Missing jose: the day California lost its Latinos, and cried about it.(Q & A)

Early on in the new film A Day Without a Mexican, a senator's wife picks up two Latinos at a street corner and hires them to paint the family mini-mansion. When the senator explodes--is she trying to ruin him politically?--the manicured fake blond snaps back that with the budget he gave her, she could only afford "illegals." Later, in a TV interview, the senator says he has never employed undocumented workers, and furthermore, he adds, his maid is legal--she used to work for the Reagans.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

It's that hypocrisy that makes A Day Without a Mexican so enjoyable to watch--even as you wish the filmmakers were more bent on political change than on making Latinos the next model minority. In the film, a fog rises up at the California border and Mexicans and all Latinos mysteriously vanish (couldn't they just have gone on strike?). With a third of the population gone, millions of cars are left in the street without their owners, the interim governor's wife has to squeeze her own OJ and the Border Patrol combs the classifieds for new jobs. A ranch owner watches his unpicked crop shrivel in the heat and people of color are besieged by the question of the day: Are you Mexican?! Sadly, the Anglos in power come to see just how much they need Latinos, but there's little suggestion that anything else has changed.

The film is educational (20 percent of California's teachers are Latinos, according to one film factoid) and downright comedic (ever notice that the sombrero resembles the shape of a UFO?). The movie also comes at an apt time. The war on terror has politicians talking as if national security takes priority over the country's economic reliance on immigrant labor. It doesn't. And in an election year when both political parties are begging for the Latino vote, the movie reminds us again of how little is offered in return.

We talked to Yareli Arizmendi, who co-wrote the script and also played the movie's protagonist: the sole remaining Mexican. Arizmendi, married to the movie's director Sergio Arau, is probably best known for her acting role in the film version of the book, Like Water For Chocolate.

Without Latinos, California falls apart. I like that premise but would it really happen like that?

If you take one-third of the population of anywhere, everything is going to collapse. They're trying [in the film], but they cannot go on with their own work because there is no child-care, the schools are a mess, there are teachers missing, all the support personnel is missing.