Secret of the River - a film review

One of the things about Trump's habit of trashing Mexicans that gets under my skin is not the obvious racism, which is disgusting enough, but the fact that it flies in the face of my personal history of encounters with Mexicans. I live in California and Mexicans are everywhere. Overall, I have not just a different view of Mexicans from Trump's "They're sending rapists and murderers..." horseshit, but a very positive one. I think of Mexicans as super hard-working people always looking for a chance to laugh. A colorful lot. Loud, much of the time, but more because of exuberance than annoying. Think of mariachi music. Trumpets, more than violins. Ai, yai yai yai! more than la la la. My bias, I'm trying to say, is a positive one.  My list of Mexican friends and acquaintances is broad enough to include artists and intellectuals, architects and doctors, as well as just plain folk who send their kids to bilingual schools like the one a block from my house, but along with Germans and Japanese and Brits and Canadians and Argentines, I list Mexicans among the folks I am essentially at home with.

So I was not surprised when a friend recommended a Netflix series to me that takes place in a small town in the State of Oaxaca and I immediately got carried away with the sweetness of a friendship between two young boys thrown together by tragic circumstances. 

Manuel is sent to his grandmother's when his mother gets sick, and meets Erik, a boy his age, who is tasked with showing him around and making him feel at home. A not particularly unusual place for a story to start.

But where the story goes from there is anything but usual. It turns out that the context for this story is the native Zapotec community of Oaxaca. In particular the Isthmus Zapotec community, and even more particularly the community of men whom the Zapotec folk consider a third gender. Suddenly, we're talking not about the kind of Mexicans who form cartels and become drug smugglers - Trump's view of Mexicans - nor of the "Cucaracha" singing Mexicans that I expressed a fondness for, but an unusual segment of the Mexican population associated with pre-Columbian Central America who have evolved a culture that makes space for a cross-dressing minority called Muxes.

Secret of the River is divided into two distinct four-episode parts, the first when the boys first meet at the age of nine or ten, and the second twenty years later, when Manuel returns to the village to try to repair broken relationships. I won't spoil the plot line; the story is engrossing and you should experience the twists and turns for yourself. Things get rough at times, the good guys are a bit too good and the bad guys a bit too bad at times, but in the end, I predict you'll be as charmed as I was by the child actors and the character of Solange, a Muxe, who becomes a mentor and protector to Manuel who, even before the age of ten, is showing tendencies of not being comfortable in his skin. 

The dark side of Mexico - intense machismo and homophobia, corrupt police, child-abuse and sex-trafficking - is also present. This is not a socialist realism fantasy. But if you are open to taking in a hitherto unfamiliar view of Mexico and another way of dealing with the  current challenge of what to do about the T in LGBT, this movie is for you.

I give it a 5 out of 5. It's probably a 4, but I'm a sucker for cute kids.

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