http://www.wsws.org/articles/2005/nov20 ... -n12.shtml

The pain you go through in this country to start a new life ...
By Joanne Laurier
12 November 2005


La Ciudad, written and directed by David Riker; Bolivia directed by Adrián Caetano, written by Adrián Caetano and Romina Lafranchini, released on DVD by New Yorker Video

Two films newly released on DVD by New Yorker Video treat the immense hardships immigrant workers face attempting to survive in their adopted countries. US filmmaker David Riker’s critically well-received film, La Ciudad (The City), made between 1992 and 1998, presents four stories about immigrants in New York City. For the work, a fictional film with documentary overtones, Riker assembled a primarily nonprofessional cast drawn from neighborhoods with a strong Latin American immigrant presence.

The first of the stories, “Bricks,� concerns day-laborers who wait on street corners each morning for work. Vehicles stop and contractors or others offer them low wages for back-breaking labor. The competition per job is fierce and the opportunities to work are few.

A truck arrives; a raspy-voiced contractor offers $50 for the day. Among the workers climbing into the truck is a father taking care of his young son. The boy is told to wait, presumably for hours, in a nearby store. Crammed into the back of the truck, the workers are kept in the dark as to where they’ll be going and what they’ll be doing. The camera pans the weary, battered faces of those ‘lucky’ enough to have been picked to earn a few dollars.

The workers are dumped in the middle of nowhere to clean bricks in a deserted industrial site for $0.15 per brick. (“I know I promised you $50, but if you work a little harder you can make twice that amount.�) Hostilities among the members of the crew increase until a wall crumbles and pins one of the younger workers under the rubble. Without a vehicle, and with no phone booth in sight, the laborer’s injuries prove fatal, causing the group to find solidarity in their grief and anger.

Next, in “Home,� the teenage Francisco, newly arrived from Puebla, Mexico, gets lost looking for his uncle’s address. Hearing music, he crashes a Quinceañera (‘sweet fifteen’ birthday party). Francisco is attracted to one of the partygoers, a girl who turns out to be from the same area. Lonely and homesick, she is not long resistant to his charms and offers him a place to stay with her and her uncle.

As they speak more intimately, she tells him of her Mexican relatives’ dependence on the money she earns. “I hope you’ll have good luck,� she says when he describes his plans to make lots of money and have fun. In the early morning, Francisco leaves the apartment while the girl is asleep to get some breakfast for his new love. In an O. Henry-type twist, Francisco’s good fortune vanishes when he can’t find his way back to the girl in the maze of the public housing complex.

“The Puppeteerâ€? vignette presents a few days in the life of a puppeteer and his daughter who live in a beat-up station wagon on the Brooklyn side of the East River. Not able to read English and suffering from tuberculosis, he supports the two of them by performing Punch and Judy shows in empty lots for street kids. After a cop harasses him for camping out on public property, the father tries to register his daughter for schoolâ€â€