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My Family is a complex web of family traditions, histories, hardships and triumphs. The film takes place in California and begins in the early 1900s continuing up until the 1980s approximately. The film begins with a young man who has to leave his home in Mexico because his family can not feed another mouth, so he heads to California, what then was not so long ago Mexico, to live with familia. The journey on foot took the young man a year to complete and when he arrives in California in the 1930s a drastically different picture is drawn for this once rural living man. Immediately the young man is taken in by his distant family member, as would be the rule of acceptance for the rest of the film, and quickly learns the life in California is much different from that he experienced in Mexico. Quickly several important characters arise, there is the young man Jose, his wife Maria and El California the old man who Jose first came to live with in California. El California had lived in California since long before it was California, but when it was still Mexico. Early on in the film El California dies, to me this symbolizes the end of the life Jose was accustomed to, the end of old Mexico and the beginning of a new life for Jose and his family in the United States. El California was the last remnant of what use to be, and now all they had was what is; California, and a world that didn't accept them. Through out the film the ongoing struggle between the Sanchez familia and the white world shows a strong antagonist side on the part of the prejudice white population. In one instance Jose's son Chuchu kills a man in self-defense and when the police come looking for him Chuchu runs and instead of trying to stop him, the police fire at will and shoot him in the head in front of his younger brother Jimmy. Later the police would rejoice in their triumph and power; Jimmy would be forever scared by the slaying of his idol. Other struggles arise as the young men in the family grow and challenge their future as labor workers; Memo goes to college to become a lawyer and in the process changes his name and relinquishes his rich heritage to secure his white bride and their up tight parents' approval, Chuchu before his untimely demise sells drugs as he refuses to cross the bridge every day to mow lawns like his father, and the youngest Jimmy resorts to violence and crime and only after a strange twist of fate finds him married and with child does he begin to see the value of familia. The title of the film My Family or Ma Familia is quite appropriate for this film; the central theme is just that- family. Throughout the film there are struggles and hardships from Maria being deported suddenly without word to her family what had happened, to the marriage of their eldest daughter everything that transpired involved the family, and nothing was done without the help of the family. Children were raised, people married, introduced, rehabilitated, loved and consoled by the family. Love was unconditional and transpired all other things. |
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