Award-winning documentary by Mexican woman recalls her grandfather

Iliana Sosa's family lives on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border. She remembers her grandfather, Juli n Moreno, who took 13 hour bus rides every month from Durango in northwest Mexico to El Paso, Texas, where she grew up.

Sosa has produced an award-winning documentary about her grandfather, What We Leave Behind, which premiered at the South By Southwest SXSW festival in March. In an interview with NBC News, she said he wanted to document his work as a bracero and capture that oral history. So many braceros have already passed away. Their stories have also gone with them. Like Sosa's grandfather, millions of Mexicans came to the U.S. through the Bracero program, a temporary work program that issued work permits between 1942 and 1964. It was originally created to deal with labor shortages from World War II when so many men went to war.

What We Leave Behind tells a very personal story about Sosa's maternal grandfather who started building a house at the age 89, in a plot of land next to his rural home in Mexico after spending much of his life riding buses to the United States.

Viewers will see Sosa's silver-haired grandfather wearing a white cowboy hat. He looks ratty, thin and resilient, made tough by a lifetime of work — he shovels dirt and carries wooden planks at the construction site of the new home.

The film can be slow at times, forcing viewers to adapt to the rhythms of Moreno's farm life. The camera also shows how his health is declining as the new home goes up cinderblock by cinderblock.

Sosa said that while What We Leave Behind began with the idea of documenting Moreno's bracero past, it turned into a seven-year project that shows his connection to Mexico and how it shaped his frontier-like perspective.

She said that my grandfather saw Mexico, that this was his home, a very beautiful way of life, of appreciating time and life for what they are. She said they did what they did because it was what they were able to do.

Sosa describes her grandfather as a mystery man who smoked a lot and brought her fudge and tamarind sweets during his visits throughout her childhood years. She says that unraveling the mystery of his story also poses deep questions about her Mexican American identity.

She describes her identity as fluid and hybrid. There is a term called nepantla, which means in-betweenness. It is a Nahuatl word that is a native language from Mexico and Central America and resonates with me. I have been in very different worlds, in different cultures and in different spaces. Sosa is the daughter of Mexican immigrants. She was born and raised in El Paso, Texas. Both of her parents came as undocumented immigrants when they were teenagers. She says her family's tenacity and hard work planted the seeds for her success.

I am the first to go to college. I am the first to go to film school and get a Master's degree. She said that I was the first in my family to be an artist and to make my labor not from my hands. My grandfather was a bracero and he worked as a farmer all his life. My mother, when she came to this country, worked as a housekeeper and a nanny. My father has always been a server. She believes that being Mexican American can mean many things when she remembers her life as the daughter of Mexican immigrants, a filmmaker and a professor.

I think the beauty of Latinidad in this country is that we do inhabit these different spaces. She said that we can be all of these selves. Home can mean more than one thing and more than one place.