Entre Nos. Directed by Paola Mendoza and Gloria La Morte. New York: IndiePix, 2009. 81 minutes.

Lucky: A Documentary. Directed by Laura Checkoway. Brooklyn: Cinema Guild, 2014. 75 minutes.

Media depicting the day-to-day struggles and motherwork of low-income women of color in the United States are rare, especially stories that give sustained and nuanced attention to issues of poverty, structural violence, immigration, social reproduction, and resistance to complex systems of oppression in Latina lives. The films Entre Nos and Lucky: A Documentary powerfully attend to these issues while chronicling the stories of low-income Latina mothers. A Colombian undocumented mother must survive on her own in the United States with her two children after her husband abandons the family in Entre Nos. Lucky is a sobering documentary about the film’s namesake that follows five years in the life of Lucky Torres, a queer Puerto Rican woman in New York who faces housing insecurity and barriers to survival on a daily basis. Lucky is also a mother who lost her own parents to the AIDS crisis of the 1970s and 1980s and subsequently grew up in the foster care system. Both films envisage justice-informed concepts of motherhood which “create a generous space for life in the face of life-threatening limits” placed on multiply-marginalized communities (Gumbs, Martens, and Williams 2016). For educators interested in teaching with these films, we recommend recognizing that the mothering of women of color is always already queer inasmuch as families of color are rendered outside of the normative and reproductively respectable US nuclear family formation (Cohen 2001; Ferguson 2003; Hong 2015).

Women of color feminists such as Cherríe Moraga (2019) have theorized the necessity of writing their mothers into the archive in a society that would otherwise erase their existences. In the Latina feminist life-writing tradition of autohistoria-teoría (Anzaldúa [1987] 2007), the writer-directors of Entre Nos, Paola Mendoza and Gloria La Morte, convey an artful and powerful portrait of gendered immigration and highlight the courage and dexterity of migrant motherhood. While not a documentary, the film is based on Mendoza's life though it is told from her mother’s point of view. Indeed, blurring the lines between narrative and documentary, Mendoza plays the role of her mother, Mariana. It tells the story of Mariana after journeying from Columbia to New York City with her children—6-year-old Andrea and 10-year-old Gabriel—to join Antonio, her husband and the children’s father. When Antonio leaves to find work in Miami, promising to send for them, days go by before Mariana faces the realization that he is unreachable and likely gone for good. Knowing little of the United States, and equally little English, Mariana is forced to survive grave circumstances with two young children.

In our experience, students find Entre Nos particularly impactful because of how it contends with the complexity of structural violence and offers a fuller narrative about issues related to the US southern border. While the film is not a new release, it is as relevant as ever to understanding the gendered aspects of (im)migration, migrant detention, and the reproductive justice issues of family separation policies. This film deeply humanizes migrants from Latin America, especially women. Paired with a reading such as Martha Escobar’s chapter “Reinforcing Gendered Racial Boundaries: Unintended Consequences of (Im)migrant Rights Discourse” from Captivity Beyond Prisons: Criminalization Experiences of Latina (Im)migrants (2016), Entre Nos can disrupt “good immigrant narratives” that valorize some (im)migration stories at the cost of others.

Directed by Laura Checkoway, Lucky speaks to the richness of queer existence in ways that avoid sanitization in mapping the messiness of Lucky’s world. Lucky Torres is queer, houseless, a woman of color, and a mother struggling with schizophrenia, memories of past trauma, and precarity, with near-constant obstacles structuring her life in New York City. In its depictions, the film challenges narratives about linear progress and middle-class ideas of work and success; these narratives are exposed as impossibilities when placed in conversation with Lucky’s queered life, the ways she has been labeled deviant, and the systemic and institutional inequities that have placed her on the periphery of support. Checkoway’s film style is incredibly intimate, well rounded, and centers nonnormativity in ways that insist upon empathy from the viewer and avoid exploitative and reductive conclusions. An incredible example of this intentionality is the film’s ability to showcase Lucky’s desires for fame and celebrity without conflating her hopes with pipe dreams or constructing them as superficial. Instead, her aspirations exist in the same temporality as her struggles to navigate or even trick the system that continually brutalizes her.

In the feminist classroom, Lucky allows students to examine queer possibility from the center of queer reality rather than from the margins. To support this, educators can encourage students to notice systems and structures operating to create forms of marginalization that affect someone’s ability to imagine life otherwise. Lucky is essential viewing in the feminist classroom as it complicates and broadens our notions of who is and is not afforded subjectivity and visibility via the deeply Black feminist praxis of bearing witness (Richardson 2020). Checkoway’s insistence on accepting the mess encourages a space where we can challenge students’ conceptions of who is deserving of support, who makes a good mother, what labor looks like, and how our material lives and our seemingly immaterial dreams may be more connected than they appear.

Beyond broadening and queering the interpretive lenses students bring into the feminist classroom, Entre Nos and Lucky may also perform representational work for multiply marginalized students, whose own rich contexts often feel left behind in the academic setting. These films are immersive, thoughtful, and exist as catalysts for connection, reflection, and reimagination. They are useful for ensuring students leave the feminist classroom with a complex understanding of the ways personhood, systems, and survival sit in relationship with one another.

Heather Montes Ireland is an assistant professor in the Department of Women's and Gender Studies at DePaul University, Chicago, USA, where she is also affiliated faculty in the Department of Latin American and Latino Studies, the Critical Ethnic Studies Program, and the LGBTQ Studies Program. Her research focuses broadly on intersectional economic justice, women of color studies, queer of color critique, and the gender and sexual politics of racial capitalism. She is currently working on a book that examines the cultural formations of entrepreneurialism that have shaped (anti-)poverty policy in the United States and transnationally, with severe ramifications for the lives of poor and low-income women of color.

Isatou (Isha) Sallah is a PhD student in the Department of Sociology at the University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign. Her research interests include gender, sexuality, queer of color critique, and Black feminist thought.