Brother Towns/Pueblos Hermanos is a story about two communities in two different nations and how they intertwine. Ultimately, it is about how we define ourselves as nations and neighbors, our vision of community, and our efforts to connect to one another. News stories about immigrants in the United States appear on TV and in the papers daily. But we don’t have to listen to the news to know that undocumented immigrants live in nearly every community across the U.S. Thus Brother Towns is a story that also affects nearly every city and town in Mexico and Central America, and one that helps us think about not only citizenship, but what it means to be human.
(posted with permission from the Migration Policy Institute)
As a country often called “a nation of immigrants,” the history of the United States cannot be separated from the stories of its migrants. Today migration is a huge political issue and has far-reaching social, economic, and cultural impacts in the U.S. The chart above shows that the U.S. continues to be the nation with the largest migrant population.
The size of the population we refer to as ‘immigrant’ is growing every day, and its presence in the U.S. cannot be ignored. To understand who the immigrants are, we need to know where they come from and why they are here.
The film Brother Towns focuses on migrants from Jacaltenango, Guatemala, an area in the highlands of Guatemala that has its own Maya history and language. However, migrants to the U.S. come from nearly every country, every religious background, every ethnicity, and every identity imaginable. A ‘migrant’ cannot be stereotyped or categorized. Each person has his own story, her own hopes and dreams, his own people, and things he leaves behind when he make the journey across borders. This section of the “Brother Towns” site sheds light on this very large, diverse, and personal subject.
