"Brilliantly explores the new social relations emerging in southern California in the wake of mass migration, economic restructuring, and the rapid growth of low-wage labor jobs in the service sector in affluent urban areas. The film envisions and enacts a cross-cultural conversation on vital public issues, a conversation that seems to be taking place nowhere else in our society. The film ´breaks the frame´ of electronic and print media discourses about immigration, compelling us to confront issues of overwhelming public policy importance in fundamentally new ways." — George Lipsitz, Prof. of American Studies, Univ. of California, Santa Cruz
"Provides a much-needed teaching tool for courses that explore the socioeconomic and cultural issues underpinning Mexican and indigenous migration. The film´s ethnographic approach raises important methodological and ethical questions about how we come to know about migrant populations. This is an essential resource for American and ethnic studies, Chicano/Latino studies, and transnational studies. — Chon Noriega, Director and Prof., Chicano Studies Research Center, UCLA
"This is a superb film for use in ethnography, anthropology, and cultural and intercultural studies, indeed in any discipline that deals seriously and critically with questions of politics, civilisation, exploitation, and human ways of being in this world. It prompts deep thought and deep learning in students. It encourages genuine, open exchange and debate, it takes us to the heart of the big questions that enable us to work with our students and ourselves as educators for transformation. It is a truly invaluable resource which opens up exciting possibilities for teaching. Use it with your students and see!" — Dr Alison Phipps, Director, Graduate School for Arts and Humanities, and Senior Lecturer in Anthropology and Intercultural Studies, Univ. of Glasgow, UK
"Not since Paul Taylor and Dorothea Lange´s American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion has a documentary explored as dramatically the social conditions underlying California´s ´imported´ agricultural labor. Deeply insightful and frequently poignant in its use of visual irony, the film provides a contemporary analysis of those few conditions that have changed, and the many more that have not, in the lives of California´s migrant farm workers. Filmmaker John Caldwell himself takes viewers through the camps and into the shacks and their inhabitants, his role much like that of The Great Gatsby´s Nick Carraway, an ambivalent moral register and witness to the culture, unable to pinpoint the blame or to absolve any, including himself, from it." — Jan Goggans, Pacific Regional Humanities Center, Univ. of California, Davis
"An uncompromising inquiry into the lives of the invisible workers in America´s affluent suburban neighborhoods and their plantation culture. As a reflexive documentary of the borderlands, the film dispels romantic postmodern notions of resistance and identity-performance. With impressive coverage and significant insight, the film shows what it truly means for young and dislocated Guatemalan and Oaxacan men, women, and children to live in the hillside shelters while they service the homes some fences apart. Rich metaphors of perseverance, creativity, and domesticity are set next to factual severity of pesticides, denied wages, sexual loneliness, and racism that beset the transnational workers who are stuck with migrancy. This provocative film is rigorous, restrained, powerful, and compassionate all at once." — Esther C.M. Yau, Prof. and Chair, Asian Studies Dept., Occidental College
"Focusing on several migrant Mexican farm worker encampments in southern California, the film observes the social gestures through which the workers, and their nearby neighbors in gated communities, negotiate and enunciate their social roles and relations. Taking its premise one step further, the film focuses on the tortured value system underlying this country´s dualistic approach to its own problems of labor and immigration. The resulting picture is unsettling, revealing a cooperative cultivation of racial identity by landowners and an inexpensive and renewable workforce which comes and goes as if planted and harvested." — Sundance Film Festival Program Guide
"A great film that stands as a sobering, soaring tale of human greed and misery, and the souls that rise above it all." — Dean Treadway, Program Dir., Dahlonega Intl. Film Festival
