There's virtually nothing made up in 'The Immigrant.' So much of the film came from somewhere in my family's past. All the details are from my own family.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Yes, I am a Mexican, and I have a past and a culture. But what matters is the film itself, not where it was financed or cast.
There just aren't enough positive portrayals of Latino life in film.
It's true that immigrant novels have to do with people going from one country to another, but there isn't a single novel that doesn't travel from one place to another, emotionally or locally.
'The Immigrant Story,' which took me about twenty-five years to write, was a very simple story, but I couldn't think of how to tell it. Then twenty years after I started it, I found this one page and realized it was going to be the story. That's the only way you get it sometimes.
American literature has always been immigrant.
One of the great pluses of being an immigrant is you get to start again in terms of your identity. You get to shed the narratives which cling to you.
In 2009, I edited, under the aegis of the Library of America, an anthology called 'Becoming Americans: Immigrants Tell Their Stories from Jamestown to Today.' It featured immigrants from different backgrounds, from black slaves like Phillis Wheatley to Yiddish-language speakers like Henry Roth.
There is no doubt that this film is autobiographical, but at the same time it also tries to portray an ordinary couple in a language that everyone can understand.
The popular story is that America was built by immigrants and that, therefore, everything about immigration is good and leads to a more successful society. This narrative is so devoid of historical context that it should embarrass anyone beyond a second-grade education.
All American fiction could be classified as immigrant fiction.