From the Other Side
More than 25 years ago, when I was living in a beachside bungalow in a suburb of San Diego, I eventually realized that the bungalow across the alley was a halfway house for Mexicans who’d just made it across the border. I had to figure this out on my own because none of my neighbors ever even alluded to the place or what it was. The constant arrival and departure of new faces was perfectly obvious yet completely unacknowledged–in fact, everything in the surrounding elysian landscape seemed to encourage one not to observe it.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
The denial there wasn’t complete, but with respect to the homeless people I encountered when I lived in Santa Barbara a few years later denial was all but obligatory: no one, after all, had any reason to go looking for the homeless. I’d grown up in Alabama, where perception of servants was similarly peripheral but the ghettos were less camouflaged. The Californians had a different way of expressing their xenophobia: they smiled cheerfully at everyone and everything in the style of Santa Barbara’s most famous resident, Ronald Reagan, without allowing themselves to see much of the pain or desperation in their midst. Some of the restaurant owners in downtown Santa Barbara used to lace their garbage cans with poison to keep away the homeless. Not out of malice, they were careful to explain, but simply out of consideration for their customers, who wanted to enjoy their meals in peace.
Some reviewers regard From the Other Side, showing this week at the Gene Siskel Film Center, as the third part of a documentary trilogy dealing with specific localities, preceded by From the East (D’est) (1993) and South (1999). Akerman’s painterly eye for landscapes and her penchant for calmly traversing spaces in cars is apparent in all three, yet the differences between these films are much more important than the similarities.
Akerman begins the film by interviewing a 21-year-old Mexican on the Mexican side of the border about his older brother; he tried to cross to the U.S. with a group, and all of them eventually perished in the desert. Next she focuses on portions of the border itself–a wide, dusty road, a field where three kids play baseball, and another road flanked by a high wall. Then she interviews Delfina, a woman in her late 70s, about her family, including the son and grandson she lost when they tried to cross the border. Her husband less stoically bemoans their loss. Akerman then turns back to the various landscapes along the border.
