Sugar (2008)

Sugar (2008) follows the story of Miguel Santos, whom everyone nicknames 'Sugar', a young Dominican man who has chops as a carpenter but finds a special talent in his country's major sport, Baseball. His knuckle ball catches the eye of American baseball recruiters and soon he is whisked away from the Dominican Republic and put on a farm team for the Kansas City Knights. He moves from Arizona to Iowa and finally to New York, experiencing various levels of culture shock along the way. Some how he breaks through the language barrier and makes a life for himself in the States, but not quite in the way he expected.



Growing up with a Dominican mama and with Dominican family, I have seen the Sugar story many times but in very different forms. Members of the Dominican diaspora are a bit like Phoenixes, the mythical birds that rise and burn only to rise again. No matter how badly they fall, they always manage to pick themselves up and start again. Dominicans are the ultimate survivors and we see this in Sugar. He has very limited English and has probably never been outside the confines of the isle of Hispanola. He tells his girlfriend that he'll drive back home in a Cadillac that can travel over water. He doesn't know what to expect but also has false expectations. He's separated from his friends and family little by little. Some of his buddies go with him to Arizona, and one goes with him to Iowa, but eventually he is alone and has to start a new life for himself.


The Dominican Republic is famous for their Baseball players. It's a veritable religion there, like soccer is with the rest of the world. Many baseball players are recruited from the DR but only a few make it to the big leagues. Sugar is one of those athletes who has a chance at the big leagues but life takes him in a different direction. Algenis Perez Soto was a perfect choice to play Sugar. He has a quiet somberness that expresses a lot of emotion without emoting. He's pensive, curious, scared, ambitious, driven, shy, playful, and he shows all of this with an almost blank stare. The cinematography is very tied into the main character. We get lots of scenes in Sugar's point of view and many of the shots reveal Sugar's naivete or something new he is about to experience. For example, in New York he looks for a place to stay. His eyes/the camera settle on "Caribe Hotel". He choses this place because of "Caribe"/"Carribean", it reminds him of home. But the hotel is really a hotbed of prostituion and a seedy nook of clandestine encounters. We know this off the bat and we want to protect Sugar, but we can't. We have to sit back and watch as he figures it out for himself.

This film gets the Dominican culture right on. The unexclusivity of romantic relationships, the feeling of entitlement in family, the connection to home but the desire to find something better, the liveliness, the dancing, the social ease, etc. It's all there along with the juxtaposition of colorful and stark visuals that represent the DR so well.

As the movie progressed, I couldn't help but chuckle as I could connect so many elements of the story with my mother's experience. She left the DR in her 20s, without any grasp of the English language, with unrealistic notions of what life in the US would be like and with the knowledge that she would never move back to her homeland. She struggled in many of the same ways that Sugar struggles.

I spoke to my mother on the phone the day after I saw the movie. I was ecstatic telling her details of the film that she would enjoy and promised her that I would get a copy to her soon so she could see. There was one particular sub-plot that I just had to tell her right then and there. Sugar and his baseball buddies are in an Arizona diner. Only one of them speaks English and when the waitress arrives he orders French Toast. The other guys order French Toast too, mimicking the sounds made by the English-speaking friend with the hopes that whatever he ordered they would like too. Sugar visits the diner over and over again, always ordering French Toast. One day, he becomes brave and asks for eggs. When the waitress asks how he would like them, he can only reply "yes". They have a back and forth struggle with understanding and he eventually caves and orders French Toast. The waitress feels for him and comes back with his French Toast and with a plate of eggs. There are a few different kinds and she tells him which is which and how to pronounce them. This scene really touched me and my mom seemed tickled when I told her about it. When I was born, the nurses wanted to tell my mother that I had beautiful eyelashes. She couldn't understand them so that made movements to indicate "baby" (rocking of the arms) and "eyelashes" (applying mascara with a finger as a fake wand).

Watching this film (and reading Dreaming in Cuban - see my previous post) made me realize that I really need to focus a lot more on stories about Latino/a's. I'm at a point in my life that I really need to expose myself to stories that speak directly to me instead of ones about people/places/experiences I can't identify with. I hope I'll be able to use Quelle's Thoughts as a forum to discuss these types of stories.