Under The Same Moon Analysis

There is an idea that says one will never fully understand another’s plight until he or she walks in their shoes. When watching the film Under the Same Moon, or La Misma Luna, viewers gain a sense of what it means to be an undocumented immigrant from Mexico in the United States. The audience travels many miles with nine-year-old Carlitos Reyes in his journey across the border to reunite with his mother Rosario, who is working without documentation in California to provide a better life in the United States for her son someday (Riggen, 2008). Viewers not only realize how risky it is to cross the border, but also observe a sense of white racial superiority in the United States through the characters’ points of view. According to a 2009 Pew Hispanic Center report, “In 2008, 12.7 million Mexican immigrants lived
407). La Misma Luna focuses on immigration, but it more clearly demonstrates the history of racial superiority this course has discussed. As Rosario and her roommate are leaving their cleaning jobs in a white, upper-class neighbourhood, the gatekeeper Paco states, “First, [the whites] screwed the poor Indians. Then they screwed the slaves. And now they’re screwing us Mexicans” (Riggen, 2008). Upon reading the textbook, students can see Paco’s statement is true. The United States unfairly invaded Mexico in present-day Texas to create the Mexican-American War in 1846. President Polk disguised his motive of land acquisition under the desire to promote and spread Christianity. Troops murdered and scalped many innocent Mexicans during the war. Mexico eventually agreed to the Rio Grande River being the Texas border; however, the natives’ unfulfilled rights were supposed to be