A Worthwhile Journey Along ‘The Border’

The agreement giving rise to the modern U.S.-Mexico border turned the landmark age of 150 last year with scant mention in either country.

It’s an uncomfortable anniversary, to be sure. The treaty that redrew the boundary, giving shape to a new American Southwest, ended a two-year war that cost Mexico half of its national territory.

The zone where the two nations meet has pulsed with turmoil and drama ever since--as setting for the U.S. military’s pursuit of Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa, as corridor for contraband of every sort and as backdrop for polarizing political debates over the movement of people from Third World to First World and back again. Border towns such as Tijuana have been cast in enduring but limited roles in the popular imagination. There’s the film noir den of mystery and sin, the kitschy theme park of blankets and Bart Simpson figures, the dusty frontier outpost far from Mexico’s cultural heart.

Even as Tijuana sprouts movie megaplexes and Office Depot-type stores to serve a thriving middle class, the old stereotypes don’t topple easily. And they seldom surrender to a frontal assault. Filmmaker Paul Espinosa opts for a more subtle approach in a new PBS documentary called “The Border” that attempts an image make-over for the 2,000-mile region through a handful of quirky stories you’re not likely to encounter on the evening news.

The two-hour program, which airs tonight on KCET, offers vignettes on varied subjects, from a retirement community in south Texas to a troupe creating a theater production in San Diego, in trying to get viewers to think anew about the border region. From its opening sequences, the documentary rejects the usual staples of border coverage--such as drug trafficking and illegal immigration--and plays up economic and cultural changes that have turned the border into a place “where the future of both countries is being determined.”

The documentary, co-produced by Espinosa and KPBS-TV in San Diego, consists of six separate segments done in the style of the network newsmagazine. (The studio host is John Quinones of ABC’s “20/20.”) Espinosa, a veteran San Diego documentary maker, produced two segments, which open and close the program. The other pieces were done by producers in the remaining U.S. border states: Texas, New Mexico and Arizona.

What results is an idiosyncratic journey to border spots that surprises and disappoints in almost equal doses. The digest style of “The Border” makes for a presentation that is accessible but too often superficial and in need of a unifying theme.

In the lead segment, Espinosa looks at how the filming of “Titanic” at a new 20th Century Fox studio affected the beach city of Rosarito in Baja California. The piece is largely favorable, noting that the film was a boon to Rosarito’s economy and image, and aided a nascent push to make the area a filming hub. But the segment sagely asks whether this budding industry will end up a new version of the cheap-labor maquiladora, the foreign-owned assembly plants that have multiplied along the border since the 1960s.

Espinosa’s other piece, an engaging visit with the Latino comedy troupe Culture Clash, delves into similar tensions over cross-border relations in San Diego and Tijuana, and the tricky matter of who gets to stamp an identity on a region that is shared and divided at once.

Also noteworthy is a segment by Albuquerque producer Matthew Sneddon on the severe water shortage facing the twin cities of El Paso and Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. It focuses on the struggles of a maquiladora worker and his family, who live in a shantytown outside Ciudad Juarez and depend on weekly water shipments to survive. A tedious ritual is the constant cleaning of storage barrels to ensure the family’s paltry water supply stays free of contamination and disease.

The urgency of those pieces is missing from a portrait of south Texas residents who for decades have sought to reclaim land they say was stolen from ancestors after the U.S.-Mexican War. The story brims with poignancy and outrage. (Under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the U.S. government was to safeguard lands the forebears were granted by Mexico and Spain. It didn’t, we are told repeatedly.) Lacking is an opposing viewpoint, if one exists, or an explanation for why this issue drags on. And why we’re watching it now.

A quaint segment on the thousands of snowbirds who flock to south Texas each winter manages to find tension by contrasting their carefree days with the hard lives of migrant U.S. farm workers who flock home to the same border area each winter between harvests. But it spends far more time with the shuffleboard crowd than with the migrants, and the theme of disparate treatment is never fully developed.

Drugs and illegal immigration crop up in a piece on the travails facing the Tohono O’odham tribe. Members of the Sonoran Desert nation, split by the U.S.-Mexico border as it runs through Arizona, have trouble traversing their traditional lands due to tightened border enforcement by U.S. authorities in recent years.

No two-hour documentary can capture the diversity and dynamism of a region of at least 12 million inhabitants stretched from the Pacific Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico. Growth alone is dizzying; demographers predict the border population could nearly double by 2020, raising worries about water supplies and the environment. Booming trade due to NAFTA and a new global market has converted the border from an afterthought to a more central concern in both nations. That’s why people far from the border need to know all they can about it. They will need accounts of such life-and-death issues as, yes, migration and drugs, and more intimate depictions of the border’s daily rhythms. A good example of the latter, “The Border” is a worthwhile place to join the journey.

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* “The Border” airs tonight at 9 on KCET. The network has rated it TV-G (suitable for all ages).