Life in the land of the Yankees III: Yonderland

La ciudad (The City) 1998 United States (88 minutes) directed by David Riker.

The ‘ciudad’ of the title is New York, but it is an immigrant’s outerborough New York: famous, glamorous Manhattan is always in the distance, a skyline on the other side of the river with far-away subway trains running in and out of it.

This four-part dramatic feature was shot in a six-year period in the mid-1990s in New York’s Latin American communities using nonprofessional actors. It contrasts immigrant fantasies of living in the United States with the simple realities that each character faces trying to survive and find work in huge, impersonal, foreign New York City, far from the rural areas of Mexico and Central America they know.

Each of the four parts tells a different story, beginning with its main character or characters having a portrait taken in a storefront photography studio facing an elevated subway line. The portraits’ subjects are shot in studio-provided ‘nice clothes’, such as a jacket and tie for the men, against a fanciful painted backdrop of a northern lake or western mountains, not unlike nineteenth century portrait photography. In one instance, a man who wants to enroll his young daughter in school in order to learn to read has her portrait made with her holding a pencil over two open books.

In ‘Bricks,’ the first story, the protagonist is one of ten men picked from a gaggle on an outerborough street corner, each of whom an unnamed ‘Italian’ promises $50 a day to do manual work. The story unfolds after ‘The Italian’ transports the group in a windowless panel truck to clean and stack bricks from the rubble of a demolished industrial site on the Hudson River in New Jersey, across the river from Manhattan.

In ‘Home,’ a young Mexican new to the city, trying to find his uncle, ends up at a wedding reception that feels like home and meets a girl from his village.

In ‘The Puppeteer,’ a man with tuberculosis lives in a car with his daughter in a desolate waterfront area in Brooklyn and puts on puppet shows to raise money from fellow immigrants; he wants to get his daughter enrolled in a city school to learn to read.

And in ‘Seamstress,’ a Salvadoran woman working as a seamstress in a Korean-owned sweat shop finds out that her daughter back home is ill and needs $400 to pay for her medical expenses. The Korean owners stop paying their workers, who stay on the job for weeks without pay for fear of losing their places.

The film gives human faces to the issues and rhetoric of immigration. By putting the characters in situations familiar to viewers, or at least not hard to imagine, it finds a common humanity in the artless plainness and homeliness of these faces and suggests that when we look beyond cultural assumptions and stereotypes we can begin to see ourselves.