FRONTLINE/World Guatemala: A Tale of Two Villages

I Just finished watching this amazing documentary exploring the fallout from one recent ICE raid in Iowa on the apprehended immigration workers' places of origin.

Back in Massachusetts suburbs where I grew up, there was one guy who helped a number of Brazilian families relocate from Brazil, finding jobs and housing in the States for people who spoke little English and would otherwise have few connections to rely upon. The process was a word-of-mouth, almost peer-to-peer underground railroad that resulted in a small settlement of people from a single Brazilian town, relocated together in states, living as family and working as co-workers.

As this Frontline episode shows, similar circumstances can spell disaster halfway across the globe when an immigration raid takes place.

In the words of Documentarian Greg Brosnan:

On May 12, 2008 U.S. Federal agents arrested nearly 400 undocumented workers in a raid on Agriprocessors Inc., the country's largest kosher meatpacking plant in Postville, a small farming town in northeastern Iowa.

It was one of the largest single roundups in U.S. immigration history and dramatic images flashed across the nation as workers were led out in chains. The plant's management was jailed on charges ranging from harboring illegal workers to bank fraud.

More than 200 of those detained are thought to be from El Rosario and San Jose Calderas, two villages just a few minutes apart in Guatemala's poverty stricken western highlands. The money they were sending back to their relatives had mostly sustained both villages. Now these breadwinners were either in jail or under house arrest in Postville, and awaiting deportation.

Watch as this Frontline/World episode explores the intimate, delicate connection between the US and Latin nations.