Friday, January 01, 2010

Sin Nombre and Civilization

Yesterday I watched the first 75% of Sin Nombre before I finally walked out on it and went upstairs to clean my eyeballs out with some college football. Sin Nombre is the story of Hondurans travelling north to the US. Some are gang members coated in tattoos and hacking people with machetes and some are innocent laborers looking for work. It's a beautifully shot film with terrific acting. The story is well-told and gripping.

I hated it. It made me want to campaign against bilingual education and all the multicultural appreciation days. Inside my head, I was remembering the snippets of the gang documentaries I'd seen on the History Channel where they describe the influx of Mexican and Honduran and other gangs into the US across our porous southern border. I really, really hated it.

Our favorite gang members from the film. Go team!

Rather than go into a long screed on the film, I'll use a single example and do a short screed. The travellers make use of a dilapidated train to get north. They climb to the roof and ride out in the open for days as the thing struggles north. Their use of the train is perfect, if unintended, symbolism for the movie.

They, nor their ancestors, nor anyone living in a society dominated by gangs did not make the train. They did not invent the train. They did not build the factories that manufactured the train. They did not build upon the knowledge of others to develop the sciences of chemistry, physics, mathematics and engineering necessary to build the train. Nor did they do any of these things in relation to the clothes they wore - all machine-manufactured by machines developed somewhere else. In short, all of the fruits of civilization were things created by others that had simply fallen into their laps so the gang members could live lives of raping, looting and killing.

As for the innocent migrants, they were travelling to land where people had created these things for them to enjoy. Without the US as a destination, they'd have had to stay home and been subjected to the cruelties of the gangs. Without the US and the rest of the West in existence, their societies would gradually decay into paleolithic squalor. No thanks were forthcoming from this film.

I'm sure the film was a reasonably accurate portrayal of the immigrants' lives and you felt deeply for them. But there was no sense from anyone involved in this project that they understood the magnitude of the effort required to have provided all of these things for them in the first place and just who had done it. Civilization provided the backdrop, but there was no concept at all of just how fragile and beautiful a thing it is.

7 comments:

Foxfier said...

there was no sense from anyone involved in this project that they understood the magnitude of the effort required to have provided all of these things for them

Bingo!

I'm sure you've seen the newspaper clipping (possibly faked) that has some guy going on a screed about how horrible hunting is, and how those who hunt should go to the store and get meat that no animals had to die to provide?

We don't even pay attention to where our food comes from, mostly; how can we expect people to pay attention to where our technology came from? To the upkeep, even?

I don't think the film should've pointed out which culture developed the stuff-- I think it should've focused on how their culture took it, ran it into the ground and then tried to get another, instead of trying to upkeep what they had and even improve it....

Kelly the little black dog said...

Sounds a bit like the Mongols. They took their science, technology and religion from others.

You overlook the symbiotic relationship between cheap illegal labor and the companies that employ them. A significant portion of our economic growth is based on this source of labor. The gangs that follow them are just unexpected consequence.

An ironic side point, when we were visiting Chile a number of years ago, they were having an illegal immigrant problem with Peru. The situation was identical to here and the reaction by the Chileans virtually the same. Labor migrates to where the jobs are. It always has.

K T Cat said...

Kelly, I certainly can understand that labor migrates to where the jobs are, I'm just hungering for some more discussion of why the jobs are there in the first place.

K T Cat said...

Foxie, that was another thing I was thinking. The train in the movie was run-down. How hard is it to maintain boxcars, fer cryin' out loud.

Ohioan@Heart said...

KT,

This is parasites attacking an otherwise established organism (i.e., civilization).

Completely parallels my previous comment w.r.t. those that destroy/exploit established systems, without doing anything that will maintain them.

Darwin is clear on what happens to those systems. Nature is red in tooth and claw.

Foxfier said...

I wonder if trying to foster a place where they can make their own jobs mightn't be better.... I know you can really get my dad going about how very basic technology (as in applied science-- this includes crop rotation, etc) can make a HUGE increase in farm or ranch yields, and he's still learning.
(About a decade ago he heard that folks had been able to avoid night births {bad, when it's freezing} in their cattle by changing the feeding time-- it worked.)

Thing is, even if we could somehow apply this technology in the area these folks are in, there's no support structure to make sure they get to keep it. Gotta have a defense against human wolves-- be it well-armed farmers, an honest police force, or a well maintained army.

Foxfier said...

Read this and it put me in mind of this post.

Mostly where it says "NOTE: Normal people do not build roadblocks out of corpses."