Bill 187 of the American State of California states that children of »illegal aliens« have no right to education and health benefits. Filmmaker Laura Angélica Simón works as an immigrant teacher at a school that accomodates many illegal pupils, mostly economic and political refugees from Mexico, Guatemala and El Salvador. The Hoover Elementary school is situated right on the borderline between rival gang territories within the Pico Union neighborhood, the »Ellis Island« of Los Angeles and its poorest community. It is also the city’s black market, with guns, drugs and fake green cards readily available, and with L.A.’s highest homicide rate. Simón talked to fellow-teachers and their pupils. By doing so, she was able to expose the racial disparities from the inside. The film centres around the emotional story of a ten-year-old girl from El Salvador. Supporters and opponents of Bill 187 express their views. Thus the dissents within the school population and the entire American society are clearly revealed.
»I was born in Mexico. When we came to the United States, I didn’t realize we had gone to another country until I went to school. Suddenly, everyone around me was dressing differently. Everyone around me was speaking a different language. The hardest thing was being called a wetback. On the way home from school, I remember, literally how kids would yell at me and my mother: ‘Wetback, wetbacks!’. And these little kids knew how to say it in Spanish: ‘Mojados go back’ and it was very painful. Not so much for me, but for my mother. Those words took away all her dignity, all her self-esteem, all her entire sense of meaning. And I didn’t have the language to defend her. I wanted to have a voice desperately in this country. When I was 6, it became very clear that I had to speak English. I made a contract with myself to not only to learn it, but to become very devoted to school, to become very devoted to whatever it is that would allow me to get my mother’s dignity back.
All my kids understand what it means to be a Latino and not wanted. Almost every child in my room has had an experience where somebody has told them something very ugly. We actually had a substitute come into my room and tell my reading groups – children are in groups called Harvard, Yale, Smith and so on – ‘Oh my gosh, you’re never going to get into one of these colleges. You’re just going to end up selling stuff on a corner like your parents do.’ I’m someone who actually came from that. My family did sell things on the street corner. I sold popsicles in East Los Angeles, right in front of El Mercado. But I also did go to Claremont. That’s why I’m almost romantic about the idea of education. It changed my life. Education to me was the miracle of America…This may sound arrogant, but the experience of making this film reinforced in me how much I love being an immigrant. It’s a really hard time to be a Latino in America. Yet, never in my entire life have I felt so proud and so lucky to have that. To come here and to have the point of view that I have from two worlds. – to be able to easily go back and forth between languages, between cultures, to have that sort of hybrid. I just love being Mexican. I love being an immigrant. I love being an American.« (Laura Angélica Simón in Los Angeles Times, May 7, 1997)
