Fronterizo: A Border Odyssey

Fronterizo tells the story of Manuel Mondragon who was born in the U.S. barrio of La Mesita on the Tijuana-San Diego, U.S.- Mexico Border. La Mesita is a close-knit community of immigrant families from Mexico where fruit orchards provide jobs and a life of strong friendships and relations. However, Manuel is deported during the Great Depression to Mexico with his siblings and mother. Manuel yearns for the community and friends left behind in the U.S. They leave behind not only the community but the dream instilled in his father's migration north.

The family is deported to his father's hometown, Cabo San Lucas on the Cape of Baja California. Manuel adapts to the life of the cape and Mexico, but his fervent goal is to return to the United States. He eventually works his way north and to the Frontera-the Mexico-U.S. Border. In this journey he engages the world of fruits and vegetables-the life of the verdulero. Traveling through the interior Mexican states of Sinaloa, Guerrero, Jalisco, and other fruit-producing regions, Manuel discovers a Mexico he never imagined.

The deep ties to both Mexico and his place of birth solidify a binational belonging and identity. On the border in Tijuana, Manuel is engaged by the life of border commerce, and eventually returns to San Diego and enters the world of bi-national export. Manuel's journey presents a Mexico border framed by the bustling markets of ethnic fruits and vegetables. In the lifestyle of fruteros, trust, competition, and suspicion live side by side in the daily encounters of the fruit trade. This is a story of loss, the loss of home but also self-emergence in the discovery of place, belonging, and identity. It is a story couched in an unknown Mexico and a life pulled by the contradictions of home, the border, and self.