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Powerful Documentary: The Invisible Mexicans of Deer Canyon

By Carol Amoruso, HAV editor

When John Carlos Frey came upon the network of Mexican migrants living in McGonigle Canyon, in San Diego, they were, effectively, invisible.  Although Frey had grown up in the city, he’d only heard of their existence--some had been in the canyon for 20, even 30 years--through a journalist friend.  Undocumented, they were off the city’s radar, just a part of the brown blur glimpsed by San Diego’s affluent residents through the windows of their SUVs.  But at the same time, as if by magic, the city’s lawns were kept in line, flowers were made to shine and babies coo, buildings rose--and fell--and fresh produce was set on people’s tables.  The “invisible Mexicans” lived in stealth, camouflaged under the canopy of brush that covers the canyon.  Their homes, only as high as the overhanging cover and some just large enough to enclose a bed, their meager belongings, a nightstand perhaps, were cobbled together of scrap wood.

From a population of between four and five hundred, the migrants’ numbers have dwindled to just a handful; those who remain live in little more than plastic-covered lean-tos.  And now they are anything but invisible.  Thanks in part to the fray Frey’s film has inadvertently thrown them into, and to the high media charge all things to do with immigration ignite, their cover, so to speak, has been blown and their ability to go on tragically diminished.

Frey discovered the “invisible Mexicans” and stepped away from the notoriety of “The Gatekeeper”, an award-winning feature he’d made and acted in about the epiphany of a hardened border patrol agent, and into McGonigle Canyon.  With his crew, he spent a year in the canyon, filming. “The Invisible Mexicans of Deer Canyon” is an intimate, spare film, shot almost entirely within the canyon, dramatizing the sense of isolation, the increasing squalor and the contrast between its aridity and the surrounding abundance.  How and why the workers persevere is the leitmotif dramatized by the visuals and straightforward interviews.

Frey walks us through the workers’ daily lives: trekking for an hour at dawn to the highway where they may, and may not, be picked up for day jobs; bathing in runoff water that increasingly is becoming more scarce and unclean; building and having to rebuild successively less habitable living quarters as they are evicted and driven deeper within; scraping together meals on makeshift stoves or splurging at the food truck; assisting at mass on Sunday.

It took Frey several months to gain the migrants’ confidence and be allowed to photograph them.  “They were afraid of any outsiders for fear of deportation and eviction,” he explains.  “They wanted to remain as quiet and as hidden as possible.”

The footage is dominated by men, leading one to believe that the canyon is inhabited almost exclusively by men, but Frey was careful to explain that it was the women with their children, between 5% and 10% of the migrants, whose confidence was hardest to win over and almost universally would not be filmed. In a touchingly awkward scene, Frey does interview one young girl, a bride of 18, who’d just made it across the border.  With her mate in the background in their small encampment, the surroundings and their plight make a travesty of their honeymoon, but one the young couple nonetheless hopes will auger prosperity.

Frey says that once he gained the migrants’ confidence, his driving intention was to convey the palpability of their faith.  “I didn’t have to beg the question or lead them on to tell me about God,” he says.  “I could FEEL their faith.  It was almost an entity unto itself.”

Much of the film’s content visits that faith.  A chapel ministered by a local Roman Catholic parish served mass in the canyon for 20 years.  Their living quarters unfailingly host icons of the saints.  And the migrants’ accounts include the unequivocal certainty that their merciful God is guiding them through their tribulation.  God doesn’t want the men to suffer, says Raul, one of three brothers all long-time veterans of the canyon, “God doesn’t punish,” he assures us.  “He challenges us, but he doesn’t punish.  Theirs is an unwavering faith both tested and reinforced by the hardships of alienation and humiliation.

Frey seems to have gathered a core of men whom he is able to follow to the filming’s end.  They invite the filmmaker into their homes and in confidentiality rather than pride of place, take him on the “tour.” Most prominently delineating their space are the tutelary icons: the favored religious objects dominated by effigies of the Virgin of Guadalupe, photographs of family, the occasional pin-up.

Notable is the slippage of housekeeping efforts as evictions to make room for luxury homes—the homes they, in essence, will have to maintain--drive them to more makeshift and dispensable living quarters.

Carlos, admittedly struggling with alcoholism—he pledges to sober up before speaking with surety and dignity before the cameras, and does—has one article of faith that goes missing after being forced to relocate to smaller, shabbier and more remote quarters: an American flag, stuck in between the wooden scraps of his wall. It’s one of those starched, faintly painted flags on pencil-like dowels, the kind we saw in profusion at the immigrants’ rights marches earlier this year.

Commitment and its outgrowth, sacrifice, register as palpable as the men’s faith.  After so many years, so much distance, and the inevitable changes life puts us all through, the men remain committed to family and to returning to Mexico.  Carlos rummages under strewn clothing in his new, reduced hut and comes up with two pairs of sandals he proudly waves under his broad, toothless grin.  They are gifts for his daughter. 

The workers’ talks with Frey are rife with sentiments like Pedro’s.  He’s just returned to the canyon after a stint on a horse farm with real wages and a real place to live but an abusive boss: “What’s important is our families back in Mexico,” he says, with a shrug of resignation.  “If I live this kind of life here [in the canyon], our families will benefit, so that when they grow up, they will have a better chance at life in Mexico.”

To the men it may be their abject faith in God, but, ultimately it is their commitment to family and promises made that keeps them holding on.

Frey confessed there are moments he almost wishes he hadn’t made the film; he hadn’t realized the inevitably of exposure.  (He’d even chosen to use the name, Deer Canyon, by which Mc Gonigle Canyon had been known decades ago, in an attempt to throw people off track.)  He hadn’t predicted that, like Mel Gibson at the smell of blood, homeowners and opportunistic press, would jump on and scandalize what Frey saw as an isolated and peaceful though incredibly tough existence and a graphic argument for immigration reform.

MSNBC’s Ana Garcia got wind of the “Invisible Mexicans”, spoke with Frey, refused to use the footage he offered her, and produced two salacious segments, charging that the canyon was rife with prostitution and drug gangs, admonishing viewers to consider that the food on their plate today may well have been picked by this scurrilous band of criminals yesterday.  Rick Roberts, KFMB Radio talkster, attempted to organize an overnight camp-out and “illegal alien barbecue” amongst his listeners as a way of scoffing at the arduous lives of the migrants.  In an ultimate act of cynicism, he printed up hundreds of T-shirts reading “I’m an illegal alien” to be handed out to the workers, gloating that they’d be grabbed up and innocently worn as self-bashing signboards because the migrants, he was sure, were all illiterate.  His scheme was foiled by a landowner who had all entry to the canyon barred, evicting several migrants along the way.

The Minutemen, too, were alerted and organized protests at the canyon and, just days ago, we learned from a chagrined Frey that authorities had raided and shut down the migrants’ chapel.  (See story.)

Frey disputes the accusations of the canyon cum den of inequity with his own observations of no organized vice in the time he’s spent there, maintaining that there hasn’t been one case of prostitution in the canyon brought by the San Diego D.A.  Even Garcia’s interview with a local police officer, a Captain Boyd, refuses to link her charges of prostitution to the encampments.

The image of the migrants driven deep and downward within the canyon, its walls closing in around them as outside forces intrude and portend further misery is a potent reminder of their plight.  But another, metaphysical graphic surfaces in the gloomy wake of the narrow-souled nativists’ response to “The Invisible Mexicans of Deer Canyon;” it’s one that makes you wonder who the real canyon dwellers are.