A screening at Day Worker Center of Mountain View

The message of La Americana helps to deepen and broaden understanding of the immigrant experience, across and within communities.  This message was central for viewers at the screening held at the Day Worker Center of Mountain View, CA.

One of the most important messages the staff and volunteers at the Day Worker Center try to convey to workers there is that the fight they are engaging in is not one they are engaging in by themselves.  “Hope and a renewable sense of challenge and triumph is something the immigrant rights movement has to maintain. Sharing our personal stories and insights, though they may individually contain tragedies and disappointments, helps to create that sense of community we need in these strange, tense times,” said screening organizer, Day Worker Center volunteer and student, Natalie Ramirez.

“The Day Worker Center of Mountain View is first and foremost a non-profit working to uphold standards of dignity and respect we know the jornaleros in our community deserve. I think La Americana illustrates perfectly the strong, heroic character those of us in this movement see everyday, but which still needs to be conveyed to the American public at large.”

The screening audience held a discussion afterward which touched on such themes as general and generational motivations behind immigration, the limbo and uncertainty of “ownership” while undocumented, the “American Dream” as theory, and the immigrant as a professional of many trades by necessity.

Even among the immigrant workers, themselves, the film was a wonderful tool for building understanding of the range and the universality of the immigrant experience.   “I felt it was beneficial to show other stories of immigrants in the United States as a whole since a lot of the jornaleros we work with may only be conscious of the immigrant environment in California,” said Ms. Ramirez.  “We shared our opinions, histories, and our vision for the future with one another- very productive.”

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