Abstract
This chapter discusses Matthew Bonifacio’s independent movie Amexicano, which centers around the improbable friendship between Italian American Bruno and undocumented Mexican worker Ignacio. The authors equate the fictional undocumented im/migrants portrayed in Matthew Bonifacio’s film to what Zygmunt Bauman calls ‘human waste’, which is the collateral damage of economic progress. The life on the border—be it a physical border or a metaphorical one (the one that divides American culture from the im/migrants’ cultural milieu of provenance)—experienced by these individuals causes great anxiety and fear (whether real or imagined). This situation also causes instability, eventually leading to what the authors define in terms of pervasive mistrust and a final collapse of trust, which then generates exclusion for the unwanted and an obsession with security for the ones living inside the border. All of these emotions (the collapse of trust, pervasive mistrust, and obsession) are palpable throughout the movie also because the initial depiction of Mexican im/migrants is overwhelmingly negative. In its second half, Amexicano shifts ‘the border’ between welcoming and exclusion, although for the two protagonists and for Gabriela (Ignacio’s sister and Bruno’s love interest) a happy ending just isn’t in the cards.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
As reported in an interview available on IndieWire.com, Famiglietti wrote the Amexicano script after he dreamed about befriending an undocumented immigrant from Mexico who fell in love with his wife. In writing the story he drew from experiences when he was younger and unemployed, and picked up day laborers from the street corners to help him with his side jobs. Moreover, he recounts a time when he worked side by side with a laborer for a couple of months, and then one day the guy was just gone. That individual was the inspiration source for the Ignacio character (IndieWire).
- 2.
For more information on the duo, see Alexander Dworkowitz’s article (2002), in which he details how “Bonafacio and Famiglietti met as extras on the set of Spike Lee’s Malcolm X”, adding that “The two call their company the Brooklyn Queens Experiment, or BQE” (Dworkowitz).
- 3.
For more information on Bonifacio’s work, consult “Matthew Bonifacio. Biography” on IMDB.com—see https://www.imdb.com/name/nm1313756/ bio?ref_=nm_ov_bio_sm (accessed April 23, 2023)—his profile on TV.Apple.com—see https://tv.apple.com/cl/ person/matthew-bonifacio/umc.cpc.2ykvog173bynru5pr4xn040r0 (accessed April 26, 2023)—and his faculty webpage on the website of Pace University, where he teaches as an adjunct in the School of Performing Arts—see https://www.pace.edu/dyson/departments/school-of-performing-arts/faculty-and-staff/adjunct-faculty/matthew-bonifacio (accessed April 26, 2023).
- 4.
We prefer to associate the word ‘undocumented’ to a migrant’s status instead of the term ‘illegal’ (the latter is, unfortunately, used throughout the movie) because the adjective ‘illegal’ is implicitly connected to the world of criminality, while an individual’s existence can never be ‘illegal’. Moreover, migration is not a crime (PICUM).
- 5.
A derivative of the Spanish term migración (migration). The term refers to the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Border Patrol agencies as well as patrol officers, and immigration officers who perform inspections of cars crossing the border or look for undocumented people in places of business. When the term migra is used in a conversation is often to complain about an encounter with immigration officials—see https://transpanish.biz/translation_blog/meaning-of-la-migra/ (accessed April 20, 2023).
- 6.
Coyote is the slang label used for a trafficker, a person who commits the crime of organizing the trafficking or movement of migrants from Latin America to the United States.
- 7.
We are purposefully using Arzubiaga et al. (2009) term ‘im/migrant’ to define individuals labeled emigrants, immigrants, migrants, and refugees, including the undocumented. As Arzubiaga et al. (2009) explain, these identities are not mutually exclusive or permanent, but their distinction is paramount because it carries legal implications.
- 8.
Besides being used as the title for a recent Colombian film (a drug gangster saga directed by Cristina Gallego and Ciro Guerra in 2018), the expression ‘birds of passage’—as Simona Frasca reminds us—has been adopted “by American historians as a metaphor for immigrants during the epoch of mass immigration at the start of the twentieth century” (Frasca, 109). More specifically, as Richard F. Cavallaro states, birds of passage were “immigrants who went back and forth between America and Italy several times before deciding to bring their families to America” (Cavallaro, 51). Among the unnumerable possible references, one may also highlight that this expression also informs Michael J. Piore’s (1979) and Joe Giordano’s (2015) eponymous books and, in the context of Mexican immigration, Camille Guerin-Gonzales’s book-length study (1996), especially Chapter II, titled “Mexican ‘Birds of Passage’: Representation of Mexicans as Foreign Sojourners.”
- 9.
See the PBS documentary The Italian Americans and, more specifically, the clip also entitled “Birds of Passage” (2015). In this context, it must be noted that Cavallaro argues that not everybody decided to stay in the US. Indeed, many im/migrants felt “that their time in America was only temporary”, leading to the fact that many of them “never became American citizens because it was not their intent to stay in America” (Cavallaro, 51).
- 10.
See, for instance, Jennifer Guglielmo and Salvatore Salerno (2003).
- 11.
Such as the infamous 1891 New Orleans lynching that led to the murder of 11 Italian Americans by a ferocious mob.
- 12.
The New Deal encompassed a series of programs and projects that President Roosevelt enacted between 1933 and 1939 to restore prosperity in America. Among these, one must mention the Wagner Act, the Social Security Act, the Federal Housing, and the GI Bill.
- 13.
Quota Acts (or The Immigration Act of 1924) limited the number of immigrants entering the US through a quota that varied according to the country of origin. It provided immigration visas to two percent of the total number of people of each nationality as of the 1980 census. It completely excluded immigrants from Asia (Office of the Historian, Foreign Service Institute).
- 14.
Acculturation is defined as the process of acquisition and adaption that takes place when two cultural groups interact, or when an individual assumes the norms and values of the host culture (Lueck and Wilson, 187).
- 15.
The adjective Chicana is used to define an American woman or girl of Mexican origin or descent.
- 16.
Mary Louise Pratt introduced the concept of the “contact zone” to define “social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery or their aftermaths as they lived out in many parts of the world today” (Pratt, 34).
- 17.
As shared by actor Raúl Castillo (playing Ignacio): “I am a child of immigrants and a byproduct of a true American Dream, so I am partial to the element of the film that treats immigrants with compassion and exposes us as the hardworking, family-oriented people that we really are” (González).
- 18.
It is interesting to note that the first shot of Bruno in the basement where he lives is a meta-cinematic reference to Bonifacio’s previous film (also starring Famiglietti) titled Lbs. (2004), in which the actor-writer shares his personal struggle with weight loss. Indeed, by visually encasing Bruno inside his bedroom door on the right-hand side of this first frame and, by so doing, juxtaposing him to (on the left-hand side of the frame) a painting that reproduces the poster of the other film (starring the same actor), Bonifacio brilliantly conveys the idea of a character—perhaps even Famiglietti himself, if one were to push this reading even further—once again being stuck.
- 19.
According to Sironi, Bauloz, and Emmanuel, a migrant is a person “who moves away from his or her place of usual residence, whether within a country or across an international border, temporarily or permanently, and for a variety of reasons. The term includes a number of well-defined, legal categories of people, such as migrant workers; persons whose particular types of movements are legally-defined, such as smuggled migrants; as well as those whose status or means of movement are not specifically defined under international law, such as international students” (Sironi, Bauloz, and Emmanuel, 132).
- 20.
A derogatory name used to refer mostly to Mexicans living in the US without official documentation.
- 21.
‘Illegal alien’ is “a dehumanizing political construction of migrants that drew on a long American tradition of imagining migrants as simultaneously impoverished ‘public charges’ and ‘job thieves’ willing to tolerate hyper-exploitation” (Hirota 2017—as cited in Aviña, 103). By the mid-1970s, the term had become common in television news clips and printed media” (Dunn 1996, 18–19—as quoted in ibid., 103).
- 22.
See, for instance, Olga Khazan (2021).
- 23.
On more than one occasion another aggressive and antagonistic Mexican laborer, Diego (who specializes in bullying everyone) calls him gordito (which means ‘fatty’).
Works Cited
Anzaldúa, Gloria. “The Homeland, Aztlán.” Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, 3–4. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987.
Arzubiaga, Angela E., Noguerón, Silvia, C. and Sullivan, Amanda L. “The education of Children in Im/migrant Families.” Review of Research in Education, Vol. 33, No. 1 (2009), 246–271.
Aviña, Alexander. “The Border is the Violence. War, Empire and Migrants in the Making of the US-Border.” In Migration and Torture in Today’s World, edited by Fabio Perocco, 93–114. Venice: Edizioni Ca ’Foscari / Venice University Press, 2023.
Bauman, Zygmunt. Liquid Times. Living in an Age of Uncertainty. Oxford: Polity Press, 2007.
———. Wasted Lives. Modernity and its Outcasts. Oxford: Polity Press, 2004.
Bertellini, Giorgio. “Film, National Cinema, and Migration.” In The Encyclopedia of Global Human Migration, Vol. 3, edited by Immanuel Ness and Marlou Schrover, 1–6. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2013.
Cavallaro, Richard F. My Sicilian Legacy. The Struggle and Joys of Three Generations. Bloomington: AuthorHouse. 2008.
Cowen, Paul S. “A Social-Cognitive Approach to Ethnicity in Films.” In Unspeakable Images. Ethnicity and the American Cinema, edited by Lester D. Friedman, 353–378. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1991.
Dunn, Timothy. The Militarization of the U.S.-Mexico Border, 1978–1992. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996.
Dworkowitz, Alexander. “Flushing filmmaker debuts film in Manhattan.” Queens News, Sports, Entertainment and Community (September 25, 2002). https://qns.com/2002/09/flushing-filmmaker-debuts-film-in-manhattan/ (accessed April 26, 2023).
Frasca, Simona. Italian Birds of Passage. The Diaspora of Neapolitan Musicians in New York. New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2014.
Fregoso, Rosa Linda. “From Il(l)egal to Legal Subject. Border Construction and Re-construction.” In The Bronze Screen. Chicana and Chicano Film Culture, 65–92. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993.
Giordano, Joe. Birds of Passage. Los Angeles: Harvard Square Editions, 2015.
González, R. H. “Anecdote: Amexicano Protagonista is a McAllen Native”. Texas Border Business. (July, 2018). https://texasborderbusiness.com/anecdote-amexicano-protagonist-is-a-mcallen-native/ (accessed April 28, 2023).
Grandin, Greg. The End of the Myth. From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2019.
Guerin-Gonzales, Camille. Mexican Workers and American Dreams. Immigration, Repatriation, and California Farm Labor, 1990–1939. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1996.
Guglielmo, Jennifer, and Salvatore Salerno (edited by). Are Italians white?: How race is made in America. London: Psychology Press: 2003.
Guglielmo, Thomas A. “Introduction.” White on Arrival: Italians, Race, Color and Power in Chicago, 1890–1945, 1–14. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.
Hall, Stuart. “Stuart Hall in Lecture. Representation and the Media.” YouTube Video, Lecture Filmed at the University of Manchester (2021). https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=84depWskwu0 (accessed April 28, 2023).
Hirota, Hidetaka. Expelling the Poor. Atlantic Seaboard and the Nineteenth-Century Origins of American Immigration Policy. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017.
IndieWire. “IndieWIRE INTERVIEW ‘Amexicano’ Director Matthew Bonifacio and Writer Carmine Famiglietti.” (September 19, 2008). https://www.indiewire.com/2008/09/ indiewire-interview-amexicano-director-matthew-bonifacio-and-writer-carmine-famiglietti-71747/ (accessed April 16, 2023).
International Organization for Migration, UN, Global Migration Data Analysis Centre. “Key Global Migration Figures 2019–2013.” https://www.migrationdataportal.org/sites/g/ files/tmzbdl251/files/2023-02/One-pager-2023-EN-Final.pdf (accessed April 16, 2023).
Jiménez, Tomás. Replenished Ethnicity: Mexican Americans, Immigration and Identity. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010.
Khazan, Olga. “Learn English. But U.S. Policy Makes that Hard.” The Atlantic, June 4, 2021. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2021/06/why-cant-immigrants-learn-english/619053/ (accessed May 13, 2022).
López, Ana M. “Are All Latins from Manhattan?: Hollywood, Ethnography, and Cultural Colonialism.” In Unspeakable Images. Ethnicity and the American Cinema, edited by Lester D. Friedman, 404–424. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1991.
Lueck, Kerstin and Wilson, Michelle. “Acculturative Stress in Latino Immigrants: The Impact of Social, Socio-psychological and Migration-related Factions.” International Journal of Intercultural Relations, Vol. 35, No 2 (2011), 186–195.
Lytle Hernández, Kelly. City of Inmates. Conquest, Rebellion and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles, 1771–1965. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017
Maciel, David R. “Pochos and Other Extremes in Mexican Cinema; or, El Cine Mexicano se va de Bracero, 1922–1963.” In Chicanos and Films. Representation and Resistance, edited by Chon A. Noriega, 94–113. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992.
McHugh, Margie and Doxsee Catrina. “English Plus Integration: Shifting the Instructional Paradigm for Immigrant Adult Learners to Support Integration Success.” Migration Policy Institute (2018) https://www.migrationpolicy.org/research/english-plus-integration-instructional-paradigm-immigrant-adult-learners (accessed April 18, 2023).
Office of the Historian, Foreign Service Institute. United States Department of State. “The Immigration Act of 1924 (The Johnson-Reed Act).” https://history.state.gov/milestones/1921-1936/immigration-act (accessed April 26, 2023).
Pérez Melgosa, Adrián. “Low-Intensity Necropolitics: Slow Violence and Migrant Bodies in Latin American Films.” Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies, Vol. 20 (2016), 217–236.
———. Cinema and Inter-American Relations: Tracking Transnational Affect. New York: Routledge, 2012.
PICUM. “Why Words Matter.” https://picum.org/words-matter/ (accessed April 10, 2023).
Piore, Michael J. Birds of Passage. Migrant Labor and Industrial Societies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979.
Pratt, Mary Louise. “Arts of the Contact Zone.” Profession, (1991), 33–40.
Public Broadcasting Service (PBS). “Birds of Passage.” In The Italian Americans (2015). Clip: Season 1, https://www.pbs.org/video/italian-americans-birds-passage/ (accessed April 16, 2023).
Sironi, Alice, Céline Bauloz, and Milen Emmanuel (edited by). “Glossary on Migration.” International Migration Law, No 34. International Organization for Migration (IOM), Geneva, 2019. https://publications.iom.int/books/international-migration-law-ndeg34-glossary-migration (accessed April 10, 2023).
Wirth, Christa. “Why the Hyphen? Individual and Collective Memories of Italianness in the United States at the Intersection of Class and Generation.” Immigrant Minorities: Historical Studies in Ethnicity, Migration and Diaspora, Vol. 34, No. 1 (2016), 22–48.
Worrall, Janet E., “A Comparative Study of Hispanics and Italians in the Southwest.” In Italian Americans. A Retrospective on the Twentieth Century, edited by Paola Alessandra Sensi-Isolani and Anthony Julian Tamburri, 110–126. Chicago Heights: American Italian Historical Association, 2001.
Films and TV Series Cited
Amexicano (Matthew Bonifacio, 2007).
Birds of Passage (Cristina Gallego and Ciro Guerra, 2018).
Lbs. (Matthew Bonifacio, 2004).
The Italian Americans (PBS, 2015).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2024 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Peralta, C., Orsitto, F. (2024). A Realistic Tale of Improbable Friendship. Notes on Matthew Bonifacio’s Amexicano (2007). In: Fioretti, D., Orsitto, F. (eds) Italian Americans in Film and Other Media. Italian and Italian American Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-47211-4_8
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-47211-4_8
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-031-47210-7
Online ISBN: 978-3-031-47211-4
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)