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There are over 800,000 students enrolled in migrant education programs in
the United States and, of those, only 45-50% ever finish high school.
Escuela, the sequel to Hannah Weyer’s critically acclaimed documentary
La Boda, personalizes these glaring statistics through the honest
portrait of a teenage Mexican-American farm worker, Liliana Luis.
Escuela is a clear-eyed view into the lives of contemporary Mexican
American migrants and their struggles to educate their children while obtaining
employment. Centered around the life of Liliana, a daughter entering her first
year of high school, Hannah Weyer follows the back-and-forth movement of the
family between their home in Texas near the borderlands and the California
agricultural fields. Despite the best efforts of the school systems to
accommodate students like Liliana, the social and emotional life of this young
woman is constantly in flux. This is an important work revealing the
difficulties of girl life on the border in a way that no textbook could.” Joe
Austin, Popular Culture Studies, Bowling Green University.
A Hanna Weyer/Women Make Movies film. 53 minutes.
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