Papers the Movie: Stories of undocumented youth by Anne Galisky (dir.)
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P a p e r s t h e Mo v i e : St o r i e s o f u n d o c u m e n t e d youth Anne Galisky (dir.) Graham Street Productions, Portland, OR, 2009, $19.95 (DVD) Latino Studies (2014) 12, 313–314. doi:10.1057/lst.2014.27
Papers the Movie, is a documentary film that narrates the stories of five undocumented high school students who face serious challenges when they try to apply for college. Unfortunately because of the undocumented students’ legal status, their dreams of achieving a higher education are almost impossible to realize. The main purpose of the film is to bring to life the stories of the 2 million undocumented students who struggle in their everyday life since they cannot do simple tasks like drive or work. They have to accept jobs where they are underpaid because of their legal status. According to the film, there are around 65,000 undocumented students who graduate from high school every year; many of them struggle to continue their education and have difficulty finding jobs that provide fair wages and benefits. Frequently, they do not know their native language nor have any familiarity with their native country because their families brought them to the United States at an early age. Nonetheless, they live in the only country that they know as their own with fear; fear of being deported or separated from their families. Another important purpose of the film is to educate viewers about the struggles that undocumented students experience when they graduate from high school or when they are getting ready to apply for college before high school
graduation. Through this film, viewers get acquainted with the shocking reality of how undocumented students are rejected from universities because of their legal status in this country. There is a common misperception that undocumented students are able to get financial aid and scholarships to attend the university; this documentary boldly disrupts this mistaken belief by demonstrating that every day universities reject even students with a grade point average over 4.0 for not having a legal status. If undocumented students desire to attend a college or university, they are treated as out of state students and subjected to very high tuition costs and fees, in many instances several times higher than that for domestic students, making attending college an unreachable goal. To give an example from my own experience with undocumented college students, in 1999 a college from California was charging US$11 per course unit, which totaled between $33 and $44 per class. However, if undocumented students wanted to attend this college, they had to pay $150 per unit, or from $450 to $600 per class. Therefore, the high cost of tuition is one of the main reasons why the majority of undocumented students cannot attend college. Unfortunately, only a few states allow undocumented students to attend colleges or universities and pay in-state tuition, and even
© 2014 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1476-3435 Latino Studies www.palgrave-journals.com/lst/
Vol. 12, 2, 313–314
Media Review
in those sta
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