(The story of an Average American Girl)
In recognition of Hispanic Heritage Month 2011, the Museum of Art at UGA, screened this movie last night. I attended, as I’m trying to document some of the activities associated with this celebration. I was not prepared for the emotional experience this simple film, had in store for me.
The film directed by Tânia Cypriano, is the story of the director who came here in the early seventies from Brazil, to study English, she knew upon arrival at the San Francisco Airport, this was the place she could be free, could live any dream, she dared to dream. Accompanying her was her aunt, who held little interest in living here, long term. Her ideas changed when an unplanned pregnancy gave her a precious little reason to stay. For the sake of her soon to be born daughter, who would be an American citizen she decided to forfeit her own happiness and plant her feet firmly in a foreign land. It is a story about an average American girl who just happens to be of Brazilin decent.
Life in the U.S. is good, but it’s bad. Life in Brazil is bad, but it’s good. A quote from the movie sums up the general feeling of the film. We as Americans take many things for granted, we also claim many words as our own, thinking we invented them and it is somewhat true, we may not have invented them, we defined them and galvanized them in the eyes of the world. Freedom, liberty, justice and for the most part equality are truly American concepts. The American Dream is a statement used throughout the world and throughout our existence to describe a thing sought after by much of the world’s population. I have traveled this world and am not blind, I see the problems we face here, but know, that we are the light by which most of the world steers.
Soon after her cousin was born, the directors grandma arrived too help raise this new American. The first thing she did was buy a video camera to record her granddaughter’s life. This movie is a collage of twenty years of footage, shot buy a woman who came here at the age of seventy and had never touched a video camera in her life, a woman who never learned the English language, but who exemplifies all that is great about the American spirit. It chronicles the lives of three generations of Brazilian women and their family members who followed them. It tell the stories of their struggle to assimilate to American culture, to get their educations and to workto provide for their families.
Ultimately this is the story of living in one country with your heart residing in another, for just as surely as you breathe, you can never dislodge what you are born to be. “I am an American and I am a Brazilian,” Tânia Cypriano. The American Dream is beautiful like the rose, but like the rose it has barbs. Many immigrants and average Americans for that matter, will never be able to afford the American Dream, it’s a hard lesson to learn. A lesson that prevails throughout the movie, as the family continues to live a revolving life moving from one county to the other, always following their divided hearts.
I wept many times during this movie as I recognized people I know in the people on the screen. I gained a deeper understanding of my wife, a Peruvian, her mother, and her children. I gained a more complex respect for the untold numbers of people who are from South and Central America, but who are none the less Americans.
I felt the hopelessness of educated people who come here, only to have their education cheapened to the point of waiting tables seventy hours a week, simply to provide for their families. Doctors serving you pizza, being treated like farm workers by the masses. American dreamers, being vilified by our government, simply for having the audacity to live the dream that we as Americans fought to establish and promised the world, so long ago.
"Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!" Emma Lazarus
I still believe these words; I fought for them, these American words with more meaning than any others.
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