Lalo & Beby achieved the American Dream. With nothing but respective grade-school and middle-school educations, the couple rose out of poverty, naturalized as citizens, and sent all three of their sons off to prestigious colleges with little to no debt. But as they worked to overcome the border that separated them from their relatives back home, a quieter border took shape between them and the children they raised in America.
Despite Lalo and Beby’s pride in their language, culture, and rural Mexican values, their sons gravitated toward the mainstream they encountered at school and on television. As a result, their children distanced themselves from Catholicism, their fluency in Spanish faded, and their life experiences became increasingly unfamiliar to the couple that parented them.
It is in response to that distance that their eldest son set out to better understand his parents’ story and reclaim a heritage he once failed to appreciate. Drawing from original interviews and the VHS home movies Lalo and Beby once sent over the border as a means of “visiting” the family members they couldn’t physically be with, Mexicanamerican is a decade-spanning collage exploring the cultural and emotional cost of migration.
