Few topics inflame political passions like immigration, but don't expect polemics from "Los Que Se Quedan" ("Those Who Remain"), a Mexican documentary screening Saturday evening at the Los Angeles Film Festival in Westwood.
The film examines the phenomenon of those left behind in the home countries, in this case the countless families enduring the emptiness and melancholy that inevitably follows the departure of loved ones for el norte.
The filmmakers, Juan Carlos Rulfo and Carlos Hagerman, spent almost a year documenting this often-overlooked aspect of immigration. Providing financing was the Bancomer Foundation, which sponsors scholarships for young people in Mexico whose parents work in the United States.
The decision to emigrate has always been an equivocal issue for struggling families. Income earned abroad generates material gains. But the ineffable sense of loss of identity certainly takes a toll.
The filmmakers followed nine families from various parts of rural Mexico, a place deeply transformed by the migratory flow.
A teenage girl, Yaremi, from the state of Jalisco, implores her visiting father, Rodolfo, not to go back to the United States. She is challenging his very way of life, pleading for a unified family rather than one with a spectral father who sends money, is a voice on the telephone and appears from time to time. She dreads his next departure.
"What will I give you to eat?" the troubled father asks his daughter, envisioning his family's uncertain future tied to a dodgy cucumber harvest in the rocky soil.
Gloria and Gerardo, from Michoacan, have spent years in a quasi-separated status as Gerardo worked assorted jobs in the U.S. But Gloria, expecting her third child -- all conceived during Gerardo's visits -- is tiring of the routine.
"What's the point of having a family?" Gloria wonders.
Gerardo knows no other life. He scoffs at staying behind and surviving on a miserly wage. The cycle of immigration has trapped him, and everyone else around him.
On some level, all of these who have left seem to recognize they have lost something profound. Francisco, a wizened horseman from Zacatecas who worked in America for more than two decades, is content that he returned for the final years of his beloved father's life. He lovingly displays a rodeo ring built to honor the old patriarch.
Pascual and Juanita, an elderly farming couple in Puebla, reminisce about three children who left years earlier. "Sometimes I'll sit there with my sewing and think about my children," she muses, "how far away they are."
Providing a kind of climax is the story of Marisela, a mother of four from Yucatan whose husband awaits her in California. She considers undertaking the dangerous trip to the border and beyond. Meantime, her daughter, Evelyn, prepares for her First Communion, reveling in a familiar world of close-knit family and small-town values. Marisela's children will have a father in the north, but not this precious sense of belonging someplace.
It is the quandary faced by millions in this era of transnational migration, a global dilemma captured deftly in this subtle piece of filmmaking.
patrick.mcdonnell@latimes.com
