Her pueblo point of view

THE community house at the center of this little pueblo is a spare, whitewashed room. Hand tools and bags of cement are stacked high at one end. Rows of simple, plastic seats line the concrete floor. The only thing looking out of place in this country setting is the DVD projector.

Silver Lake filmmaker Yolanda Cruz stands at the front of the room and introduces her film “Suenos Binacionales” (Binational Dreams) to the locals who have come out on this rainy night. The audience of Zapotecans is overwhelmingly made up of seniors and children: Almost no one in the audience appears to be between the ages of 18 and 60. It’s a reflection of their village, where many of those old enough to work have long since left for the United States. It’s also a phenomenon Cruz herself knows well. She grew up in a mountainous region less than 150 miles away. Her community too has seen its pueblos empty out as the young residents migrate to the U.S. in a quest for work.

What happens to them and the communities they leave behind is a profound and personal concern of Cruz’s -- and the subject of her film.

Made with the support of the Rockefeller Foundation, “Binational Dreams” is a 30-minute documentary that follows two groups of Oaxacan migrants -- one group in California, the other in North Carolina. In stark terms, it captures the enormous sacrifices they make in migrating, telling stories such as that of a young mother who leaves behind her village, culture and even her child to work as a hotel maid.

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Bringing film to the people

CRUZ, 31, stands about 5 feet, and her face is framed by long black hair that she laughingly says she should braid more often. The laugh lights up her face, conveying equal measures of confidence and charm. In conversation with Cruz, one more thing quickly becomes apparent -- she is powerful, in a manner of someone quite sure of herself.

Cruz had flown to southern Mexico earlier this month to screen her film as part of the eighth International Indigenous Film Festival. In addition to the program in Oaxaca, 80 special screenings were held in tiny villages across southern Mexico in a unique effort to bring the films to indigenous people who might never have any other opportunity to see them. The village to which Cruz has journeyed is high in the Sierra Norte, perched on a narrow ridge top just wide enough for the community house, a 17th century church and the dirt road that winds past.

Cruz’ film devotes considerable time to villages such as this one that have been left behind. It confronts the reality that there is little economic opportunity in the pueblos, where most of the work is subsistence farming and storefront shops that typically generate too little income to support a couple, much less a family. Just as real, it shows how migration drains the villages’ most important resource -- their people -- straining individuals, community and culture.

Cruz allows her subjects to tell the story in their own words. But the perspective is uniquely hers, a reflection of someone with an intimate knowledge of both sides of the border. The result is a film that is not a polemic about legal and illegal immigration. It is a statement about just how difficult the choices are.

“The film is meant to question, not provide definitive answers,” Cruz says. “Both sides of the border are changing, that’s a fact. So let’s look at what those changes mean.”

As interested as she is in the immigration debate unfolding in the U.S., her focus is on a decidedly grass-roots level. Organizing is a theme that comes up in most of her films. Not coincidentally, she grew up in the house of a community activist.

Cruz was born in Cieneguilla, a tiny pueblo in the region occupied by the Chatino Indian community. Cruz is Chatina herself. The village was founded and literally organized by her father, who went on to become an activist working for Chatino rights. Her family moved to the city of Oaxaca when she was 6. But they always maintained a strong connection to the village, going back whenever they could. At 15, her life suddenly changed when her father emerged one evening from a community meeting in a nearby city, and was shot to death. The killer was widely presumed to be a hired gun. But justice proved elusive, and the family had the much more immediate concern of surviving. When her older sister married and moved to Washington state, Cruz went with her.

Within a few years, she enrolled at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash., and like her father she was drawn to political activism and indigenous people’s rights. But while taking a class on Russian cinema, she was struck by the ability of films to express political values.

“I realized that film was a great tool to organize,” she says. She moved on to UCLA’s film program, and found a large community of Oaxaquenos -- sometimes called OaxaCalifornians -- all migrants from her home state now living in Los Angeles. Many were thinkers, artists, teachers, activists -- settling among them was a natural fit for her. It also helped inform her films, which from the beginning have largely focused on the unique issues facing Mexican Indians.

Her student film, “Entre Suenos” (Within Dreams), selected to screen as part of the Sundance Film Festival’s “Native Visions” category in 2000, was a meditation on an indigenous woman seeking her identity. Her master’s project followed a Zapotecan who worked in Los Angeles as a gardener and returned to his hometown to host the feast day festival, the most important event of the year in his village.

“Binational Dreams” grew naturally out of these themes of migration and what Cruz terms “transnationalism” -- people who have two national and cultural identities.

Nevertheless, the anchor of the film is the very place Cruz has been returning to since her childhood -- the village.

In fact, she first screened “Binational Dreams” in her village. It caused a great deal of excitement, and when it was over, the audience asked to see it again, and then again.

“Mostly, they just wanted to catch a glimpse of their family, friends or neighbors, sometimes just to see, sometimes to tease.”

Since then, the film has increasingly found an audience, particularly among university groups that are using the documentary to illuminate the plight of migrants at a time when the nation has been swept up in the immigration debate.

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The primary audience

CRUZ is glad for her American viewership. But she maintains that the primary audience for “Binational Dreams” has always been those who live in the small villages and towns of Mexico, from which so many immigrants come. (When it was shown in Mexico City, the idea of migrating seemed foreign to some. “Mexico City is a place where people from the villages go, it’s not a place from where many people leave,” Cruz said.)

But it’s hard to get a film to the pueblos, which are often remote and rarely have a movie theater or any way to project a film.

This is why she’s so pleased to be showing her film at the annual festival held in this decidedly rural community, an event that is the brainchild of one of the organizers, Guillermo Monteforte.

“It’s easy to have a festival in the city,” Monteforte says, “But these films need to reach the people they’re about.”

Cruz is eager to see how this village audience will react.

When the film ends she quickly stands and, instead of waiting for comments, begins asking the audience members what they thought of the film.

“It’s sad,” says an older woman, Felipa Juarez. She has a brother who has been in the U.S. for 10 years. She said that although there’s only fieldwork to be had in their village, migrants are suffering beneath the weight of their decision to pursue jobs in America. “People are coming back,” she says.

Cruz asks if anyone has family or friends in the U.S., and most people raise their hands. One young man says he wants to go there himself. Another older man, Facundo Cruz (no relation to Yolanda), says that he was in the U.S. as a bracero -- a permitted worker -- in 1944.

“It’s the first time I’ve seen this kind of film,” he says. “I’d like more to come.” After the screening, Yolanda Cruz repairs to a spare taqueria with plastic tables and a bare floor. While a Sylvester Stallone movie plays loudly on the restaurant’s largest asset -- a television -- she digs into a tostada and discusses her next projects. One is a documentary on women and immigration, another on Mexican-against-Mexican racism. She is also at work on a drama that is set, not surprisingly, in her village. Her thoughts often return to village life, as they do when Cruz reflects on the evening’s screening.

“It was great to show it here. For this audience, it is not something foreign,” she says. “In other places, people say, ‘Oh, your language sounds like Chinese.’ ” (Chatino, like many indigenous languages in Oaxaca, is tonal.) “We may be different tribes, but we have many similarities.”

When asked what she considers her home, she thinks, but only for a moment.

“My village is home. So is L.A.,” said Cruz, who became a U.S. citizen two years ago.

“Home is wherever there are a lot of people like me.”