SAN ANTONIO • The Texas premiere of filmmaker John Carlos Frey’s documentary, The Invisible Chapel, opened the Mexican American Cultural Center’s (MACC) first annual bilingual Symposium on Immigration on Oct. 12, making visible a community in a population currently at the center of an escalating national controversy.
    The subjects of Frey’s film are undocumented migrant workers from Mexico, laborers who work 10- to 12-hour days in the most menial of jobs in agriculture, construction and the fast food industry in the San Diego area. They live in cobbled together shanties wrapped in plastic, with no running water, electricity or sanitation, struggling to save enough from their minimum wage jobs to give their families in Mexico a better life.
    For more than 20 years, parishioners of Our Lady of Mt. Carmel Parish in San Diego have brought sustenance to these people in the form of food, clothing and healthcare, as well as a Sunday Mass and religious education classes held in an outdoor chapel created by the immigrants in the woods. It is the story of this chapel and the faith of those who worshipped there that are held up to us by Frey, to examine in the light of our own faith.