Thoreau Center Midday Reels presents Entre Nos

Wednesday, February 16 12:30pm - 2:00 pm Pacific Room at Tides, Thoreau Center for Sustainability

Join us for Midday Reels, featuring the award-winning film Entre Nos. This film traces the story of a family struggling to survive and make a permanent home for themselves in the United States. Despite grueling challenges, this mother’s courage and imagination offer hope. The film is based on a true story and should spark more dialogue about immigration reform. The Center for American Progress, America’s Voice Education Fund, and Reform Immigration for America have all supported this film.

Film Synopsis:

Mariana (Paola Mendoza) is determined to keep her family together. Her children, Gabriel (Sebastian Villada Lopez), 10, and Andrea (Laura Montana Cortez), 6, have grown up in Colombia without their father. He immigrated to the United States years earlier in order to make a better life for his family. Finally after many years of separation the family is reunited in New York City.

After coming home late from work one night Antonio announces he has found work in Miami and will be moving there…alone. He will send for the family when he is settled.

Days go by and Mariana does not hear from him. Worried and desperate, she goes to her only friend’s home only to find out Antonio is not coming back. The rent is due, there is no food on the table and Mariana has fifty dollars to her name. With no one to turn to, she must find a way, in a strange city where she barely speaks the language, to provide for her family, financially and emotionally.

Mariana makes homemade empanadas (meat patties), which she tries to sell on the streets, however this quickly fails. With all options closing in on her, Mariana turns to the city’s trash, collecting cans in order to put food on the table. With Gabriel and Andrea working beside her, the family finds the most stability they have known since their arrival, and it is during these challenging moments that the family triumphs.

In entre nos, Mariana, Gabriel and Andrea take us on a remarkable journey where we bear witness to a family’s commitment to survival and their unrelenting hope for the American dream...one soda can at a time.

Midday Reels events are free informal mid-day learning sessions hosted at Tides. Friends, neighbors and colleagues are welcome. Visitors, please sign in at the front desk.

Thoreau Center Film Screening: The Wall

Friday, September 10
12:30 pm to 2:00 pm
Pacific Room at Tides, Thoreau Center for Sustainability SF
Presented by Lou Ramirez

Join us for a premiere screening of the San Francisco Film Festival's The Wall, directed by Ricardo A. Martinez.

In 2006, the U.S. Congress passed The Secure Fence Act calling for the construction of 700 miles of fence along the U.S./Mexico border. Filmed over two years, The Wall documents the impact of constructing this border fence along the Southwest. From policy makers to citizens of border towns, the debate elevates as residents respond to having a fence built in their backyard. Nobody could have imagined how many problems the fence would create, from an excess of dead bodies to an increase in smuggling costs.

The San Francisco Latino Film Festival runs September 16 through September 28, 2010. Check local listings for screenings and the Cine+Mas website for more information: www.sflatinofilmfestival.com.

Brown Bag events are free informal mid-day learning sessions hosted at Tides. Friends, neighbors and colleagues are welcome. Visitors, please sign in at the front desk.

Thoreau Center Brown Bag, July 1

Stories from the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands

Thursday, July 1 12:30pm - 1:30pm
Atlantic Room at Tides, Thoreau Center

From a distance, the U.S.-Mexico border looks like a dividing line. In her new book, The Wind Doesn't Need a Passport: Stories from the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands, journalist Tyche Hendricks shows us that that border is actually a region. A complex, multi-faceted, often-misunderstood, bi-national terrain, it is more borderlands than borderline.

Many people have lives on both sides: they cross daily for work, school, family, shopping. Pollution and disease flow back and forth. Extensive trade and economic activity tie the United States and Mexico together. And there's a shared history and culture. But with a stalled immigration policy and a raging drug war, it's the people who live in the borderlands who are bearing the brunt of the violence, the political friction and the pressures of the recession.

Hendricks traveled through the border region and gathered some remarkable stories -- from emergency rooms and factory floors, farm kitchens and jail cells. She saw American and Mexican cowboys, environmentalists, nurses and nuns wrestling with shared bi-national problems. A better understanding of the borderlands -- and the way the United States and Mexico are connected there -- could help policymakers reach more lasting solutions that benefit both countries.

Tyche Hendricks reported on immigration and immigrant communities at the San Francisco Chronicle for many years. She has taught at UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism and took her international reporting students to Tijuana last winter. She is now an editor for The California Report on KQED Public Radio. The Wind Doesn't Need a Passport: Stories from the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands is out this month from the University of California Press.

Brown Bag events are free informal mid-day learning sessions hosted at Tides. Friends, neighbors and colleagues are welcome. Visitors, please sign in at the front desk.

Thoreau Center Film Screening: Amreeka

When: Wednesday, October 21, 2009 12:30 PM-1:30 PM


Where: Pacific Room at Tides



The Thoreau Center is hosting a screening of the recently released film Amreeka. This film chronicles the adventures of Muna, a single mother who leaves the West Bank with Fadi, her teenage son, with dreams of an exciting future in the promised land of small town Illinois. In America, as her son navigates high school hallways the way he used to move through military checkpoints, the indomitable Muna scrambles together a new life cooking up falafel burgers as well as hamburgers at the local White Castle.


By writer-director Cherien Dabis in her feature film debut, Amreeka is a universal journey into the lives of a family of immigrants and first-generation teenagers caught between their heritage and the new world in which they now live and the bittersweet search for a place to call home.


National Geographic Entertainment will release Amreeka in September 2009. Amreeka is a First Generation Films-Alcina Pictures-Buffalo Gal Pictures/Eagle Vision Media Group Production, presented by E1 Entertainment in association with Levantine Entertainment, Rotana Studios and Showtime Arabia.


Amreeka made its world premiere in dramatic competition at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival, and played as Opening Night of New Directors/New Films, a co-presentation of The Museum of Modern Art and The Film Society of Lincoln Center. Amreeka made its debut internationally in Directors’ Fortnight at the Cannes Film Festival.

New Book - The Accidental American

New to the collection is The Accidental American: Immigration and Citizenship in the Age of Globalization by Rinku Sen and Fekkak Mamdouh from Berrett-Koehler Publishers in San Francisco. From the publisher's site:

The Accidental American advocates a bold new approach to immigration: a free international flow of labor to match globalization’s free flow of capital. After all, corporations are encouraged to move anywhere in the world they can maximize their earnings. People shouldn’t have to risk exploitation, abuse, even imprisonment when they try to do the same.

Activist, journalist, and immigration expert Rinku Sen and organizer Fekkak Mamdouh examine the consequences of this injustice through Mamdouh’s own story. Born in Morocco, he was a waiter and union leader at Windows on the World, a restaurant in the World Trade Center, on September 11th. In the aftermath, facing a rising tide of anti-immigrant bias, Mamdouh and others formed the Restaurant Opportunities Center of New York to help their colleagues fight for decent jobs and fair treatment.

The experiences of Mamdouh and his coworkers vividly demonstrate the human cost of our flawed immigration policies. Since September 11th, immigrants have increasingly been treated as presumptive criminals. As a counterpoint to these regressive, fundamentally un-American practices, Sen forcefully advocates more humane policies, coupled with proposals for reforming globalization so that all countries can more equitably benefit from a mobile labor force.