Maids clean the hallways every morning, chefs prepare all of the meals, and a driver chauffeurs his residents from place to place. No, this is not the Hilton mansion, but a Boston College residence hall. No longer are these considered luxuries, only available to the rich and famous, but are an everyday part of the life of a BC student. Because of this privilege, it is sometimes difficult to see these workers as anything but their job description. However, many of them have incredible stories of perseverance under impossible situations available to anyone willing to ask.
Susan Legere, GA&S '09, did just that when she decided to create a documentary investigating the lives of three immigrants currently working at BC. The documentary titled Immigrant Reflections: Three Boston College Service Workers Share Their Stories, left many speechless after it aired at the Boston Latino International Film Festival this weekend.
The film, which is now available online at at.bc.edu, closely follows the lives of three BC employees, Vicky, Manny, and Jorge, in their struggle to assimilate into American society. Legere chose to show original photographs of each worker's home towns along with pictures of family members. No longer were these people strangers, but the audience gained a sense of familiarity, an empathetic connection with them. Each worker then went on to share their stories of what it was like growing up so far from where they currently live, a feeling further strengthened in a post-film interview with the filmmaker and subjects.
Vicky was only 2 years old when her mother left her three children behind in a house in Cacao Frontera, Guatemala without indoor plumbing or electricity to immigrate illegally to the United States. "Everything was natural, we had to use light from lanterns and we had no TV," she said.
A previous movie at the festival showed the brutality and suffering a Mexican family underwent while crossing the border into the United States after spending days trapped inside a truck. Upon seeing the film, Vicky's eyes swelled up with tears as she hugged her two children tightly. "That movie shows what my mother experienced. She suffered a lot to bring us here," Vicky said while looking out at the audience. "She went nearly eight days without food during her trip into the U.S. It was very different from the process I experienced in coming to this country."
2008 Woodie Awards
