La Jaula de Oro movie (1987)

I knew La Jaula de Oro was a song by Los Tigres del Norte. In grad school my roommate and I would always laugh about the line: "I don't want to go back to Mexico, no way dad!" But it wasn't until yesterday that I found out they also made a movie!! My husband found it on YouTube and told me they used to play it all the time on TV when he was a kid. It blew me away because of the way it discussed the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act, which I spent years studying.

The film tells the story of two brothers played by the Almada brothers and the impact of the new law on their lives. Rodolfo (Fernando Almada) is emigrado (has legal immigrant status) while Reynaldo (Mario Almada) refuses to adjust his status and is determined to take his family back to Mexico to his hometown of Villanueva, Zacatecas. Reynaldo reminds his brother they were only supposed to go to the US for a couple of years to save money and go back to Mexico. Instead, they ended up staying 13 years. Rodolfo tells him to accept that they're staying in the US for good and their families are better off. Reynaldo disagrees. Without legal status, he lives in fear everyday, moving strictly from work to home and home to work, afraid of getting caught. Rodolfo scolds him for not fixing his papers when he had the chance.

When the film was made there were concerns that the Simpson-Rodino law would lead to employment discrimination for Latinos - as a whole. The law was originally proposed by organized labor and liberal democrats in the 1970s and was intended to discourage undocumented immigration by penalizing those who employed undocumented workers with fines. But as Latinos became a larger political voting bloc, the law was opposed by a growing number of Latino, civil rights, and immigrant rights organizations. This held the legislation up for over a decade. To get the bill passed, a host of amendments were introduced to the law, including a lesser known guest-worker migrant program, and a much better known legalization program, which is what the law is most remembered for today. When you put this into context, people are often surprised to learn that the 1986 immigration reform, often known as the amnesty law, originally began as an immigration restriction bill.

In the film, Reynaldo and Rodolfo's adult sons Tony and Agustín are played by Jorge and Hernán Hernández of Los Tigres del Norte. The young men show the generational divide between themselves and their parents, although they too were born in Mexico. In contrast to their parents, they are active in American politics and are shown playing music at a demonstration and benefit concert against the immigration law organized by the GI Forum - a real Mexican American veterans organization founded in 1948. At the demonstration, a representative from MALDEF - the Mexican American Legal Defense Fund, and one of the leading Latino organizations at the time, explains that the new law will break up families and lead to more discrimination against undocumented workers. "With the new law, employers will pay their workers less with the pretext that they are even more illegal than before."

Their concern is warranted. Rodolfo is a factory foreman who oversees an immigrant workforce that includes his brother. When Reynaldo goes to pick up his paycheck, his supervisor informs him that today is his last day because he's undocumented and the company can't risk getting fined under the new immigration law. However, that same day he is replaced with an undocumented worker from Guatemala who is paid even less than he was.

The title of the movie "La Jaula de Oro" (the Golden Cage) refers to undocumented immigrants living imprisoned in the US and this point is made evident when Reynaldo goes to pick up his younger children from school. He tells them he got out of work early so he can take them wherever they want. His son suggests they go see a baseball game to watch Fernando Valenzuela pitch, but his daughter quickly interjects: "Are you crazy? Dad is illegal, if he gets caught, it's going to be your fault!" Instead, they decide to go straight home.

By the end of the movie, Rodolfo quits in disgust upon learning that his employer is using the new law to undercut wages for new workers. In a separate incident, Reynaldo's daughter is killed in an accident and his wife finally lets him take the family back to Mexico. They are shown driving down the freeway into Tijuana.

One of the things that struck me about the movie is that the Tigres del Norte were, in essence, playing teenagers. I was used to Jorge Hernández singing the part of the dad who wants to go back to Mexico, not the son who wants to stay in the US. In the movie, the two young men want to stay in the US and fight for immigrants rights and Tony, who is played by Jorge Hernández, decides to marry Alicia, a Guatemalan immigrant, both because he is in love with her but also to get her legalized.

I read a couple reviews of the movie that were pretty negative, from a Chicano standpoint, because of the ways it romanticized Mexico and the negative and one dimensional portrayal it gave of life in the US. But I've always been fascinated by these movies as historical documents of what people were talking about at the time. Most of these films focus on generational dissonance, circular migration, or migrant extortion at the hands of smugglers and immigration lawyers and the moral of the story is to go back to Mexico.

Going back to the 1986 immigration reform, it's interesting and painful to see the fears people had when the law was first passed. In the film, the characters are mostly worried about the ways it's going to exacerbate labor exploitation and don't go into any detail about how the legalization process works. If you look back to those days, you can see that it would take some time to realize the significance of the legislation and the pathways it opened for family sponsored migration. I think anyone who is interested in the current immigration debate would benefit from checking out this film. Next time we talk to my mother in law we're going to ask her what she thought about it when it first came out. When I taught my Mexican Immigration class I had students watch several films and describe the themes from the course. If I had known about this one I would have definitely added it to the list!!