SYPNOSIS

Their sons distanced themselves from Catholicism, their fluency in Spanish faded, and their life experiences became increasingly unfamiliar to the people who raised them. It is in response to that distance that their eldest son set out to better understand their story and reclaim a heritage he once failed to appreciate. Drawing from original interviews and the VHS home videos his parents sent over the border between 1993 and 2005 as a means of “visiting” the families they couldn’t physically be with, Mexicanamerican is an expressionistic collage through time, exploring the emotional and cultural cost of migration.

Director’s statement:

Mexicanamerican is not just a tribute to my parents and their sacrifices; it is an act of reclamation. My estrangement from my heritage is what led me to make the film. As a first-generation American, I grew up with only a loose grasp of the history and background my parents carried with them. I knew the outlines of their biographies but not the most painful details — the choices, compromises, and cultural contradictions they navigated to give their children a better life. In adulthood, I began to feel the cost of that distance, and what started as a personal attempt to reconnect became a vehicle for others to do the same.

The film is a reckoning with how cultural identity is maintained, altered, or lost across generations within immigrant families. It explores how assimilation can carry unintended consequences, not only in public or political life but also in the most intimate corners of the family unit. While American institutions — schools, media, and immigration policy — form the backdrop, the conflicts depicted are primarily internal and interpersonal, centering the agency and complexity of people whose lived experiences are too often reduced to data points or simplified narratives.

All the archival footage in the film was sourced exclusively from the home videos my parents recorded and mailed across the U.S.-Mexico border between 1993 and 2005. These tapes were a way of “visiting” the loved ones they could not physically be with before naturalizing as citizens. I paired them with present-day interviews conducted over the course of several years.

The film draws inspiration from deeply personal, form-breaking documentaries such as Cameraperson; Hale County This Morning, This Evening; its namesake, Italianamerican; and the work of both Chantal Akerman and Adam Curtis. I wanted to use every tool at my disposal to create an immersive and cinematic experience — not just an expositional one. Subtitles, for instance, are used not merely functionally but compositionally, often centered onscreen to emphasize the role of language and translation in this multilingual story.

I also sought to reveal the everyday poetry hidden in the seemingly banal amateur footage my parents created. The VHS medium, with its jarring cuts, glitches, and analog texture, functions as a universal shorthand for nostalgia and first-person recollection — especially when juxtaposed against the present-day interview footage shot on modern digital cameras and Zoom recordings. Even the television broadcasts accidentally taped over the home movies are left intact, serving as ambient transmissions from the media landscape that shaped my family’s cultural identity.

In the end, Mexicanamerican is both an offering and an invitation: a catharsis for immigrant families of all backgrounds, and a call for more nuanced, empathetic conversations about the immigrant experience. It is a documentary, yes — but also a personal archive, a memory poem, and a long-overdue home movie of my own, dedicated to my family and to all migrants and refugees around the world still in search of home.

Eben Sánchez (Co-Director) is a filmmaker from Portland, Oregon currently completing his senior year as a Media Studies major and Religious Studies minor at Pomona College. Eben most recently premiered his debut short as a writer-director, DULCE COMPAÑÍA, centered around a young poet who overcomes self-hatred and shame about his sexuality by confronting his family’s intergenerational trauma.

Michael Rogerson (Producer) is a Brooklyn based producer and director of film and theatre, and the artistic director of Silencio Projects. With Silencio, he produced the US premiere of Simon Longman’s Gundog (co-produced by CultureLab LIC), the Midwest premiere of Christopher Chen’s Home Invasion, and Midwest premiere of Marius von Mayenburg’s The Dog, the Night, and the Knife (in partnership with Fulton Street Collective), and a basement-rock-show version of Enda Walsh’s Disco Pigs, which played multiple sold out runs in real DIY venues in Logan Square. His short film All the Way Down This Time played at Queens International Film Festival and won best short at Queer Fear Film Festival. He recently assisted Les Waters on Grief Camp at Atlantic Theater Company, and is currently developing a reduced cast adaptation of Peter Weiss’ The Investigation. He graduated from Northwestern University, and trained with Anne Bogart’s SITI Company. 

Justin Enoch (Sound Designer/Mixer) is a Romanian-born, LA-based sound designer, composer, and interdisciplinary artist. Their work has screened at Sundance, TIFF, and the Student Academy Awards. Their most recent credits include TAHARA (sound design, foley), AGAINST REALITY (sound design, mix), FLAIL (sound design, composer), and INSIDE THE RED SEA MISSION (composer).

Nudo (Composer) is a regional-electronic duo based in Texas formed by Eric Hernandez and Joaquin Tenorio. “Nudo incorporates samples, field recordings, and electronics in service of a sound that captures the textures of the Texican landscape they know so intimately—the joy and the strife; the desert calm and the looming conflict.” (Nina Protocol).