Damien Millet
Why is There Rampant Famine in the 21st Century?

Ana M. Malinow, MD
Why We Need a Single-Payer Health Care System

Jeff Armstrong
Freeing Leonard Peltier: What Would Warren Harding Do?

Norman Solomon
A Green New Deal

Website of the Day
The End of Lake Mead?

May 6, 2009

Doug Peacock
The Fate of the Yellowstone Grizzly

Patrick Cockburn
Afghans to Obama: Get Out, Take Karzai With You

Richard Neville
The Torturer's Apprentice

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
To Power a Nation: Nuclear Bombs or Sunshine?

Winslow T. Wheeler
Of Pork and Baloney: Obama's Defense Budget

Deepak Tripathi
Pakistan in Crisis

Stephen Soldz
A "Natural Reaction": APA Ethics Policy-Maker Endorses Torture

Reuven Kaminer
Nice is Not Enough: Obama vs. Netanyahu and Lieberman

David Macaray
The Chrysler-UAW Deal

Kevin Zeese
Why We Were Arrested at the Senate Finance Committee Hearings

Marjorie Cohn
Stanford Antiwar Alums Call for War Crimes Investigation of Condoleezza Rice

Coalition for an Ethical Psychology
Investigate Psychologist and Health Provider Complicity in Torture

Website of the Day
Who's Behind the Financial Meltdown?

May 5, 2009

William Blum
Torture and Mr. Obama

Uri Avnery
Netanyahu's Plan

Steven Higgs
Autism and Toxic Pollution

Dean Baker
Why Economists Should Learn Arithmetic

Daniel Wolff
The Education of Rachel Carson

Sibel Edmonds
The Broken Congress

Carole King Klein
A New Chance to Save the Northern Rockies

Fidel Castro
Giving One's All

Belén Fernández
Oil and Aguardiente in the Ecuadoran Elections

Dan Bacher
Schwarzenegger's Big Lie About Fish vs. Jobs

Website of the Day
"I Married Isis on the Fifth Day of May"

May 4, 2009

James G. Abourezk
The AIPAC Spy Case

Jeff Leys
Obama's War Budget

Patrick Cockburn
Afghan Ayatollahs Press Marital Rape Law

Andy Worthington
A Start on Guantánamo, But Not Enough

Jaime Avilés
Mexico's Plague-Bringers

David Swanson
An Even Worse Bybee Memo

Paul Craig Roberts
Working with Jack Kemp

P. Sainath
Celeb Crusades and the Death of Politics

Eugenia Tsao
Canada's Obama and the Cult of the Prof

Benjamin Dangl
Protest and Rubber Bullets in Paraquay

Sami Al-Arian
Mourning William Moffitt

Website of the Day
"Soldiers Are Cutting Us Down": Kent State, May 4, 1970

May 1 - 3, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Game-Changers: Specter Jumps, Souter Quits

Gary Leupp
Dropping the AIPAC Spying Case

Peter Linebaugh
The Key to the Bastille

Jeffrey St. Clair /
Joshua Frank:
Half Life of a Toxic War: Iraq's Wrecked Environment

C. G. Estabrook
Minion of the Long War

Patrick Cockburn
Kabul's New Elite

Mike Whitney
Economy on the Ropes

Pierre Sprey /
Winslow Wheeler
What "Sweeping Overhaul" of the Pentagon?

Andy Worthington
Al-Marri's Plea Deal: Dictatorial Powers Unchallenged

Mairead Maguire
Stand Up to Israeli Apartheid: a Letter to Obama From a Nobel Peace Prize Laureate

Nadia Hijab
The Israel Boycott is Biting

Diane Farsetta
Life, Death and Water Policy

Michael Calderón-Zaks
The Déjà Vu Flu: Why Much of the Discussion About Swine Flu is Racist

Richard Rhames
When Piggies Come Home to Roost: Swine Flu and the Industrial Meat Gulags

Russell Mokhiber
Inside the Beltway Baucus

Ramzy Baroud
Clinton's Unpromising Start

Rannie Amiri
Understanding Lebanon's June Elections

Deb Reich
No Talking, Dammit!

Steven Higgs
Indiana Criminalizes Dissent: Roadblocks on the NAFTA Highway

Brian Cloughley
Malice in Blunderland

David Michael Green
The Party's Over

Farzana Versey
Sex, Swat and Susan Boyle

Jim Goodman
Think Before You Eat: Agriculture and the Environment

Carl Finamore
New Prescription for a Healthy Union Movement

Christopher Brauchli
The Sounds of Silence: the Texas Option

Susie Day
The Real Cause of Unemployment: Employees!

David Yearsley
Nuts Over Beethoven

Lorenzo Wolff
Three Minutes of Perfection

Peter Stone Brown
Dancing with Dylan

Poets' Basement Dominguez, Orloski and Springate

Website of the Weekend
May Day Europe

April 30, 2009

Ellen Cantarow
Obama and "Two States": Seamless Continuity From Bush Time

Dana L. Cloud
The McCarthyism That Horowitz Built

Paul W. Lovinger /
Jeannette Hassberg
A Nation of Laws

Binoy Kampmark
Swine at the Trough: the Business of Pandemics

Brian Downing
The Perils of Modernization in Afghanistan

Frank Snepp
Tortured by the Past

David Swanson
The Wrong Torture Question

Conn Hallinan
The Coming Asian Storm

Ron Jacobs
Not Dead Yet: an Interview with Jerry Gordon on the State of the Antiwar Movement

John Goekler
The Only Path to a Middle East Picnic?

Jasmine L. Tyler /
Anthony Papa
An End to Crack/Powder Cocaine Sentencing Disparity?

Website of the Day
Emergency Petition: Stop Coal Industry Intimidation of Activists

April 29, 2009

Joann Wypijewski
Death at Work in America

Patrick Cockburn
The Taliban's Roads to Kabul

Andy Worthington
Cheney's Twisted World

Chris Floyd
The Specter Diversion

Dave Lindorff
No More Excuses: a Specter is Haunting the Democrats

Jeremy Scahill
The Nuremberg Truth and Reconciliation Commission?

Doug Henwood
Zionist Lobby Targets Another Tenured Professor: an Interview with William Robinson

Michael Hudson
Will Iceland be Handed Over to a New Gang of Kleptocrats?

Russell Mokhiber
My Ron Pollack Problem--And Yours

Eric Toussaint
Ecuador at the Crossroads

Website of the Day
An Interview with Leslie and Andrew Cockburn on "American Casino"

April 28, 2009

Uri Avnery
A Little Red Light: On Israeli Fascism

Jeremy Scahill
Obama's Iraq: the Picture of Dorian Gray

Dean Baker
The Perfect Gift for Wall Street: a Financial Transactions Tax

Michael D. Yates
At the Factory Gate

Conn Hallinan
Georgian Plots? Saakavili's "Order No. 2"

John Stauber
Beyond MoveOn

Tom Barry
The Failed Border Security Initiative

Harvey Wasserman
Who Pays for America's Chernobyl Roulette?

Jeff Nygaard
Pirates, Profits and Propaganda

Frederico Fuentes
Why the U.S. Still Hates Cuba

Website of the Day
The Man Behind the Hood

April 27, 2009

Pam Martens
The Far Right's Plot to Capture New Hampshire

Patrick Cockburn
Torture? It Probably Killed More Americans Than 9/11

Andrew J. Bacevich Guardian of the Status Quo: Obama's Sins of Omission

Mitu Sengupta
The Bloodbath in Sri Lanka

Franklin Lamb
Hillary Does Beirut: The 165-Minute Swoop-In

Firmin DeBrabander
Crimes of Economic Madness

Dave Lindorff
Wide Open to Pandemic?

Russell Mokhiber
How Corrupt is That?

Mike Whitney
Pinter's Message to Obama

Mark Weisbrot
Overhauling the IMF

Rev. José M. Tirado
Iceland's New Dawn: How the Right Got Trounced

Website of the Day
American Casino

April 24-26, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Putting the Bush Years on Trial

Marjorie Cohn
Torture Used to Try to Link Saddam with 9/11

Andy Worthington
Who Ordered the Torture of Abu Zubaydah?

Jeremy Scahill
Are Leading Democrats Afraid of a Special Prosecutor to Investigate Torture?

Chris Floyd
Top of the Heap: the Democrats' Teachable Moment on Torture

Mike Whitney
A Housing Crash Update

Anthony DiMaggio
Obama and the Housing Crisis

Chris Kromm
Democratic Lobbyists Key to Fight Against Employee Free Choice Act

Saul Landau
Seventeen Months in "the Hole:" an Interview with the Leader of the Cuban Five

Dave Lindorff
Free John Walker Lindh

Greg Moses
The Debt Looters

Joshua Frank
Calling for a Coal Moratorium: an Interview with Ted Nace

Fred Gardner
Collective Farming and the Lynch Case

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
Homework, Testing and Stealth Apartheid in Education

David Michael Green
Of Tea Parties and Teleprompters

Ramzy Baroud
Middle East Spies: a New Front in Gaza's Conflict

Rannie Amiri
Mubarak's Expanding Enemies List

Laura Carlsen
Mr. President, Calderon is Not Mexico

Richard Morse
The Haitian People Need a Lobbyist

Nikolas Kozloff
Protecting the Bald Eagle: a Task Now Falling to ... Hugo Chavez?

Kent Peterson
The Fight to Save Mexico's Mangroves

Robert Bryce
The Ethanol Scammers Rent a General

Niranjan Ramakrishnan The Financial Experts

Ron Jacobs
Torture is More Than Just "Harsh Tactics"

Richard Rhames
Roman Legends, Book Burning and History's Hunt

Stephen Martin
Wherefore Art Thou American Dream?

David Yearsley
Rodgers, Hammerstein, Michener and Nostalgia's Clammy Embrace

Poets' Basement
Khalil and Mankh

Website of the Weekend
Doug and Andrea Peacock on Grizzlies and Edward Abbey

April 23, 2009

Eamonn Fingleton
How the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times Buried the Madoff Scandal for at Least Four Years

Ray McGovern
Obama Plays Hamlet on Torture

Michael Ratner
The Torture Commission Trap

Alan Farago
The Quicksand Economy

Rob Larson
Business Gets Carded

Nadia Hijab
The Real Heroes of Durban

Fawzia Afzal-Khan
Deconstructing the Taliban

Dave Lindorff
Are Members of Congress Being Blackmailed?

Helen Redmond
Selling Out Single-Payer: the "Public Option" Con

Adam Federman
The Battle Over New York's Marcellus Shale

Website of the Day
An Interactive Map of Vanishing Employment Across the Country

April 22, 2009

Chris Floyd
The Fatal Thread: Torture, War and the Imperial Project

Joanne Mariner
Torture Evidence and Terror Blacklists

Vijay Prashad
Obama's Afghan Plan: Fracturing the Antiwar Movement

Gareth Porter
U.S. Lacks Capacity to Win Over Afghans

Dean Baker
The Tyranny of Bad Economics

Peter Morici
Housing Sales and Fixing the Economy

Winslow T. Wheeler
Eliminating Bad Pentagon Habits

Barucha Calamity Peller
The Battle to Take Back the New School

Harvey Wasserman
Chernobyl Could Happen Here

Aisha Brown /
Dedrick Muhammad
White Privilege in the Americas

Teo Ballvé
Obama's Feel Good Meeting with Colombia's Uribe

Website of the Day
Ahmedinejad's Durban Speech: What He Actually Said

April 21, 2009

Randy Rowland
Lindy Blake's Great Escape

Dave Lindorff
Jay Bybee's Conspiracy to Torture

Fidel Castro
The Secret Summit

George McGovern
Pull Out of Iraq This Year

Greg Moses
The Unemployment Channel

Benjamin Dangl
Argentina Remembers

Sonia Nettnin
Saving Lives in Gaza

Frank Barat
The Death of Bassem: a Shooting at the Wall in Bil'n

Binoy Kampmark
Legal Purgatory and John Demjanjuk

John V. Walsh
Code Red for Single Payer

David Macaray
SAG Should be Praised, Not Assailed

Website of the Day
Bonus Man: For Executive Assholes Everywhere

April 20, 2009

Mike Whitney
Housing Bust Comes Roaring Back, Worse Than Ever

Andrea Peacock
Histrionics and Legalisms in Missoula

Henry A. Giroux
Ten Years After Columbine: the Tragedy of Youth Deepens

Liaquat Ali Khan
Drone Attacks on Pakistan's Indigenous Tribes

Fred Gardner
Obama's DoJ Backs Prosecution of Medical Marijuana Providers

Stephen Soldz
Obama, Blair, Panetta and the Torture Memos: Praising Moral Cowards, Ignoring Real Heroes

Nadia Hijab
Obama's Multi-Polar Middle East

Dave Lindorff
The Meeting in Trinidad

P. Sainath
India's Press Nixes "R" Word

Nelson P Valdés
A Modest (Transition) Proposal to Obama

Mark Engler
American Empire Foreclosed?

Belén Fernández
The FARC Can't Dance

Website of the Day
Dear Mr. Buffett...

Weekend Edition
May 8-10, 2009

Fukunaga's Sin Nombre

Giving Faces to People Who Don't Have Names

By KIM NICOLINI

Sin Nombre (Without A Name) is a beautiful, passionately alive film from Mexico that I almost missed and am really glad I didn’t. The first film from 31 year old director Cary Joji Fukunaga, the film is a vibrant and urgent dramatic thriller that documents the journey of illegal immigrants riding freight trains from Central America and Southern Mexico on a pilgrimage to El Norte (a.k.a. the United States).

Structurally speaking, the film operates as a thriller, and it delivers the thrills (some with brutal ferocity) from beginning to end. However, what this movie does best is give faces and names to the people (“illegal” immigrants) who don’t have names in our culture and certainly don’t have any kind of substantive representation in the movies. Fukunaga was inspired to make the movie when he learned of a real life 2003 story about 80 illegal immigrants (19 of whom were dead) found in a locked truck abandoned in Texas. While the movie definitely addresses real issues of immigration and borders, it never hammers those over the audience’s head, but instead delivers a really riveting movie whose characters and stories resonate with pulsing cinematic life.

Laced with menace and a strangulating sense of danger from beginning to end, Sin Nombre works like the best of classic film noirs. As in the classic noir Out of the Past, Sin Nombre focuses on its existential male protagonist, Casper, who is hunted down by his past and has doom written all over him. As in classic noirs, Casper made a lot of decisions in life that are destined to haunt him and follow him to death’s door. There is no escaping the past for Casper, and the thrill of the movie comes from the menace of his past hunting him at every turn.  That menace comes in the form of the powerful and violent Mara Salvatruca gang (a real gang) and its leader Lil Mago. Lil Mago looks like the devil himself. His face tattooed with war paint, he is a ferocious leader. Living by the code of loyalty or death, Lil Mago initiates young boys into the gang and punishes liars by ordering them to be violently kicked and beaten for thirteen seconds. A thirteen seconds which seems like an hour when we’re watching it on screen. Lil Mago also attempts to rape and accidentally kills Casper’s girlfriend. He’s not a very nice guy. Not unlike the gangster organizations that populate depression era Hollywood gangster movies, the “mara” offers Casper economic opportunities that he wouldn’t otherwise have in an environment choking with poverty.  The problem is that to take advantage of those opportunities, Casper has to become a bad guy too, and he’s not altogether comfortable with that role. Devastated by the murder of his girlfriend, Casper attempts to flee the gang only to end up confronting them on a freight train and killing Lil Mago when trying to save another girl, Sarya, from being raped. The spiral spins further into doom as gang members seek revenge on Casper. There is no escape for Casper.

(Spoilers ahead.)

The twist on the noir element comes from the female figure. There is no femme fatale in this movie (though there is one bad woman who attempts to trap Casper). Instead there is Sayra, the viriginal teen girl from Honduras who is riding the freight trains with her father and who Casper saves from Lil Mago. Sayra and Casper play against each other setting us up for a romantic salvation narrative. Sayra’s innocence and purity drills into the innocent core of young Casper, and the cards are played so we expect redemption through love. But the film does not allow for such idealized forms of redemption. Leaving redemption through love behind, the film ends with classic noir nihilism showing us that there is no escaping your past as Casper’s past hunts him down and kills him while the innocent Sayra looks on.

More than just a border crossing story, Sin Nombre is an exceptionally well done thriller from an entirely fresh perspective.  It is a thriller about a certain set of characters (namely Casper and Sayra), but the story is framed by a whole community and culture of poverty, violence, and immigration.  Even though the characters are specific, they are projected into a more global framework by literally being framed within a vast population of Mexican and Central American immigrants who populate the screen and the culture of the film. Yes, the movie focuses on Sayra and Casper, but they are always within the context of a larger community as we see them mostly amongst hundreds of immigrants riding the trains. This is why the film functions so beautifully, because it does tell the riveting story of the characters in the film but also the story of all the people they represent. It functions both as narrative cinema (a thriller) and a socio-economic document about the culture it depicts.  

The cinematography in the film is beautifully effective. Shot in rich 35mm film, the movie doesn’t rely on the hand held flash-cut gimmickry of digital video that is so often used by young filmmakers.  The camera takes its time and focuses on what is happening on the screen, and it allows space for the characters to live and breathe in their environment.   Shot on location in Mexico, at times the film feels like documentary realism (the buildings and street culture of the barrio; the small rural towns the trains pass through). At other times the film is a gorgeously surreal art film (the ominous vision of the train yards at night, the intense color saturation).  The fluctuation between the real and the surreal, the pastoral and the apocalyptic, functions just as the movie does. It is both a fictional piece of art film, and it is a document relating real life events and situations. The opening scene is a powerful example of this doubling effect. The screen is filled with a gorgeously hallucinatory forest. Autumn leaves blanket the forest floor with rich reds and oranges. Everything is peaceful and still. We wonder what this beautiful place is and why it is in this movie. Then, the camera pulls away and we see the back of Casper staring into the forest as if he is looking through a window. But as Casper begins to move through the scene, we realize he’s looking at a mural on the wall of his barrio apartment. There is no forest, just walls. He is literally walled in by his environment.

The film is full of these kinds of effective moments that are visually gorgeous but also sublimely apocalyptic.  One of the scenes that carries incredible power comes towards the very end of the film when Sayra and Casper attempt their final crossing into El Norte (America).  Sayra clings to an inner-tube floating on the muddy river as she watches Casper get brutally killed. The camera alternates between Sayra’s face and the scene on the shore where Casper is shot by the young boy Smiley and then pummeled and riddled with bullets by gang members. This scene is not done with pyrotechnics that exploit the violence. It is all seen from a distance, and the distance of the camera somehow makes it so much more effective than if the camera forced us into close-up. Rather than focusing on the specific point of injury through close-up, we are able to pull back and see the entire tragic scene of Casper’s body lying dead in the river. Rather than focusing on the single moment of his death, the camera pulls back and shows us the whole tragic landscape of Casper’s life as we see him doomed in his environment even in this seemingly pastoral riverside scene. The most compelling moment in the scene is when the sun begins to set and we see the form of Casper’s body face down in the river, the water saturated with red from his blood, echoing back to that opening scene of the red forest floor.  Casper himself becomes absorbed into the very landscape that he cannot escape.  

Another moment that is simultaneously huge and small is the scene when Sayra’s father dies. Riding the freight trains, they are suddenly flanked by Border Patrol. The father runs with the rest of the immigrants trying to get away, but he trips and falls between two trains. He disappears just like that. Here one minute. Gone the next. There is no dramatic image of him plummeting to his death, no lingering camera on his mangled remains on the tracks. He just vanishes and dies because this is what happens when people attempt to cross borders. They have accidents. They die. They disappear. Even when Sayra learns of her father’s death, the camera fixes on her face as the death registers, but then she walks off screen. By pulling back from these kinds of traumatic scenes, the film does not buy into sensationalism but instead plays to a classic cinematic portrait of the human experience and allows us room to experience it rather than shoving it down our throats.   

The cinematography alternates between the beauty and expanse of the countryside and the condensed claustrophobic confines of the barrio. On one hand, we see rolling hills and a sea of oak trees. On the other, we get an up close look at the apocalyptic hell of the gang headquarters. In all the environments, the details are rich -- the buildings, graffiti, street scenes, food, and furnishings. The slightest object carries weight and significance because of how the color works and how the camera decides to focus on it. For example, in one scene in the gang headquarters, Lil Mago offers the young boy Smiley something to drink and brings out a half crushed plastic bottle of orange juice. In that one moment when Smiley grabs the bottle, the film encapsulates the conflicting culture of gang life which provides a sense of family bond while also being the source of the very real threat of violence. The image of the juice bottle is seemingly nurturing (the juice) while also being inherently violent and destructive (the crushed bottle). It’s a kiss you and kick you culture.

When Sayra finally arrives in Texas and the cinematography moves to America, it shifts focus yet maintains its tension. Rather than being greeted by the Land of Freedom and Promise, Sayra finds herself in the bleak colorless landscape of institutionalized America. We see her walking across vast stretches of parking lots surrounding a Walmart, a Sears, and a Sam’s Club. Cop cars drive by on the streets and we feel the threat of the police. In fact, America from this view is nothing but commerce and law. In the final scene when Sayra picks up a payphone to call her stepmother, we cannot really feel hope or victory. All we can feel is how she travelled from one hell just to reach another, and all this is accomplished by the quiet landscape of concrete, asphalt, and big box stores.

One of the most stunning visual effects in this movie is the use of trains.  Trains are everywhere in this film.  Kids gather at the train yards in the barrio. The trains sit in the yard like sleeping industrial giants. They hiss to life and cut through the landscape. Trains breathe in and out of these people’s lives. People climb onto the bodies of the trains as if they are riding some giant industrial mammoth. They populate the trains like a colony of insects on the body of a ferocious animal. The train is the body of their migration, the body of their poverty, the body of the motion of their lives that is driving them to do desperate things like ride across the country on top of a freight train while being pummeled by wind, rocks, rain, and tree branches. The trains breathe their steam and hiss with menacing life. Like the gangs, the trains provide a window of opportunity but also a very real threat of death. And these people who ride the tops of freight trains trying to grab a piece of freedom and opportunity are real people, yet they are also invisible freight.  In one scene where dozens of people are congregated on the train tracks, a commercial airplane flies over head. “Ever been in one of those?” Casper asks Sayra. The answer, of course, is no. The world where they are, sitting on the railroad tracks waiting to jump a train,  is impossibly far removed from the passengers with passports and Visas flying in that plane.

In the middle of all this migration narrative is the pulsing threat of the Mara Salvatruca gang culture. This culture is delivered through striking images of gang life as an insulated hell built on brotherhood and the threat of violence. There are a number of unapologetically brutal moments in the film, mostly involving the initiation of the young boy Smiley. Smiley is initiated into his lifetime marriage to the gang through a series of graphic incients. He is first brutally kicked on the street by gang members. Lil Mago then forces him to kill a member of the opposing gang and feed him to the dogs. His final initiation is actually hunting down and killing Casper. 

Some critics like to dismiss the gang representations as being sensational, but gangs do exist and once initiated into a gang there is very little opportunity for escape from that life. The gang offers a sense of cohesion, bonding, ownership, power and opportunity in an economic landscape that provides no opportunities. There are many scenes with Lil Mago holding a baby while ordering murders and threatening violence. To some this may seem over-the-top, but the truth is that many children are born into gangs. I worked closely with Mexican gang teenagers for several years, and I’ve seen firsthand how insulated that culture is and how impossible it is to get out of it. I worked with kids who were indoctrinated from birth. Girls shot up with heroin and pimped at age seven and boys tattooed at age eight. They were born into a world not unlike the one of the baby that Lil Mago holds in his arms.  Some people may think these scenes are melodramatic, but this is real life. It’s just not a life we’re used to seeing in the movies. 

One of the problems with film criticism is that educated “white” people want to ascribe their critiques of cinema to representations of a culture, like Mexican gang culture, that they actually don’t know much about. Mexican gang culture is melodramatic and tragic. It is all consuming. It is coded and inscribed into the body like the very tattoos the gang members sport. It is a lifetime permanent mark that cannot be left behind. You can’t look at it and judge it in relation to Anglo culture. You have to understand that it is a completely different culture, and we cannot use our “white” standards to judge its representation in cinema.

For example, some reviewers have criticized the film for the way the movie reduces all the characters to archetypes – the doomed gang member with his broken heart, the innocent boy corrupted and indoctrinated into violence, the virginal girl, the evil violent gang leader, the estranged father figure – but that’s how Mexican culture functions. Mythic iconography plays a huge role in Mexican culture, and the movie is showing its story through this lens. It is not applying white cinematic standards to how it represents its characters.  For example, in the scene when the train passes a statue of the Virgin of Guadalupe on a hill, everyone stops to cross themselves, hold their prayer books or their rosaries and pray. Some people are inclined to laugh at this scene or dismiss it as being unnecessarily religious, but the Virgin of Guadalupe and this kind of absolute faith in her figure is integral to Mexican culture. It is important to recognize the huge mythic role of Catholicism in Mexican culture and to distinguish it from Euro Catholicism.  It is much more grounded in mysticism and reduced to a kind of pagan iconography. The image of these people praying to the Virgin makes their whole plight seem so much more desperate, that their lives are so consumed by poverty that they have to rely on faith for hope.

It’s amazing how many intellectual critics are so readily willing to dismiss a movie like this for bartering in stereotypes or critique it for its redemptive qualities. There is no winning in the arena of the politically correct. Either you get slammed for not representing a certain group or you get slammed for your representation of the group. We need to discard this prison of the politically correct and appreciate a movie like Sin Nombre for what it is. It is a movie from a fresh young director who actually rode freight trains with immigrants in southern Mexico. It is a film that is not about being white or from a white perspective.  It’s a movie about people who we don’t see in the movies. Take a look at what’s playing at the cineplex, and then take a look at Sin Nombre.  It certainly is a breath of fresh air compared to the vast majority of movies coming out of Hollywood. Consider the context in which Sin Nombre is operating, and then try to judge it. Why is it that a movie that is about the trials and tribulations of people who are not white, such as people trying to escape poverty and violence, is seen as trite and mocked for being melodramatic?  Certainly Hollywood puts out no shortage of schlock about white people dealing with their various crises  -- white people going through divorce, white people recovering from drug and alcohol addiction, white people experiencing childhood trauma, white people with autism, and whatever else white people suffer. Why do we have to denigrate a movie about brown people struggling with their issues, especially when the movie is better made and has much more interesting and innovative cinematography and editing than the vast majority of American movies?

Walking out of the movie theater and seeing the halls plastered with posters of upcoming summer releases, I could really feel how refreshing it was to see Sin Nombre and not have to look at another Judd Apatow movie or another Comic Book Hero on Steroids bursting out of the screen. Besides, Sin Nombre is an excellent piece of filmmaking.

Kim Nicolini is an artist, poet and cultural critic. She lives in Tucson, Arizona with her daughter and a menagerie of beasts. She works a day job to support her art and culture habits. She is currently finishing a book-length essayistic memoir about being a teenage runaway in 1970s San Francisco. She can be reached at: knicolini@gmail.com.

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