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'Harvest of Empire': Connecting dots on immigration

For all the talk about immigration, rarely does the conversation veer into why so many Latinos have come to the United States. Harvest of Empire attempts to fill in the gaps, and the reasons don't include some naive notion about streets being paved with gold.

For all the talk about immigration, rarely does the conversation veer into why so many Latinos have come to the United States.

Harvest of Empire

attempts to fill in the gaps, and the reasons don't include some naive notion about streets being paved with gold.

The documentary, based on the book by journalist Juan Gonzalez, makes a persuasive argument that immigration from Nicaragua, Mexico, Cuba, and other nations is the direct result of American maneuvering in Latin America.

The film follows a pattern, looking at each country individually and hearing personal tales from immigrants before taking a deep dive into the history of that nation. The documentary starts slowly, looking at Puerto Rico. But the stories grow more eye-opening as filmmakers Peter Getzels and Eduardo Lopez paint a recurring picture.

In Guatemala, for example, the American government orchestrated the overthrow of Jacobo Arbenz's regime. The president planned to more evenly distribute the nation's land, which would, in turn, hurt American companies that owned large swaths of the country. Whether from fear of communism or financial interests, the United States made the decision to intervene. And the result of that coup was a civil war that lasted more than three decades and included a genocide against the country's Mayans.

According to the film, less than 2 percent of political asylum requests were granted from Guatemala during that period.

This raises an important moral question, one that rarely enters the immigration debate: If America is responsible for destabilizing a country, what is our role when the country's citizens suffer as a result?

The quandary gets only murkier when the film considers so many other countries with similar stories - torture in El Salvador, terrorists in Nicaragua, a cruel despot leading the Dominican Republic, starvation in Mexico - all with at least a few fingerprints of the U.S. government. And that's before considering Cuba and the American support of Fulgencio Batista, whose horrifying reign led to a swing of the pendulum in the form of Fidel Castro.

We hear stories from a wide array of immigrants, from celebrated writer Junot Diaz to television personality Geraldo Rivera, as well as the director of the brain tumor surgery program at Johns Hopkins and Nobel Peace Prize winner Rigoberta Menchu. They offer moving stories of how they didn't want to leave their homes and their families; America is less a dream destination than a last resort for some.

While the documentary connects some dots more effectively than others, the overall feeling is effective; the film complicates an already complex debate.

Harvest of Empire *** (out of four stars)

Directed by Peter Getzels and Eduardo Lopez. With Juan Gonzalez. In English and in Spanish with subtitles. Distributed by Harvest of Empire LLC.

Running time: 1 hour, 30 mins.

Parent's guide: No MPAA rating (images of death and war and troubling stories of torture)

Playing at: UA Riverview

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