The water is the color and consistency of chocolate milk, but they dip the jugs in anyway. Guapo takes one of them, sniffs the water inside, then takes a sip. He squints into the desert, nods and hands the jug to Tigre. “It’s good — you can’t taste the dirt or anything,” he says.

Filmmaker Tommy Davis took the jug next, setting his video camera down to take a drink.

“I wanted to show what these people go through to get into our country. I’d never done a documentary before, but I knew it was something I had to do.”

In the winter of 2003 Davis followed four men across the United States-Mexico border for his first documentary, “Mojados, Into The Night.” He marched with them for four days and nights across 120 miles of desert, 85 pounds of batteries and videotapes strapped to his back. “I wanted to show what these people go through to get into our country,” he says. “I’d never done a documentary before, but I knew it was something I had to do.”

Davis used a Power Mac and Final Cut Pro to splice the footage together. He released the film in March 2004 at the South by Southwest Film Festival in Austin, where it won the Audience Award. It took the Best Documentary award at the Arizona International Film Festival the next month.

Closing the Borders

In 1995 the U.S. Border Patrol began concentrating its efforts in metropolitan centers along the U.S.-Mexico border. Mexican migrants, called “Mojados” or “wetbacks,” were forced to cross the border in the desert. Since that year more than 2,000 of them have died trying to enter the U.S.

Davis was raised near the border in McAllen, Texas. He grew up with immigrants, some of them illegal, and knew that crossing the desert was often fatal. When Davis attended college on the East Coast, he realized that not many Americans knew about the struggle. He decided to make “Mojados” to show them.

Davis took a job as a telemarketer to earn money for the project. He made regular trips to the Texas-Mexico border, hoping to find a group of migrants who would let him film their journey. He had no luck and in 2003 he moved to Cheran, Mexico. The 24-year-old spoke little Spanish and had nowhere to stay.

Earning Trust

”I had to live with them to earn their trust, so I moved down there and waited it out,” he says. “I didn’t know Spanish, but I found people who knew English in the village. I lived with a group of priests and worked in the seminary.”

Davis was prepared to stay in Mexico for up to a year to find migrants who would trust him, but within a few months he met Oso, the man who would lead him across the border.

A farmer in his 50s, Oso had been crossing the border annually for 20 years. He worked six to eight months at a time in the U.S., earning money to buy farmland in Mexico. “He told me, ‘Yeah, you can come if you want, if you can hack it,’” says Davis. Oso devised a test for Davis, a daylong trek through the Mexican mountains. Davis kept up and Oso agreed to take him through the desert.

Next page: Through the Mountains, Into the Desert