The Latin American Studies Center will be organizing a film festival that will include a variety of feature-length motion pictures about Latin America and Latin Americans. You have been asked to assist in the preparation of a viewer's guide for films that deal with patterns and problems of migration. The 1983 US/UK independent film El Norte (Gregory Nava, director) will be the principal feature film for your viewer's guide.
To allow your viewers to make the most of the film, your guide must do a number of important things, chief among them is to summarize clearly the plot and character development of El Norte and to contextualize the plotlines and characters within critical categories of migration, notably the structural conditions and human experiences that propel migration and immigration in modern Latin America. It is important that your viewer's guide make explicit an engagement with the various course materials.
Engagement should be demonstrated through selective quotes of assigned readings, screened videos, and handouts. See note below for additional resources that you may wish to consult. Although you can anticipate that the main audience at the film festival will be other University students with an interest in Latin American Studies, you should write a review that is accessible to students from a variety of academic majors.
The viewer's guide, due at the beginning of class on Thursday, December 9, 2010, should be approximately 800-1000 words (including notes, properly formatted in Chicago/Turabian style) and printed double-spaced with reasonably-sized fonts and margins. Please paginate. You should use the real name of the actor/actress only at the first mention. Otherwise, refer to character by the name/position within the film's plotline. Film titles are italicized.
Your viewer's guide should not be conceived as a research paper. However, you may wish to consult the following online resources for some general background on patterns of migration as well the history of recent Guatemala, including ex-migration to the United States.
The Encyclopedia of Latin American History and Culture (2nd. ed.) [available via ResearchPort], especially entries on "Guatemala," "Hispanics in the United States," "K'iche'," and "Migration and Migrations."
The Pew Hispanic Center has assembled statistical summaries of demographic and economic profiles of Hispanics in the United States by their countries of origin, including Guatemala. [http://pewhispanic.org/data/origins/]