In the midst of the protests in LA, I sat down and watched The Accountant² (yes that superscript is part of the title, no it is not a footnote). If you're not familiar with the franchise, Ben Affleck plays an autistic accountant who works for every single mob in the world and is also a stone cold killer. It's as "what the hell, sure" a premise as you can get, but the first movie is honestly not bad. If nothing else, it might be one of the only pieces of media that treats nonverbal autistic people like they're actually people (!).
So I went into the second movie expecting more of the same: some laughs, some pulling of the heart strings, lots of crazy action sequences. And I certainly got all of that. But this time, the movie tackled a bigger topic, too: the US-Mexico border.
Without spoiling the plot, immigration is a central theme in The Accountant². The movie deftly teaches the audience about La Bestia (aka El Tren de la Muerte), how much water it takes to survive in the northern Mexican deserts and how heavy it is to carry, and the unhappy fates of many migrants, all without ever devolving into sepia-toned misery porn. We meet undocumented sex workers who are not brutalized; in fact, they are humanized, and it's never questioned that they too deserve safety and dignity. One character even quips that illegal immigration exists because they do the jobs Americans don't deign to: they clean hotels, they butcher animals in slaughterhouses. It's not an exaggeration to say that the US would fall apart if we actually did deport every undocumented worker.
Most of the movie takes place in LA, and I kept thinking of the photos I'd seen of the protests. Countless signs of "CHINGA LA MIGRA", quote-unquote legal immigrants cooking the ubiquitous hot dogs while wearing masks to protect themselves from tear gas, mariachi bands playing, women line-dancing. Photos too of the bloody bruises left by rubber bullets, of uniformed men swinging batons with pitch black eyes, their souls long gone, blinked out of existence the day they picked up a badge. I thought of the LAPD helicopters that would circle over my neighborhood at 3AM, making it impossible to sleep. How militarized and surveilled the city felt, a city where honestly most people just want to eat some mangos covered in chamoy and kick it in their backyard. Do LAPD cops know about mangos with chamoy?
It's hard to make sense of LA even if you've spent a lot of time there. It's trite to call it sprawling but it really is sprawling, blooming out in all directions. 1 in 35 Americans live in LA County (1 in 12 Americans live in California, period). LA County has more people than most states in their entirety. I only lived there briefly, one delirious year in the early days of Covid, and I clung hard to my tiny corner of it so I wouldn't get lost in the roiling sea of strip malls, highways, and tall swaying palm trees. Perhaps that sounds hellish, and LA can be, but it also felt like heaven. Best food in America, hands down, sorry to everyone else but it's not up for debate (and no, NYC is not even in the running here -- if any other region is a serious contender, it is of course the South). Technicolor sunsets (so what if it's from pollution? We all have plastic in our brains now, who cares). Snow-capped mountains in the winter, huge balmy beaches in the summer.
But I'm waxing poetic, and poorly at that. LA is a hyperobject, too massive (too sprawling) to be understood from any one vantage point. If it can be summarized at all, it's in the statistic above: 1 in 35 Americans live in LA County. To the extent that an arbitrary shape in the corner of a map can stand in for the whole, LA is America. The climate disasters, the criminalization of poverty, the endless surveillance, and now this inanely evil "crackdown" on "illegals": that's America, baby!!!
I've lived in the border state of California almost all my life. I've known people who are undocumented, or whose families are. I've picked up Spanish here and there and don't blink when someone says No hablo inglés. I suspect all of this is true for you, too. No matter where you live, an immigrant, especially an undocumented immigrant, has touched your life. They clean buildings during the graveyard shift, they cook in almost every kitchen, they butchered the beef in your hamburger. (How to explain empathy to an American? Imagine someone making a burger.) They're your classmates, your coworkers, the woman who does your nails, the guy who lives next door. To say we should get rid of these people is not only evil, in fact beyond evil and blatantly fascist, but it is also just really, like, dumb. There is a pain in that, in knowing that the people calling the shots are complete morons who don't understand anything about how the world works. Surely we deserve better enemies. But at least our enemies let us know who they are. And anyone who says they "didn't vote for this" is lying: this was very clearly always where Trump 2.0 would lead, and the brain plastic is no excuse for not seeing that. Nice try but we all have brain plastic! Ah but anyway, enough about the idiots that bedevil us, we need to celebrate the people who dance and feed each other and heal the wounded in front of the monsters with bullets, rubber or otherwise. How lucky are we to be on the side of the angels!