James Shamus's Use Of Gang Violence In Sin Nombre

Apart from a single reference to the gang’s presence in Los Angeles, there is no mention of the MS-13’s origins in southern California, and the U.S. government’s role in facilitating its emergence and spread. Salvadoran migrants, whose very residence there was owed to U.S. support for El Salvador’s brutal military-oligarchy alliance, created the gang in the 1980s as a form of self-protection. U.S. deportations of members helped to internationalize the gang, which now has a strong presence in many Central American countries, and in southern Mexico.

Given the focus of the film, it is perhaps far too much to expect Sin Nombre to address such matters. But it begs the question of what the filmmaker is trying to accomplish by focusing on gang violence and its intersection with the Central American migrant passage through Mexico. It is in this area where Sin Nombre proves
A question-and-answer session with Fukunaga and Focus Features CEO, James Shamus, following a recent showing of the film at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, NY, helped to shed some light onto the production- and marketing-related thinking surrounding the film. Shamus somewhat cryptically called the film “radically political” (suggesting that it was so in a progressive sense), and praised the fact that it gives voice to people rarely heard in feature films — Latinos. He also gushed about how the film is bringing large numbers of Latinos into art-house theaters, evidence of its cross-over appeal.

Fukunaga indirectly took issue with Shamus’s suggestion that Sin Nombre was political. “I didn’t write it as a political film,” the filmmaker asserted. “I wasn’t trying to change anyone’s mind.” Instead, he stated that he wanted viewers to have an “experience”