Sine Nomine

Yesterday I drove to old downtown Albuquerque to look around and to see a movie that may not make it to Davenport; Sin Nombre.

The movie was great. It is two stories, one of a young woman from Honduras who travels to the United States, and the other of a gang member from Tapachula, Chiapas. It is 96 minutes long. It is in Spanish with English subtitles. It is violent, but so is the situation. The focus of the film is the difficulty of the journey through Mexico as migrants prepare to try to cross the Northern border of Mexico into the United States.

In my head the name, Sin Nombre gets mixed around with the Latin words Sine Nomine, which is the hymn tune of For All the Saints. No one on this journey travels alone, they are surrounded by a cloud of witnesses and a community of people; the saints. While these saints ain't no saints, some help others along in the journey. And always our situation is contextualized by those who have gone before, and all the experiences and people who have brought us to this time and place. One can imagine that many people now in the United States who have travelled here from Central America and Mexico have similar journeys in their experience and their own community of saints who have accompanied them on their way. I wonder how our border closing efforts fit into the narrative they construct when, having arrived, they rest from their journey?