Guillermo Arriaga at the Baker Institute.
The U.S.-Mexico border is not only about drugs and immigration. There are also tales of love, violence and cruelty, hope and desire, friendship, and of redemption and criminality, according to Mexican screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga. It is easy to lose track of this humanity when so much of the news and perceptions about the border are formed from afar and clouded by politics, he told an audience during a recent Baker Institute lecture.
Arriaga, whose novels and screenplays include “Amores Perros” and “Babel,” grew up in Mexico City. His first border crossing was at age 8, from Tijuana to Disneyland. He crossed again at age 12, and recalls being in complete amazement at the ability to have one foot in Mexico and one in the United States.
In the 1970s, he says, border town commerce consisted of locally owned mom-and-pop stores. The economic upheaval of the 1980s altered the landscape to one dominated by pharmacy, hotel and restaurant chains. The impact of these border changes are a theme in Arriaga’s movies, particularly “The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada.”
The film’s key character is named after one of Arriaga’s friends, Melquiades Estrada. In real life, Melquiades and his two brothers, Lucio and Pedro, poor ranchers in northern Mexico, illegally cross the border because of the deteriorating Mexican economy situation and their inability to make a living. In the United States, each struggles to learn a new language and different customs, though they do not all stay. For Melquiades, the inability to travel back-and-forth between the two countries means that nine years pass before he sees his family again.
Arriaga said he understands the fear some Americans feel when suddenly finding themselves surrounded by people who do not speak their language and who have a different cultural and historical background. However, he notes, it was the push by the United States and other first-world nations to open borders and economies that led the way to the movement of people — including the flow of immigrants across the U.S.-Mexico border. And, just like Americans, these Mexicans are also frightened.
Acknowledging the humanity on both sides of the border is difficult, Arriaga told the audience. He cites the indigenous phrase, mamil anatapei, which means a man and a woman sitting facing each other but unable to express their deep feelings for each other. Instead, they talk about something trivial like a soccer match. It is a moment of vital importance that is lost. Arriaga invites us to face up to that moment so it doesn’t slip away.
View the Nov. 12, 2009, webcast, “The Mexico-U.S. Border Through the Lens of a Screenwriter.”
Lisa Guáqueta is the project administrator for the Latin American Initiative at the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy. Her areas of research interest include the urban dynamics of Latin America, especially the role of cities and local governments in international issues. She studied economics at Universidad Externado de Colombia and holds a master’s degree in international affairs from The New School in New York.