A Day Without a Mexican

I watched this on the DVD of the movie. I never got around to watching the full-length version.

The idea of this short film is that all of the Mexicans (or all Latinos - its hard to tell because the characters use the terms interchangeably) have disappeared from California. It is done in bad TV documentary style. It reminded me of the screwy UFO documentaries that run late at night on SciFi or Discovery. I guess the style is supposed to be ironic, but it just doesn't work.

There is some attempt to point out that not all Mexicans or Latinos (again, they can't seem to be clear on this point) work in fields, restaurants, or car washes. However, the talk of missing Hispanic college professors is just an excuse to make a lengthy rant about California immigration policies.

I guess if I lived in California, I might appreciate it more. Maybe not. I live in Texas and work in an area that is more than 90% Hispanic. The sad thing is the only memorable character is a beer drinking redneck complaining about how there are no Mexicans to fix his car and telling stories about the "good old days" when Mexicans would do the work for cheap. That is good, subtle social commentary. The rest is over the top stupidity that just makes you roll your eyes.

Although this movie depicts the majority of Americans as very ignorant to the contributions and facts concerning the Latino population that live here, I think that it is not stereotypical. I have heard the same remarks about Latinos from many people that I know, not because they are bad people, but because United States citizens in general do not care about educating themselves when it comes to this population. The movie does a great job at dispelling many misconceptions such as the amount of money the US government spends on Latinos as opposed to the amount they give back to our economy. It accomplishes this in a more light-hearted manner than just presenting pure data. Of course, this movie could have been made focusing on many different marginalized or misunderstood subsets of the US population, but it is very helpful in showing that we are all necessary to contribute to this society and without any part, we cannot function.

I watched the original short film that was included on the Day Without A Mexican DVD, because I figured that for them to have made such a bad film, they must have somehow made it in a shorter version and had it not be as stupid as the full length film was, but I was wrong. Instead, you get the same reduction of even the most bigoted Americans to cartoonish stereotypes and caricatures. In fact, here they have to be even more abrupt in their portrayal of mind-boggling ignorance because they only have 30 minutes to tell the whole story. In one scene, some white woman meekly looks at her interviewer and says something like, "All people who speak Spanish are Mexican, right? Right?"

Please.

The sad thing is that I realize that such unfiltered stupidity does, in fact, exist in America, but it is in such small numbers that normal people, regular, thinking Americans, already know how backwards these people are, and they don't need a film like this to come along and hit them over the head with it.

My biggest problem is that I agree completely with the unbalanced nature of American society, in that the people who work the hardest and support our economy the most are treated almost as subhumans, which is why I wish this film wouldn't have chosen something so unbelievably inept as inexplicable, mass disappearance in order to show what it might be like if all of our migrant workers disappeared. There are very real and very serious ways that this could have been done, and the resulting film might very well have been something that could have been taken seriously.

Then again, this was done as something of a comedy, which in itself belittles the message that the film is trying to get across. It's almost like they purposely wanted you to walk away from the film thinking they were joking all along.

I could accept something like A Day Without A Mexican if it was made as a student film or something, more an exercise in film-making with a tiny bit of social commentary thrown in for good measure, but to have been made as a short film and THEN a feature film? Ouch.

It reminds me of an equally idiotic mockumentary called The September Tapes, which commits a far greater crime by pretending to be about a guy who lost a brother or something in the war in Afghanistan, and he blows off all the danger and goes to Afghanistan himself to find him. It's not long before you realize that this moron is some white guy pretending to have lost a family member in a war and then pretending to go to that country and pretending to be in real danger and then laughing all the way to the bank. And this in the middle of that war. They should slap a helmet on him, give him a rifle, and send him to Afghanistan for real.

But in the case of A Day Without A Mexican, I'd settle for just not letting them make any more movies.