by José de la Isla
Hispanic Link News Service
MEXICO CITY — “Harvest of Empire,” a yet-to-be released documentary based on New York Daily News columnist Juan González’s book of the same name, is making private viewing rounds in New York and Washington, D.C.
Perhaps it will soon get the mass audience it deserves.
Early in the documentary, directed by Peter Getzels and Eduardo López, González explains that by mid-century half of U.S. residents will trace their origins not to Europe but to Latin America.
That’s an enormous population transformation from how the nation used to be. Unless we all understand how that happened, we will be unable to deal with it, except with a new upside-down history, myth-making and chauvinism, the kind ignorance breeds.
Seven years in the making, “Harvest of Empire” carries a message about the need for people to understand that the demographic shift comes from this nation’s own policies and policy toward Central America, Mexico, Puerto Rico, Cuba, the Dominican Republic and other Caribbean countries.
So what does this mean? For one thing, our current knowledge base is shallow and must stand up to the truth. Hollywood, advertisers and ideologue images will not stand for long under a disinfecting airing.
And that is where “Harvest of Empire” comes in. Its hard lessons about the sacrifices immigrants have made are as fundamental as those of the pilgrims and the founding fathers.
The 90-minute video is a reminder about what essayist Richard Rodríguez once said: We read our history from right to left, from east to west, not south to north. The unavoidable foundational here is understood south to north. It explains why most large migrations happened and the many unavoidable personal epics.
This is not about chauvinism, fake patriotism or ideology. “Harvest of Empire” faithfully captures the political and social circumstances that drove Hispanic immigration to the United States. The documentary is history, sociology and foreign policy combined. It is reality.
Perhaps this is the reason some of the documentary’s context and disclosures are hard to take. Too many of our leaders of recent eras — like former Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and others confused anti-communism with legitimate reform — have been deified. I see “Give-‘em-Hell” President Harry Truman doing a heroic deed but creating a disapora.
Those paying attention to this decade’s experience already know about how blow-back, the unintended consequences of war, imprudent foreign adventure and dumb public policy create population displacements, underdevelopment and incredible suffering.
To understand why the U.S. has pursued insane policies, we need look no further than Deep Throat of the 1970s: “Follow the money.”
Commercial interests, such as United Fruit’s Latin empire, fueled a U.S. foreign policy that helped form dictatorships and counterinsurgencies that made non-combatants, the ones we now call immigrants, flee or become victims.
It explains to me why Germán Umansor, from El Salvador, who had his two kids in his pick-up when we met, described his wife’s post-traumatic stress syndrome, and the reason he was distraught. Or Miriam Evangelina who once told me “the day we were leaving the soldiers came and took our neighbor. A bomb went off up the street.”
Or Amparo, of evangelical faith, now raising three exemplary children in a Houston suburb, who tells me about running with Honduran rebels in the hills. Or my own family story of five generation ago. Or poet Martín Espada explaining how his father Frank, the famous photographer from Puerto Rico, insisted he was an immigrant. Or Juan González narrating his own father’s frustrations and disillusionment. Many, many others also ought to tell their immigrant family stories, now with context supplied by this documentary.
“Harvest of Empire” is also about the undercurrent need for the reconciliation that millions of Latino families in the United States have wanted. Its telling will help restore Latino human purpose. The healing encourages civic participation and why nobody should be anyone’s political pawn.
For immigrants, passing on their story inside each family is like a compass for the next generation, explaining the south we came from and why we left.
I hope Harvest of Empire gets a distribution of a billion viewers, that it wins an Academic Award or an Emmy and its producers and author strut at Cannes on a red carpet, if only as an expression that there’s a reward for telling the truth, doing good and getting an overdue conversation going between neighbors.
[José de la Isla is a nationally syndicated columnist for Hispanic Link and Scripps Howard news services. His next book, The Rise of Latino Political Power, will appear early in 2013. Reach him at joseisla3@yahoo.com.] See this column in Spanish and more at www.HispanicLink.org.
