Award-winning film sparks a lively Sprunt Lectures discussion at Union Presbyterian Seminary

LOUISVILLE — The Rev. Dr. Miguel A. De La Torre has written dozens of books, but it took making a film alongside his son and his wife to reach the crowds he’s yet to reach through his books.

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De La Torre, Professor of Social Ethics and Latinx Studies at Iliff School of Theology in Denver, is delivering the 115^th Sprunt Lectures this week at Union Presbyterian Seminary in Richmond, Virginia. Before his first talk on Monday, De La Torre screened the  award-winning 2017 film “Trails of Hope and Terror.” Watch the trailer here. His initial Sprunt Lecture is here.

“Nobody reads my books except other scholars. You’ve got to be a bit of a theological nerd,” De La Torre told those gathered in Lake Chapel at Union Presbyterian Seminary and online. “More people saw the film in the first week than the people who have read all my books put together.”

“How do we as scholars find new ways to communicate the work we’re doing? Making this film was part of that venture,” he said, urging the gathered scholars and others to “think of creative ways to get this information out to a wider audience that desperately needs it. Making complex issues accessible is the job of the true scholar.”

Filmmakers interviewed immigrants seeking to cross the border between Mexico and the United States as well as people who oppose such attempts. Among those interviewed are a pair of Presbyterian pastors: the Rev. John Fife, the emeritus pastor at Southside Presbyterian Church in Tucson, Arizona, Moderator of the 204^th General Assembly (1992) and a co-founder of Sanctuary movement and organizer of No More Deaths; and Fife’s successor at Southside, the Rev. Alison J. Harrington.

After the screening, De La Torre highlighted some of the scenes the film depicts, including a Border Patrol agent kicking over jugs of water placed in the desert to aid migrants. In another scene, an agent dumps the water on the ground, then challenges the filmmakers by asking them, with cameras rolling, if they’d left the water. “If we said yes, they’d arrest us for littering,” De La Torre said.

At one point, U.S. authorities did detain De La Torre’s team. They’d found a bale of marijuana nearby and threatened team members with arrest on charges of drug trafficking. “I went to their leader and said, ‘I am a professor at a seminary and these students will be pastors one day,’” he said. “I think you may want to check with your supervisor before you charge us with drug trafficking.”

Meanwhile, it was time for a worship service, and De La Torre and his students invited the authorities to join them. Instead, they held the team for a few more hours until word came from headquarters in Washington to let them go — but not before De La Torre’s identification had been run through a law enforcement database.

Perhaps not coincidentally, De La Torre has seen his tax returns audited every year since.

“I told John Fife that, and he said, ‘Welcome to the club,’” De La Torre said.

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As for the three anti-immigrant people featured in the film, De Le Torre described a novel approach for gaining access.

“I was concerned about going to their rally,” he said. “I covered up my Cuban flag tattoos and said, ‘Howdy, patriots! We are here to do some interviews about all these people coming into the country. Do you want to talk to us?’ They said, ‘Sure.’”

The team soon learned that immigrants making their way through the Sonoran desert hide even from the people trying to help them. Team members would hit the trail each morning, yelling, “We have water and medicine. Don’t be afraid. We’re from the church.” One day the job fell to a person without good Spanish skills. After enduring the yelling for a while, a group of immigrants came to the team. “I’m so sorry. We don’t have much water, but what we have we will be happy to share with you,” they told the team.

“Those who have nothing are willing to share with those who have everything,” De La Torre said. “It flipped the whole script for me.”

He has of course seen the film many times, but Monday’s viewing was the first time since President Donald Trump’s second inauguration.

“Sometimes I just break down” while viewing his own film, he said, “and it’s kind of embarrassing. It still breaks my heart, especially after I got to know these people.”

During a question-and-answer session following his talk, De La Torre said filmmakers have recouped most of the money invested in the film, and plan to make the film accessible to the public in the next two weeks.

“For some people, it’s better to embrace ignorance than it is even to watch a film,” he said. “I have had people watch the film and then threaten me because it rocked their self-identity. I believe my job as a scholar is to provide the means by which to raise consciousness.”

De La Torre is teaming with the Rev. Dr. Mitri Raheb to edit a book scheduled for publication in September. “Tear Down These Walls: Decolonial Approaches to Barriers and Liberation” will have a look at “walls around the world,” De La Torre said. “We want the labor — we just don’t want the bodies attached to that labor.”

Before the  North American Free Trade Agreement came into effect in 1994, “if you needed labor, you would publish in the Tijuana newspaper and say, ‘Meet us on this bus.’ The bus would take you to Washington state to harvest apples.” When harvesters completed their work, they’d work their way south and then harvest their own corn crop in Mexico.

“When we passed NAFTA, we militarized the border,” De La Torre said. “When our hatred for the other is greater than our economic needs, we would rather put up that wall than invite the labor that will go back to their countries.”

“That’s the irony of the wall,” he said. “We cannot understand the immigration system without understanding economics.”

“I double dog dare you to come to the border,” he said. “It’s the only way we’re going to raise consciousness.”

De La Torre said a former mentor of his, John Curtis Raines of Temple University, used to say that Americans “like to dream upward but blame downward.”

“We buy lottery tickets because we dream of becoming the 1%,” De La Torre said. “But we have more in common with those we look down on. That’s the ethical struggle we find ourselves in.”

The Sprunt Lectures continue online and at Union Presbyterian Seminary in Richmond, Virginia, Tuesday and Wednesday. Learn more here.