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.