Austin-based director Iliana Sosa's new HBO documentary focuses on Texas' borderlands

Amid the charged politics of U.S.-Mexico border control, an Austin-based documentary maker returned to the question of her youth: the in-betweenness of border life.

University of Texas professor Iliana Sosa’s most recent project, "God Save Texas: La Frontera," focuses on her hometown of El Paso, the largest city in the state’s borderlands. The subject is personal and historical, and it incorporates intimate stories ripe with connection, sacrifice, pain and absurdity. It will be released on HBO Max as one of three parts of the new "God Save Texas" series on Feb. 27. The series extends on journalist Lawrence Wright's 2018 book, inquiring on the assumptions and simplifications of Texas mythology.

Sosa’s contribution reveals the damage that limited definitions of being American or Texan can have on lives that don’t fit. It asks viewers to consider the duality required of border residents.

“There’s power to living in-between, but it also threatens just what we associate as being 'American.' And that’s part of what we’re living now," Sosa told the American-Statesman.

Inevitably, Sosa’s lens captures the tense dance of movement and halt at the U.S.-Mexico border. She shows the long history of fronterizo movement — for work, friends and family — and of state challenges to this ebb and flow. There’s the pre-World War II uses of Zyklon-B fumigations of Mexican migrant laborers, and the legal aid lawyer whose family lived in Ciudad Juárez for generations waiting to live on the same side of the border as they worked. The current migrant humanitarian crisis also appears.

Sosa’s film, though, does not constrain itself to the subject of border policy. Community efforts to stop the gentrification of one of El Paso’s oldest neighborhoods, Duranguito, reveal a desire of residents to carve their own future and not leave the decisions of “progress” to the powers that be. Instead of a new arena, those fighting the leveling of a neighborhood ask for the buildings to be reused as a historical zone. (Since the documentary was made, the residents have seemingly won this fight.)

The documentary portrays in-betweenness as inescapable. It reaches even an outsider — USA TODAY immigration reporter Lauren Villagran — who moves to El Paso, falls in love with a Mexican citizen and thus endures the separation caused by the pandemic-era border closures.

The film suggests that the hard-line fortification of the border is a threat to a community that has long breathed as a singular organism. So, too, are the threats of physical violence, like the 2019 Walmart shooting committed by a white nationalist killer concerned with replacement theory.

These threats, Sosa said, make for a necessary resilience in border life.

“There’s a resistance there … (but) it is tested a lot. I think outside forces, politics, everything that is happening — it’s hard to live in that in-between,” Sosa said.

Sosa points out the pain border residents endure. She shows the yearly “Hugs not Walls” event, when the border is temporarily opened for families on either side to embrace for minutes at a time.

Until a new reality arises, the strength to endure this is in community.

“There’s magic in the multiplicity," Sosa narrates at one point in the documentary. "Of being not one, but many, in the in-between."

Iliana Sosa’s "God Save Texas: La Frontera" will premiere Feb. 28 at 9 p.m. CT on HBO. It will be available to stream on HBO Max, along with the other two parts of the series — directed by Richard Linklater and Alex Stapleton — beginning on Feb. 27.

This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: Austin-based director's HBO documentary focuses on border and home