Review of "Which Way Home"

“Which Way Home” is a documentary directed and produced by Rebecca Cammisa that deals with the plight of migrant children as they make their journey to the United States. The phenomenon is by no means recent, and is as old as the epic of migration. It is colored by the pain of separation, and the deep feeling of abandonment that leads to guilt on the part of parents and deep feelings of inadequacy that can lead to bitterness on the part of the children. The director includes interviews with the children, but what makes it novel is the fact that this documentary is also structured as an adventure story.

In this film we follow the journey of two migrant children from Central America. They are Kevin and Fito, and they are from a small town in Honduras. They seem to be undertaking the journey in good spirits, and seem fully as boisterous and optimistic as any children their age would be, undaunted as they are by the risks they have assumed. There is no doubt that this is a perilous journey, one that involves passage on top of the notorious “Bestia”, the name that has been given to the freight trains in Mexico that travel the length of Mexico.

This “Bestia” has become part of the mythology of migration for many. These trains leave from the border region with Guatemala, and they are infused with a sense not only of hope but also dread. One imagines that trains were similarly viewed here in the United States in an earlier epoch of our history, when the movement west was one that represented, as the movement north to the United States does to these migrants, a hope for a new beginning.

However, along with the hope comes the prospect as well of danger and threats. It is a perilous journey in which many migrants struggle to climb aboard and hold on. The viewer has a visceral sense of these threats in the way in which these people scramble to hold on to the sides of moving trains, and climb aboard them and are forced to be on the watch for vegetation such as the branches of trees that threaten to knock them off. There are also, of course, the unexpected starts and stops of the trains that seem to snort and buckle the way a horse does, thus helping to explain the alternate name “Caballo” .

The human danger is just as prevalent, although one can earnestly believe that the presence of a camera crew worked to afford these children a protective shell. For other migrants, there is always the prospect of encounters with thieves and sexual predators, and indeed, many migrants lose everything long before they reach the border. It is a perilous journey, one that would seem terrifying to an adult but that somehow seems unreal to the children.

Kevin and Fito at times play up to the camera. It is unsettling to see them clinging to a side hold on the train as it passes over steep hillsides, and to see them nonchalantly approaching Mexican families to beg for food to eat. It is an adventure for them, and they open up to the camera crew, confessing quite candidly that their motivation resides not only in a wish for reunification with a missing parent, but also, from dysfunctional family dynamics. They both confess to having felt rejected by their parents, and in a way this journey is an escape that is part of a painful process of adolescent crisis.

The journey is long, and we are left to wonder how far they will reach. It seems even from the beginning that they are living on borrowed time, and this helps to create a sense of latent danger. How far will they get, and is there tragedy awaiting them?  Given the way in which they have built up the American Dream and their eager wish for accepting families and material comfort, is seems that their wishes inevitably will be dashed, for how can reality hope to measure up?

After a series of rendezvous, the camera crew loses track of the children, only to find them again at a later moment.  The worst has not happened. Kevin, the chubby and ebullient youngster who seemed to be the leader of this group that came to include as well two Mexican boys (Jairo and the “Dog”), manages to make it to the border and turns himself in. Fito somehow makes it back without reaching the border. The “Dog”, sadly, returns to Chiapas and picks up his prior lifestyle as a niño gamin, those that inhabit the streets and live by petty thievery and glue-sniffing.

The film, of course, touches upon the experience of other selected individuals. It is, of course, heart-breaking to see children who have been detained by immigration authorities, abandoned at times by their smugglers, and awaiting repatriation to families that, in a real sense, have no place for them. Migration has become a safety-valve not only for economic migrants but for those whose problems derive from psycho-social circumstances, and we can’t underestimate the degree to which spiritual poverty, for lack of a more adequate term, leads to migration.

Both the children when repatriated as well as their parents are enjoined by the authorities to repair their own family relationships. It is, of course, evident to all to see that these reunions mask deeper problems. These children have, in a sense, already been abandoned, and it is only a matter of time before they leave on the eternal quest to start their own families, ones that will offer them the emotional support that they receive , for example, from the film crews that followed and interviewed them, shielding them from the worse aspects of this journey to the north.

We have no firm statistics on the number of deaths, and one of the leaders of a refugee center in Mexico asserts that between 10 and 20 percent of migrants will perish on this journey north. He earnestly warms them that if this journey is a dangerous passage, then the North, “El norte”, is death itself. It is a dramatic warning, and none of the migrants is quite prepared to understand what it will mean to run the risk of being kidnapped by drug gangs, as happens frequently, and possibly massacred, or to run the risk of crossing a dangerous desert. What do they know of deserts, they who come from tropic homelands?

In the end, Kevin does make a second journey, and he does end up in Washington, wishing, as the film informs us, to be adopted by an American family. Where, indeed, is he to find his home? It isn’t in the countries he left behind.  And that is one of the psychological effects of migration, for the journey itself and the illusion of the “dream” unsettles them, perhaps permanently.  It is to be expected that it will serve as the groundwork for a powerful nostalgia that will affect them the way it affects all of us as we grow older, for we never stop believing in the power of illusions.



Eternal Observer -- ORomero (c) 2013
Copyrights ORomero 2013