Los Sandy’s

We cross deserts, glaciers, continents
The whole world from end to end
Stubborn, survivors
Eyes on the wind and on the currents
Hands firm on the oar

We carry our wars
our lullabies
our path made of verses
of migrations, of famines

And that’s how it has always been, since eternity
We were the drop of water, traveling in the meteorite
Crossing galaxies, the void, millennia
We sought oxygen, we found dreams

Movimiento, Jorge Drexler

There is a force that makes us look for safety, for protection. There is a drive to dream and chase something better. In this journey, we build a shelter and find a home, share stories, and find complicity, joy, an also despair until that force puts us in motion again. Fear, famine, rare curiosity, or nonconformism make us cut our roots with a goodbye, bidding farewell to those who named things for us for the first time, those who gave us our name. We leave them with an absence that whispers don’t worry, I will be fine, I will be back, and depart with bags and luggage though we really leave with a promise, a question, and our memory.

My 18 years old me left Granada (Spain), my hometown, looking to become an actor and a filmmaker. Today, seventeen homes later, I live in New York, a city of immigrants that opened the world for me and made me aware of migrations more than ever. I listened to stories of incredible resilience, bravery, and sacrifice from its protagonists. I looked back then to my history. For instance, how the Spanish Civil War impacted my family. I asked my family and learned, for example, about how my grandfather Jaime and his family escaped in the middle of a winter night from being assassinated by the Republican army. I learned how my other grandfather, Paco, traumatically became the head of a family of 6 when he was 16 and migrated with all of them to Granada, looking for opportunities to feed them all. Or before the war, I learned how my great-grandma María left her little town in the mountains as a single mum looking for opportunities for her and her baby, my grandmother, and survived by breastfeeding the baby of a wealthy family. Also, how some of my family migrated and settled in Sinaloa, Mexico, and left behind their beloved ones and the hard work in the charcoal mines of Sierra Nevada. And then, here it’s me, conveying all their history, their stories, their dreams, their struggles, fears, and suffering, their sacrifice for a better future, and their love to provide something better for the next generation.

On Feb. 2017, producer Alan Thompson and I visited Fresno to shoot a documentary piece for a non-profit working in the area. Being on the ground, we needed to find and document the stories of families needing medical help. We met many families, and among them was the Garcia, a family of undocumented Mexican immigrants living and working in the hardest conditions but possessing the most precious treasure: the talent for music. Inspired and helped by their parents, six of the seven children, Ivan (17), Luis (16), Willy (14), Freddy (11), Santiago (9), and Melina (7), formed Los Sandy’s, a Mexican folk music band that performs in the Central Valley of California. They did perform for our video, and in awe, Alan and I decided to go back to tell their whole story.

One year later, Trump tried to illegalize the Dreamers by ending DACA. We thought that that was the right time to film Los Garcia. In the field, we discovered that the family was not affected by this, but their circumstances were still heartbreaking and got even worse. Enrique, the father, had died from an aneurysm months after his 7th son was born, repeating the cycle for Julia. Her dad passed when she was a little kid. In addition, he said they had to move from the place they called home for 18 years because the landlord wanted to sell the property. Powerless, with nothing to negotiate or money to purchase the land, they had to cut their roots and move elsewhere.

Impressed by the strength and resilience of Julia to move forward as a family, I wondered what she had to sacrifice. What did she want to be when she was little? How many dreams she had to leave behind? What moved her to leave everything behind to enter a land of uncertainty and danger? Why did her husband pass as her dad did? I saw my family mirrored in her. Like Julia, how many dreams, desires, and beloved ones they had to leave behind? How about their grandparents? And their ancestors? How many of them migrated? Where did they come from? Why did they migrate? Why did yours? Where did they come from? Ultimately, from the same place as mine. We share the same past. We are descendants of the same migrants who wanted the best for us.