Watch ‘The Wall’ Documentary
As Uncle Hugh used to say, “Ain’t no tailors in th’ legislature.”
Ricardo Martinez picked his way through a broiled Gulf tilapia surrounded by chicken fried Texans and animated border stories conjured by the West Coast-New Yorker’s new film.
As Uncle Hugh used to say, “Ain’t no tailors in th’ legislature.”
Ricardo Martinez picked his way through a broiled Gulf tilapia surrounded by chicken fried Texans and animated border stories conjured by the West Coast-New Yorker’s new film.
“The Wall” is a smorgasbord look at the politically rubbed-raw American immigration issue as varied and personal as the South Texas cuisine crushing the Kingsville bar table spread in front of Martinez.
He didn’t sample the dead cow slathered in library paste or the tacos al cabrón (pun intended), but he savored the experience shared with those of us who did, tolerated our indulgence, wondered at our wild appetites.
Exactly the way his film marvels at the horror and humanism along the Mexican-U.S. border.
Reared in Oakland, educated at NYU, Ricardo Martinez exhibits an openness in his film virtually unknown to an audience that sucks up to Michael Moore.
“I try to let people be who they will be,” he told a class of would-be story-tellers who had just made him their new hero. “I tell them that even though I may not agree with them personally, I want to give them the opportunity to tell the truth from their point of view.”
“The Wall” is a documentary.
It is no demonstration, no plea, no advocacy.
Rather, we watch a windshield tour of the 1,300-mile strip of purgatory between anticipation of salvation and acquiescence to despair, between lives in desolation and the United States of America.
We stop off for a visit with some graying, paunchy gun-toting “Minute Men,” lost souls pointing their cold, dead fingers toward the maw of hell, irrelevant and impotent unless they get in the way of the mastication.
“What’s wrong with being White?” asks their reality-show-run-amok spokeswoman, clinging dubiously to here contention that America is a White, Christian nation… and Jews, she concedes, clumsily deferring to Martinez, who she thinks must fall into some acceptable ethnicity.
After all, he can pronounce “cheese” and “chair” like a Native New Yorker.
We pass by the chewed-up, desiccated remains of those driven into the desert by the border wall, fallen on the pilgrimage to drive nails in Nashville or screed concrete in Cleveland.
We glimpse the gangs of one-time drug smugglers who have found it easier to prey on the scrimpings of immigrants, ironically victims of their illegal declaration by a legal system .
Martinez leaves it up to us to decide the moral dilemma of outlawing a man willing to ride freights and trek the desert for the dispensation of hanging drywall.
We follow a 40-year veteran sheriff along that wall, a man who “has seen three generations come out of a manhole” trying to get under, over, around, through it.
If there is an answer to the bitter riddle of the border, Martinez said, it is to let those who wrestle with it along the line; those usually the last consideration of American immigration “policy.”
Even in victory, the story of a woman whose legal battles drove Homeland Security out of her backyard, the family that saved its golf course from being walled off from his snowbird Yankee customers, of the cities and counties willing to tax themselves to build Rio Grande flood plain levees that the wall builder bureaucrats would have leveled, the defeat of a proposed 24-hour surveillance tower threatening to hold a small town under a federal microscope, the wall snakes its way across our path and leaves us, as we leave the theater, with a lingering, insoluble interrogative.
Can humanity live in a policy of exclusion?
To date this year, federal officials reported more than 1,200 breaches of the Mexican border wall.
For a showing of “The Wall,” go to .
