A Migrant Girl’s Journey to School

The high school years are rarely easy, but imagine if they were interrupted by a move to another campus, about 1,000 miles away, often more than once per school year. Different friends, different teachers, sometimes entirely different courses of instruction.

For thousands of students in the U.S., such upheaval is a reality, for they are the sons and daughters of field workers compelled by lack of education and other marketable skills to travel to where various harvests occur. Contrary to what you might think, many of these families are longtime U.S. citizens, not recent immigrants.

Director Hannah Weyer’s haunting “Escuela,” airing at 10 tonight on KCET as part of PBS’ “P.O.V.” series, lays out the problems of such a peripatetic life through the eyes of Liliana Luis. Rather than make sweeping statements, the hourlong film simply and effectively presents Luis’ experience, as her Mexican American family bounces between Texas and California.

Whether it’s dealing with the bureaucracy built to accommodate the migration of schoolchildren throughout the Western U.S. or coping with her growing interest in boys, Luis unself-consciously takes viewers through the ups and downs.

Luis occasionally addresses questions posed by Weyer, who shot the film with a small Hi-8 video camera; but mostly Luis simply goes through daily life, with Weyer acting as a fly on the wall. (Despite being fairly taut, the film does go off on one tangent, following a pair of officials searching for two girls who haven’t been attending school.)

In a sense, the film is a sequel to Weyer’s 2000 “La Boda” (“wedding” in Spanish), which examined migrant life through a Luis family wedding celebration. But “Escuela” (“school”) stands on its own as one student’s testament to the trials of adolescence complicated by forces beyond her control.