Gregory Nava’s account of political oppression in Guatemala and the challenges of new immigrant labor in the United States was one of the first great successes in the burgeoning American independent film scene of the early 1980s. After their father is brutally massacred along with a party of laborers by the military, a brother and sister plot to escape their troubled homeland with the hope of finding prosperity across the U.S. border. Along the way, they face grueling adversity—both in their efforts to make it safely to Los Angeles and in the world of work as servants they discover after resettling there. Nava and co-writer Ann Thomas’s work owes a clear debt to the politics of the 1960s as it fashions a compassionate narrative of the contemporary experience of illegal immigration.