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The hole
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Synopsis
In the days before "The Day of the Dead," Pachuco returns to his native village of Pátzcuaro, in the Mexican state of Michoacán, after thirty years of wrestling with the border's barbed wire and dodging the bullets of U.S. immigration authorities. It has been a long, tireless pursuit of a dream he had hoped would save him from the poverty and dead-end future his village represented.
Defeated, and "with a heavy heart," his return is nothing like the hero's reception he had forever imagined. Many old friends are now dead, his boyhood love has long since married, and the faces of those who remain — such as his steadfast friend Chavita — cruelly mirror his own fate, marked by the tequila in which they took refuge from the sorrow and emptiness of their lives.
On the eve of "el Día de los Muertos," the village prepares to celebrate one of México's most deeply rooted and magical traditions. It is a celebration attracting people of all types and variousorigins, usually drawn more to the the festivities than by the true significance of the Holiday. On patrol, meanwhile, are two corrupt policemen — Tachito and "el Negro" — who have their own agenda: They are looking for a some "street dog" with a "suspicious attitude" who might be accused of a crime they themselves have committed.
On this night, in the sordid and foul-smelling village jail, a number of characters find themselves together: Pachuco and Chavita, picked up on their nightly drunken ramble through the village; Marianito, the village idiot; Hilario, a truck driver arrested for assaulting his wife and her lover after catching them in the act; Jeff, an American hippie tourist; Carlitos, a well-to-do youth who, while inebriated, crashed his car into a funeral procession; and Juan, a failed rock'n roll musician.
Their respective stories reveal how each has come to find himself in jail, and collectively form a puzzle whose interlocking pieces finally portray México as an essentially male-chauvinist, profoundly traditional, and tremendously corrupt society that, while celebratingthe dead, ignores its own "living dead."
In this way, one comes to understand that the paths leading into the pit can be traversed by anyone, regardless of race, class or origin. It is not so much the physical space enclosed by bars that defines, by negation, what our freedom really is, but rather an interior prison from which we can escape only if, as Pachuco, we struggle to realize our dream, and accept all its consequences.*
*Translation by Chuck Reese |
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