Background
The origins of El Norte are the director's experiences in San Diego, California, as he grew up. Nava came from a border family and has relatives on the other side in Tijuana, Baja California. As a youth, he crossed the border several times a week, often wondering who lived in all those cardboard shacks on the Mexican side.
For research the producers of El Norte learned about the plight of indigenous Guatemalans from years of research, much of it conducted among exiles living in Southern California. According to Nava, "There are hundreds of thousands of refugees from Central America in Los Angeles alone. Nobody knows the exact number, but a recent TV inquiry estimated 300,000-400,000. In our own research, we came across a community of Mayans from Guatemala — 5,000 from one village — now in Los Angeles. The original village, which is now dead, had 15,000."
Annette Insdorf, writing for The New York Times, said Nava discussed the singular nature of the US-Mexico border. Nava said: "The border is unique—the only place in the world where an industrialized first-world nation shares the border with a third-world country. In California, it's just a fence: on one side are the Tijuana slums, on the other side—San Diego. It's so graphic! This was the germ of the story."
The motion picture has become a staple of high school Spanish language classes throughout the United States and multiculturalism studies in college.
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