![]() She persuades Jimmy ( Jimmy Smits) to marry her and save her from deportation, and in a sequence that is first hilarious and later quite moving, Jimmy does. In one of the movie's best sequences, Toni ( Constance Marie), now an activist in L.A., becomes concerned by the plight of a young woman from El Salvador who is about to be deported and faces death because of the politics of her family. Memo (Enrique Castillo) does become a lawyer (and tells his Anglo in-laws that his name is "basically Spanish for "Bill"). ![]() Toni, meanwhile, becomes a nun, goes to South America, gets "political," and comes home to present her family with a big surprise, in one of the many scenes that mix social commentary with humor. Irene's wedding is interrupted by the arrival of a gang hostile to the hotheaded Chucho, and as they threaten each other, Paco tells us "it was the usual macho bull-." But eventually Chucho will lose his life because of it, and little Jimmy, seeing him die, will be scarred for many years. Nava, who is of Mexican-Basque ancestry, and his co-writer and producer (and wife), Anna Thomas, tell their stories in vivid sequences. But Maria fights her way back to her family, sheltering her baby in her arms.Īs the action moves from the 1930s to the late 1950s, we meet all the children: Paco Irene, on her wedding day Toni, who becomes a nun Memo, who wants to go to law school Chucho, who is attracted to the street life, and little Jimmy ("whose late arrival came as a great surprise"). "This really happened," says the movie's narrator, Paco ( Edward James Olmos), a writer who is telling the story of his family. They are married and have two children and she is pregnant with a third in the Depression year of 1932, when government troops round her up with tens of thousands of other Mexican-Americans (most of them, like Maria, American citizens) and ship them in cattle cars to central Mexico, hoping that they will never return. ![]() Jose ( Jacob Vargas) crosses the bridge to the Anglo neighborhoods to work as a gardener, and there he meets Maria ( Jennifer Lopez), who works as a nanny. The relative, an old man known as El Californio, was born in Los Angeles when it was still part of Mexico, and on his tombstone he wants it written, "and where I lie, it is still Mexico." El Californio lives in a small house in East Los Angeles, and this house, tucked under a bridge on a dirt street that still actually exists, becomes a symbol of the family, gaining paint, windows, extra rooms and a picket fence as the family grows. The story begins in the 1920s with a man named Jose Sanchez, who thinks it might take him a week or two to walk north from Mexico to "a village called Los Angeles," where he has a relative.
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