Mia Fischel, Features Editor–
“My child can’t be born here. It has to wait until we cross.”
Yuri, 19 years old and over eight months pregnant, refused to give birth south of the U.S. border. With her life packed up in three small duffel bags, she decided to travel thousands of miles in hopes of granting her second child the privilege of U.S. citizenship.
“The Caravan” is a documentary following Yuri, her husband, Mike, and their two-year-old son Santi as they join the pilgrimage from Honduras to California. It was screened on April 4 in Herrick Hall.
Marking the end of Denison’s 19th Human Rights Film Festival, “The Caravan” exposes the perilous journey towards the U.S. border which many asylum-seeking migrants undergo. International studies professor Chris Crews attributes the explosion of attention towards this movement to inflammatory language and media involvement.
“There’s always been some level of organization for at least the last thirty or forty years. It kind of got this name, ‘The Caravan’, because of all this media attention even though there have been large groups of migrants before and since,” Crews said.
But how can migrants seek political asylum from a corrupt government only to be faced with more violence as refugees in an unfamiliar country?
When Yuri’s family finally reaches the border of Tijuana, Mexico, and and San Diego, they are met with 9,000 plus armed forces and thousands of other migrants. A wall– 30 feet high and extending into the Pacific Ocean– bars them from the “American dream” on the other side. It looks like a scene from a sci-fi movie.
The migrants are told to wait it out. Maybe it would take six months to a year. Maybe they would be deported, forced to start over from square one.
With internal violence, climate change and political instability continuing to push citizens from their own countries, migration remains a timely issue.
The international studies department hopes that documentaries like “The Caravan” provide an opportunity for students and faculty to reflect on and engage with a variety of current issues.
“A film is an easy way to pack a lot of information into a roughly two hour timespan. It can also get more into the nuance of an issue, so there would be no way to give you the experience of Yuri and her family on that journey just by talking about it,” Crews said. “That kind of human touch and the personal experiences is something that documentary films are really good at doing.”
Previous films included “Madan Sara,” which follows the women working in markets in Haiti and “Tantura” which examines the 1948 war and massacre of the Palestinian village of Tantura.
If you missed these screenings, “The Caravan” and “Tantura” are both available and free to watch through the Denison library.