Between Two Worlds

by Gaetana Caldwell-Smith / April 2009

Cary Fukanaga’s.debut film, "Sin Nombre," starring Edgar Flores and Paulina Gaitan, is an award-winner from Sundance. It is as beautiful as a sunset over water and as ugly as a mangled corpse. Both images, and others even more horrifying, appear in the film, shot by cinematographer Adrian Goldman.

It is a Romeo and Juliet tale that takes place in poverty-stricken Guatemalan and Mexican villages, and travels to the U.S. border at the Rio Grande.

In the villages, jobless young men have little to do but form gangs. Members, dressed in low-slung pants and ribbed, white undershirts, hang out in lush gardens beneath sunlit banana leaves, and in a neglected, overgrown cemetery (ironically, where most of them will end up before their time).

Their tattoos (including on their faces) are stylized letters and numbers, symbols that speak to rites of passage. What money they get is by theft, murder, and extortion.

The Romeo character is El Caspar or Willy, played by Edgar Flores. Juliet is Sayra, (17-year-old actress Paulina Gaitan). Unlike his gang leaders and sidekicks, Willy’s handsome face is not tattooed—except for an identifying teardrop, near the outer corner of an eye—only his torso and arms. Sayra has traveled from Honduras to Guatemala to join her dad and uncle who are simply poor, unemployed men, who plan to ride box cars to the U.S. border, and then make it across, eventually to end up living with relatives in New Jersey.

The story involves Willy’s love for a naïve girl, Diana, outside of his gang, called Mara Salvatrucha (a real gang that was founded in Los Angeles and expanded throughout Central America). In an interview, Fukanaga said that the locals were very open to their filming as he used them in much of the footage.

Diana goes looking for El Caspar and is shown out of their cemetery hangout by the leader, played by Felipe Castro. The leader returns after dark to tell Willy his girl is now with the Devil. Bereft, Willy runs away and ends up in the rail yard, where hundreds of people, including Sayra, her father and uncle, wait for a freight train to take them north. When it comes, they will climb onto the roofs of boxcars.

For verisimilitude, Director Fukanaga joined a group of such travelers and subjected himself to this experience several times. A scene shows El Caspar/Willy using his belt to secure himself so he won’t fall off while sleeping. But Willy’s tear-drop marking gives him away. The itinerants fear him and want to kill him. He keeps to himself as much as possible.

After Willy and Saryra have endured a number of harrowing adventures, they grow close. The gang plans to assassinate them both, and finally catch up to them at a train stop. But a rival armed gang, protecting their own barrio, attacks them, inadvertently saving the couple’s lives. Willy’s story ends as he watches Sayra cross the Rio Grande clinging to an inner-tube, guided by a coyote.

In an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle, Fukanaga emphasized the fact that more immigrants are coming from Central America. They make it to Mexico, continue north, and enter the U.S. Some bring their gang lore with them.

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"Sin Nombre" has some similarities, as well as striking contrasts, with another recent film dealing with immigration, "Crossing Over." The latter, a slick Hollywood product with some suspenseful, gritty scenes, deals with the issue from a relatively mainstream U.S. point of view.

Director Wayne Kramer often oversimplifies in order to piece together the film’s interlocking plot lines, which are carried forward by a varied mix of characters. The film opens with ICE agents, led by Harrison Ford as Max Brogan, storming a sweatshop in Los Angeles’s industrial district and roughing up the mostly brown-skinned workers.

Brogan, gray-haired and weary, has seen so much that rather than becoming jaded, he’s now become a caring human being. He confronts a young Latina, Mireya Sanchez, played by Alice Braga, and employs stock Spanish phrases to communicate with her. She has a little boy she’d left that morning with a baby-sitter. It seems preposterous that an ICE agent would single out and help an undocumented immigrant. But such is Ford’s character, and this is Hollywood.

There is something ominous in watching the U.S. Border Patrol and armed ICE personnel carrying out sneak raids on food-processing plants and racing helter-skelter in Humvees down dirt tracks along the U.S./Mexico border. Sunburned, armed, beefy men—and a few women—chase after and capture men and women who want only to put food on the table.

What is lacking in both films is a look at the political and social climate in their countries, which leaves people so little hope for any kind of a future that they are willing to risk their lives and endure harrowing experiences at the hands of thieves, murderers, and greedy, sadistic coyotes—not to mention persecution by U.S. authorities once they cross the border.