Mi Familia/My Family



Mi Familia/My Family

Introduction

My Family focuses on three generations of a proud Mexican family that settle in East Los Angeles. Directed and co-written by Gregory Nava (with Anna Thomas), My Family provides a great movie experience even if it goes slightly slack toward the end, and the storylines sometimes fall into typical patterns. At its outset, My Family, Mi Familia seems set on spinning a yarn of mythic proportions, but an early line dismisses that notion and the film settles in as a warm, joyous slice-of-life. My Family uses a mostly unknown cast (with the exceptions of Jimmy Smits, Edward James Olmos and Esai Morales, who finally gets his first really good role since making an impression as Ritchie Valens' brother in 1987's La Bamba) to great effect in telling its story of family crises and celebrations (James, 1995). In addition to Morales' work, Jacob Vargas and Eduardo Lopez Rojas provide fine performances as the younger and older versions of the Sanchez family patriarch as does Jenny Gago as the family's mother in her later years. For quite a while, the story and the look of My Family so entrance the viewer that you believe the film will never make a misstep, but alas it does in the third section of the film when the most standard elements come into play and the film overstays its welcome.

Sanchez family encounters the U.S. and they are representative of Mexican Americans as a group as Jose meets Maria, Jose Sanchez walks from Mexico to California, where he meets, and marries the Mexican-born Maria the mother of Chucho, Isabel, Paco, Toni, Jimmy and Memo, who was an American citizen. Jose goes and meets his last living relative in Californio, El Californio, and starts a new life. You can really see the pride El Californio has in his home, family, and California from the way he makes his living and treats his home. During the time she was pregnant of her first baby, she went to the groceries store, and that she was caught and deported to Mexico by the U.S. Federal Government in a mass roundup. Two years later, she makes it back to Los Angeles with Chucho to meet with his husband.

There were the first two borders in the movie, when Jose walks to Los Angeles and then when Maria finds the way to go back home with her son (Ebert, 1995). Right in the middle between Mexico and California were the family Sanchez settled. In the beginning, this situation was not a big deal. The eldest daughter Irene gets married. Chucho and Paco, the narrator of the story, were grown up. Memo and Jimmy were the new additions to the family. The story continues through the two generations of the family. The film shows how Jose and his wife Maria struggle throughout the next sixty years trying to provide and raise their family with Mexican culture still in them and keep their pride of their culture ...