The Mexican film Los Herederos was shown on December 9, 2009 at UCLA as part of the extensive cultural program run by the University of Guadalajara at Los Angeles (UDGLA) in the city of Los Angeles. The screening, which was also supported by the University of Guadalajara Foundation in the United States of America, Inc. and the Guadalajara International Film Festival, was held at the James Bridges Theater on the UCLA campus.

Prior to the event, Carmen Cervantes, UDGLA’s Operations Coordinator in Los Angeles, and Randal Johnson, Director of the UCLA Latin American Institute, spoke to the audience about the importance of promoting outreach activities aimed at young people from different cultures, and how the partnership between UDGLA and UCLA helps to foster greater awareness of the culture and concerns of the Latino community.

Directed by Eugenio Polgovsky, Los Herederos exposes the harsh reality of child labor in Mexico. For this reason it has received financial support from the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) as a project that would help raise awareness among governments, institutions and society in hopes that this longstanding practice involving children and youth in our country will be eradicated.

Polgovsky’s documentary deals with child labor as it exists in Mexican regions such as Veracruz, Oaxaca, Puebla and Guerrero. It shows how children living in rural Mexico begin to work at a very young age and gives a portrait of their lives and daily struggle to survive. The jobs they perform are numerous: working on farms, tending livestock, cutting firewood, sewing fabric, brick making, caring for younger siblings, harvesting fields far from their homeland, transporting water and making alebrije woodcrafts. The film puts forth the argument that because these children have inherited the tools and techniques of their ancestors, they have also inherited their hardships.