By Alex Rivera

"This is a deftly choreographed, startlingly personal film...an important first look at a whole world that is still too invisible to those outside it."
Angela Jamison
UCLA Labor Center (More responses to The Sixth Section)

The Sixth Section is a groundbreaking documentary that follows the transnational organizing of a community of Mexican immigrants who live and work in upstate New York. The men profiled in the film form an organization called ‘Grupo Unión,’ which is devoted to raising money in the United States to rebuild the Mexican town that they’ve left behind. Grupo Unión is one of at least a thousand “hometown associations” formed by immigrants in the United States. The Sixth Section is the first documentary to capture this dynamic form of cross-border organizing, and in doing so, it shatters many of the preconceptions around immigrants. The film shows how immigrants are responding to the pressures of economic globalization, how small groups of people can make big change, and how immigrant communities are building transnational communities, even in these times of increasingly militarized borders.

The Sixth Section was produced with support from P.O.V., The MacArthur Foundation, and The Rockefeller Foundation.

Watch an interview with director Alex Rivera here: