A Realistic Tale of Improbable Friendship. Notes on Matthew Bonifacio’s Amexicano (2007)

This chapter discusses Matthew Bonifacio’s independent movie Amexicano, which centers around the improbable friendship between Italian American Bruno and undocumented Mexican worker Ignacio. The authors equate the fictional undocumented im/migrants portrayed in Matthew Bonifacio’s film to what Zygmunt Bauman calls ‘human waste’, which is the collateral damage of economic progress. The life on the border—be it a physical border or a metaphorical one (the one that divides American culture from the im/migrants’ cultural milieu of provenance)—experienced by these individuals causes great anxiety and fear (whether real or imagined). This situation also causes instability, eventually leading to what the authors define in terms of pervasive mistrust and a final collapse of trust, which then generates exclusion for the unwanted and an obsession with security for the ones living inside the border. All of these emotions (the collapse of trust, pervasive mistrust, and obsession) are palpable throughout the movie also because the initial depiction of Mexican im/migrants is overwhelmingly negative. In its second half, Amexicano shifts ‘the border’ between welcoming and exclusion, although for the two protagonists and for Gabriela (Ignacio’s sister and Bruno’s love interest) a happy ending just isn’t in the cards.