Spine 458: El Norte

Gregory Nava's El Norte is a gut-wrenching tale of indigenous teen siblings escaping violence in Guatemala. It tells a story that really hadn't been told before, centering characters whose stories often go ignored even today. But Nava seems reluctant to tell the whole story, to show where the blame lies, to make the connections between the violence Enrique and Rosa are fleeing and the history of colonialism and US foreign policy that put and kept those perpetrating the violence in power. Roger Ebert praised the film for not being political. Ebert is wrong. The film is inherently political, and even if it means to only show the story through the eyes of the siblings experiencing it, those siblings have a political life -- they are fleeing because their father was beheaded for being a labor organizer! -- meaning that Nava's apolitical approach removes a dimension of not just the story, but the people.