The movie Bread and Roses is a very interesting movie that recreates the reality of immigrants. Although the entire movie presents important information, I was mostly stroke by the beginning of the movie. Immigrants are working hard to support their family and also to allow their relatives to leave their countries. They deal with traders for the transport. They fight to come to a country with the dream of a better life in a country I am sure they know a lot about. At least me I did not.

Given they come as illegal, they cannot have proper work. Instead, they work for someone who has control over them because of their status. In the movie, there was a women who cries saying that she needs the job after she was fired for a stupid reason. She cries because she has a family that depends on her. Others need those jobs in order to finance their education for a real future. Indeed the difficult transportation and the crappy jobs are just few in the list of all the obstacles that immigrants have to go through. They also have to grow to the expensive education system, if allowed, without any financial support. All these because of a better life for them and their progeny. Sincerely, I GIVE MY RESPECT to all immigrants or family of immigrants!

The movie Bread and Roses tells the story of Maya, an illegal immigrant who becomes a janitor at an office building in Los Angeles. The working conditions for Maya and the other janitors are less than ideal. Since some of the employees at her job are also illegal immigrants, the mangement takes advantage of this because they know that without a job, these people cannot survive. One day a labor acitivist, Sam, comes to Maya’s job and tries to get the janitors to unionize. This is great and all but I felt as if this movie played very much into the savior complex. It is great to want to help people rise up and better their situation. However, I think the best way is to empower these marginalized groups and allow them to make their own decisions accordingly. I feel as if this movie was more like, “I’m Sam, and we are going to do it my way.” Whether or not his way works or not, it makes him the “savior of the oppressed” and I do not think this is the best way to make a lasting change in any issue.

The plight of underpaid workers is something that people love to talk about, but is typically left up to the people stuck in the bad situation to actually do anything about. This movie is a classic example of such a situation. In this case, the workers are janitors and cleaning people for various big buildings in LA. They are also primarily illegal immigrants. Their illegal status complicates the situation because their employers are able to bully them into accepting lower wags under the threat of firing them, or worse, calling ICE and threatening deportation.

The largest enemy of the employer’s will is the Janitor’s union, which in this movie is led by a character named Sam Shapiro. He is fighting to increase the wages of the workers and also to get more people into the union. The people who were in the union were payed about eight and a half dollars per hour, whereas the people who weren’t were only paid about five and a half. The more people that are in the union, the more leverage they would be able to exert on the employers.

Throughout the movie there is a tentative love story between the female protagonist, Maya, and Sam. Their relationship, however, is complicated with the sort of professional relationship that develops between tow colleagues. The director is very careful to make sure that the love story does not eclipse the point of the movie which is to bring to light the plight of janitorial workers. However, the love story does pull a little on the heartstrings and leave the viewer in want of more. It serves to show the presence of love even in difficult situations.

A rift gradually appears between Maya and the rest of her family because she gets caught up in the broad goal of social change whereas her family is more interested in living incognito and simply surviving. They say that life is not good, but at least it is not bad. They don’t want her to get them tangled up in a big mess that could jeopardize all that they had worked for in coming to the united states. As Maya moves more down the activist track, she slowly begins to drift away from her family highlighting the everlasting dichotomy in life between the comfortable and the progressive. Which is better? It is really in the eyes of the beholder.

Similarly, the story ends on an inconclusive but hopeful note. This is the way with progressive change — it is often unknown where the outcome will lie and if it will be an improvement. However, if change is not pursued, then it will never happen. The real life strike that occurred in LA inspired this movie, and thus brought awareness to yet another group of underprivileged city workers that beforehand few had given thought to.

Recently, Rose hosted the movie Bread and Roses which was about this pair of sisters who work as janitors in horrible conditions under an awful boss. The boss, Perez, fires people on a whim and is extremely corrupt, feeding off of the vulnerable nature of these undocumented people. It’s terrible that they couldn’t speak up against his atrocities as they are helpless which is why they do not respond to Sam. It’s upsetting Rosa’s weakness, her ailing husband, is the reason she is pitted against her sister. Its just terrible that she has to maximize her benefits by harming her co-workers and her sister. I think the scene that strikes me the most was right at the beginning when Maya is “won” and almost raped by the one of the men who smuggled her in. Actually, that might not be true. I think when Rosa admits to Maya what she has been doing to help Maya and their family may be the most moving scene. You can see the defeat and tiredness in Rosa’s eyes and now that she has her own family to care for, it makes sense why she is reluctant to help her sister. The sacrifice that Rosa made for her family is absolutely demeaning and I can see why she’s just tired of all of her sacrifices. It is a noble deed that she was willing to demean herself to help her family and, to a point, I see that it is her turn to be selfish. Regardless, it was very sad that Maya was deported and the janitors were able to gain the right to unionize. It was the bittersweet sending.

Although the story was very moving and made me start thinking of unionization and the wages that janitors made at the time, I was also wondering why bread and roses. I know that Sam Shapiro explains that the term originated in 1912 by striking textile workers in Lowell. Actually, just as I typed that, I recalled that bread is for food and sustenance while roses is for beauty? I think I’m starting to forget. Maybe roses was a metaphor for the working conditions which would make sense as the janitors were working in terrible conditions.

It’d be easy for me to write something about how I sympathize with the union worker’s plight. I could write about how, having grown up in California, these issues are near and relevant to me.

I’m unable to do that, though.

My house was one of the houses the cleaning ladies would clean. My Mom, who was (and probably still is) constantly filling her schedule with commitments, felt unnerved by how she was unable to clean the house once every week. She hired some cleaning ladies, who happened to be Mexican. She paid them well, and often gave them bonuses. But to me, they weren’t under me, and they weren’t over me. They were just people doing their jobs, and they were damn good at it, too.

My neighborhood mostly consisted of middle class Asians– Chinese and Indians comprised the vast majority. I would often hear little snippets of Mandarin disparaging the Mexican immigrants, claiming that they have it easy with Social Security. I heard of a Mexican family who was evicted after not paying rent for half a year. Once the house was reclaimed by the worried landlords, they had to spend more money than they gained cleaning and repairing furniture in order to make it sell-able.

Why did I say all this? I said all that to let you know that I’ve lived an entitled life surrounded by people who subtly encouraged my feelings of entitlement.

However, while I can’t relate to the union worker’s plight, I can relate to humanity.

Humanity is something most everyone has, and most everyone holds dear. A concept of Good or Bad might be influenced by upbringing or society, but love and hate, tears and laughter, these are all universally relatable things, human things. This is why the film made me think about why I’m entitled, and why I should worry about the unions and the people in those unions, even though I might never be on the receiving end. They risk and sacrifice everything for what they feel is right, like Robin Hood and his band of merry men.

Though it sounds cliche to say it, this film opened my eyes to the struggle of these people. And, though the film may have taken place a long time ago, the sermon it preaches remain painfully relevant.

In Flora’s Friday Films, we watched the movie Bread and Roses, which follows an undocumented immigrant, named Maya, as she tries to aid her fellow janitorial workers in LA in getting better working conditions. Maya comes to the United States, and lives with her sister Rosa and her family. Rosa gets Maya a job (at a price) with her as a janitor. It quickly becomes apparent that these janitors work in subpar conditions. In one particularly striking scene, we watch as a janitor, who is the breadwinner for her family in El Salvador, gets fired because her bus arrived late to work. Maya herself has to give her first month’s paycheck to her supervisor as payment for getting the job. As Maya gets to know her fellow janitors, and watches as her sister Rosa is unable to pay for proper medical care for her husband despite working overtime, she encourages her fellow workers to fight for unionization with the help of union organizer Sam Shapiro. Despite some setbacks and a personal rift that grows between Rosa and Maya, due to some hard decisions, the Janitors are successful and do earn union rights. The film presented us with a harsh reality of the lives of some undocumented immigrants and custodial workers. One of the janitors sets aside his paycheck to get a deposit on a scholarship. Rosa, in order to pay for her husbands treatment, must sell out her fellow workers to their supervisor in hopes of getting a better paying job. Maya herself is deported after robbing a convenience store to help one of her janitors get enough money for his scholarship deposit, after a majority of the janitors are fired for protesting at a high class party. This film gave me a perspective on the struggles of undocumented immigrants and the working class, and important it is to ensure that all have a proper standard of living.

Last Friday, we watched Bread and Roses, a movie that depicted the lives of immigrant workers and the difficulties that they had to go through. Not only had the workers had to go through bad treatment at work, but they also had extremely low wages. Seeing this movie has made me a lot appreciative of my own personal experiences given the opportunities I have with higher education and at the same time made me realize how difficult it really is for people who do not have these chances.

In addition, it was kind of like revisiting all of the history that I’ve learned throughout the years. Sam, one of the protagonists in the movie, helped the social workers to create a movement in order to raise awareness and wages to the janitors. I think this summarizes a lot of what unfair workers have to go through. They’re often too unaware of the change that can happen and they assume that being treated without respect is the way to go because they do not have the education or advantage that everyone else has. They simply take what they have for face value. The movie is a good reminder in that it takes time to improve one’s environment and as long as people are willing to put in the effort and to take the risks, you will ultimately be recognized for your efforts.

Bread and Roses depicted the struggle that immigrants face, shedding light on how painfully unfair and difficult it can be for immigrants to make enough money just to eat or to be treated respectfully.

This movie made me wonder where the boundary lies for when the standards of morality begin to change when there seems to be no other choice? For example, the main character, Maya robbed a bank in order obtain money to pay for her friend’s college tuition. The friend had been working for five years attempting to collect his savings, until he lost his job due to coworkers trying to unionize. Should she have felt the guilt of robbing the bank at all given a system where fairness and justice didn’t seem to apply to her and her fellow janitors?

One of the most impactful scenes to me was when Maya confronted her sister Rosa for betraying her union efforts to the supervisor, and by doing so, becoming supervisor herself. Considering their bond, it seemed unconceivable and harsh that Rosa would not only do something like this, but feel no remorse. However, as the scene develops, the audience experiences the cruelty of the situation along with Maya. As Rosa reveals what she had to do in order to get the family where they were, including prostituting herself, Maya is tormented by the guilt, sadness, and loss of naivety she experiences. She experiences guilt and sadness the naivety to what Rosa had been through to get the family to where they were.

This movie was a reminder that desperate times call for sacrifices to be made, even if that dedication to improving what is wrong requires bending what one considers as right and wrong.

I did some research on the historical backgrounds of the movie, and found that it was inspired by the slogan of a textile strike in Massachusetts in 1912, in regards to fair wage (bread) and good conditions (roses). It was one of the strikes where workers came together in unity against the company, arguing together for fair conditions. This forms the basis of the 2000 movie “Bread and Roses” in which an illegal immigrant (Maya) finds work as a janitor, and tries to unionize to get fair pay and better conditions.

The movie recounts her struggles with Rosa, her sister, as well as her bosses who know that she is an illegal immigrant and take advantage of it. This movie really got me to think about minimum wage in this country, which is not enough to support a family, especially in an expensive city like Los Angeles, where the movie is set. If minimum wage always came with benefits including health insurance then it wouldn’t be too much of a problem, but often the problem is that minimum wage jobs do not support those types of benefits. Jobs such as janitorial jobs are incredibly important, and someone has to do them, but people don’t want to do them because of how those with those jobs are treated.

People that do the jobs that are important for our society to function on the lowest level should have the same benefits as anyone else who works at a full time job.

Bread and Roses depicts two different reactions by illegal immigrants, when faced with similar situations.

On one hand, there is Maya, the sister who has little to lose and fewer people to harm than just herself. She does not have a family of her own depending on her and thus she makes very risky decisions. At the cost of losing her job, she stands up for herself when men at the bar that employed her made sexual advances towards her. She then continues to put the subsequent job, that her sister obtained for her, in jeopardy by organizing meetings between the janitorial staff and union organizers. Now, one can argue that these were ultimately causes for the greater good given the living situations of the workers depicted, but what I found most interesting was that Maya was willing to risk her job, the sole reason that was mentioned for her crossing the border, to help not only herself but others in need.

In contrast, Rosa, whose name translates to “Rose” in English, stood out to me as a symbol of someone who understood that she could not have her pie and eat it too. She was burdened with the responsibility of not only feeding her mother and sister back home in Mexico, but taking care of her two kids and ill husband. She basically worked at a brothel since she was a child in order to provide for her family and keep them from starving most of her life and was even willing to compromise her own moral standards to obtain a job for her sister. Out of fear of not being able to provide for her family, she refused to partake in any movement to unionize the janitorial staff in the building or call attention to herself in other ways. After all, she had everything she had migrated to the United States to get, a job and means of feeding her family. I don’t really think anyone would dispute her actions on account of her reasons. How many of us would give up the security of having a next meal for self respect?

The reality for most illegal immigrants is that they don’t really have any type of security in this country. They could lose their jobs for any reason at any time and there is no foundation for disputing mistreatment due to their undocumented status and the illegality of their employment to begin with. Yet that reality is something many people are willing to take in exchange for being able to provide food for their families. For illegal immigrants like Rosa, the “roses” she was fighting for were the mere means of supporting her loved ones. While Maya wanted to fight for more, none of it would have been possible without Rosa’s help in the first place.

The great American psychologist, Abraham Maslow, might say that due to her need for “bread” being taken care of by Rosa, Maya was able to be concerned about other needs and have the yearning for different “roses.”