| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Valley of Tears. Directed by Hart Perry. Produced by David Sandoval. Written by Juan Gonzalez. 2003; color and black and white; 82 minutes. Distributed by Seventh Art Releasing.
Valley of Tears is a documentary film that recounts events between 1979 and 1996 in the small community of Raymondville (population 8,800) located in south Texas, close to the Mexican border. The film opens with a day-by-day account of a strike begun spontaneously by those who did the backbreaking work of harvesting onions, a work stoppage that received support from the Texas Farm Workers Union. Even though the strike was defeated when a powerful grower, Othal Brand, bought the entire crop from the small local grower, the film portrays the transformation of Raymondville's Mexican-American population that resulted from the strike. In the wake of the walkout, residents no longer accepted a second-class status in their own community and became far more assertive in demanding their rights as Americans. Future battles were not fought on the picket line but in the voting booth, and the film's last two segments focus on the fight to gain control of the local school board and the district attorney's office in Willacy County.	1
Since the film does not employ a narrator and there are no interviews with academics or other experts, almost all of the commentary is provided by community activists. Black and white stills are used to trace Raymondville's history from the nineteenth century, when landowners employed Mexican laborers to clear the land of mesquite and cactus, through the community's heyday in the 1940s, when an "onion queen" received her crown during the annual onion festival. The film's most dramatic moment is the revelation of an incident in the 1920s when, after two deputies had been killed at a dance, Texas Rangers arrested twenty-five to thirty Mexicans who were then "shot trying to escape." Unfortunately, no further information is provided about the massacre, other than the fact that no one was ever tried for the murders.	. . .

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