DVD,DVD + 3-Year Site/Local Streaming and Three-Year Site/Local Streaming Renewal
68 minutes, 2006, English Closed Captions Directed and Produced by Vicky Funari and Sergio De La Torre In Spanish with English subtitles An online FACILITATOR GUIDE is available for this title.
ABOUT THE FILM
**Winner of the 2007 Latin American Studies Association CASA Award of Merit in Film**
Carmen Durán works the graveyard shift in one of Tijuana’s 800 maquiladoras; she is one of six million women around the world who labor for poverty wages in the factories of transnational corporations. After making television components all night, Carmen comes home to a dirt-floor shack she built out of cast-off garage doors from the U.S., in a neighborhood with no sewage lines or electricity. She suffers from on-the-job kidney damage and lead poisoning from her years of exposure to toxic chemicals. She earns six dollars a day on which she must support herself and her three children.
Starting in the 1980s the U.S. and Mexican governments initiated a trade agreement allowing components for everything from batteries, IV tubes, toys to clothes to be imported duty-free into Mexico, assembled there and then exported back duty-free as finished consumer goods for sale in the U.S. Tijuana became known as the television capital of the world, ‘TV-juana.’ Globalization promised jobs, and working class Mexicans uprooted their lives to flock to the northern frontier in search of better paying work. After a decades long boom in 2001, Tijuana suffered a recession as corporations chased after even cheaper labor in Asia.
When the Sanyo plant where Carmen worked for six years moved to Indonesia, they tried to avoid paying the legally mandated severance pay. Carmen became a promotora, or grassroots activist, challenging the usual illegal tactics of the powerful transnationals that are poisoning their workers and the barrios they inhabit. Through sheer persistence, Carmen and her fellow workers won the severance pay to which they were entitled by law.
In making this documentary, the filmmakers worked collaboratively with the factory workers, providing cameras to the women and teaching them how to shoot. For five years the women documented their daily lives and the events in their communities, often giving the film the intimate tone of a video diary.
Lourdes Lujan, another promotora, shows us her home, Chilpancingo, a barrio bisected by a stream which flows down from a bluff occupied by nearly 200 plants that expel hazardous wastes. Chief among these is Metales y Derivados, a long abandoned battery recycling factory whose U.S. owner relocated to San Diego in 1994 to avoid paying fines and clean-up costs, leaving behind 23,000 metric tons of toxic waste. Chilpancingo residents, downstream and downwind of the Metales site, began to suffer skin and respiratory problems and an abnormally high number of children with birth defects
With the backing of the San Diego Environmental Health Coalition, a cross-border group advocating for a safer environment, Lourdes and her neighbors launched complaints with numerous Mexican agencies, including the equivalent of the Environmental Protection Agency. The government’s apparent collusion with the polluters reminds Jaime Cota, a Tijuana labor leader, of a verse from Sor Juana de la Cruz: “Who is worse: the one who pays for sin or the one who sins for pay.”
Describing themselves ironically as a “collective of busybodies,” and adopting the slogan, ‘Tijuana is no trashcan,’ the Chilpancingo collective in 2004, after ten years of constant struggle, forced both the Mexican and American governments to begin a clean up of the Metales y Derivados site.
While Maquilapolis shows that globalization gives corporations the freedom to move around the world seeking cheaper labor and more lax environmental regulations, it also demonstrates how organized workers can successfully demand that the laws be enforced. Thanks to her persistence in demanding severance pay, Carmen’s house now has concrete floors. And thanks to her new knowledge of labor rights, she has since taken another factory to the labor board for a violation similar to Sanyo’s; she hopes one day to go to school and become a labor lawyer.
Globalization turns workers into a commodity which can be bought anywhere in the world for the lowest price. Yet they are more than a commodity; they are human beings who demand to be treated with dignity. As one of Carmen’s colleagues says, “I make objects and to the factory managers I myself am only an object, a replaceable part of a production process. I don’t want to be an object, I want to be a person, I want to realize my dreams.”
Maquilapolis can be screened in classes on International Studies, Labor Studies, Economics, Latin American Studies, Women’s Studies, Border Studies, Industrial Relations, Sociology, and Anthropology to introduce discussions of globalization’s impact on world labor. It will give a human face to the workers who are forced to find work as corporations seek out the cheapest labor possible. The film is entirely bilingual, with English or Spanish subtitles, as needed, so it can also be used to organize maquiladores workers to struggle for their rights.
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CRITICAL COMMENT
"By making women themselves an integral part of the filmmaking process the director enables them to successfully tackle challenges many would consider hopeless. Refusing pity, these women exhibit a determination and faith in the future that can only be described as uplifting."
Jay Weissberg, Variety
"A portrait of the perils of globalization that admirably seeks new forms of expression...a stirring work that'll provoke genuine outrage.
The New York Times
"All who care about social justice, the environment, womens rights and labor rights, should view this film. Maquilapolis should be screened in theaters, union halls, college campuses, and at the annual meeting of the World Social Forum. Many consider the U.S.-Mexico border to be "the laboratory of the future." In Maquilapolis the border is also the site where global capitalism is facing profound resistance. Maquilapolis is one of the most authoritative documentaries on cross-border organizing."
Rosa-Linda Fregoso, Chair, Latin American/Latino Studies, University of California Santa Cruz
"Maquilapolis is a compelling look at the high, hidden costs of the global economy. It puts human beings front and center. This film is a must see!"
Harley Shaiken, Professor, University of California, Berkeley
"Maquilapolis is a wonderful fusion of expose and imagination, delivering an unprecedented look into the realities of life in the border communities where the maquiladoras reign. Made in collaboration with the women whose lives center on these secretive factories, Maquilapolis succeeds in crossing borders and peering around corners to capture how the women caught in the contradictions of global capital understand their own positions. A key case study for anyone interested in transnational realities -- and subjectivities."
B. Ruby Rich, Community Studies Department & Social Documentation Program, University of California, Santa Cruz
"Argues not for special privileges but for a flicker of justice."
Richard Corliss, Time
"Anyone who's following the immigration debate should see this film for the reality check that it provides to the argument that investment in Mexico provides good jobs."
David D'Arcy, GreenCine Daily
"An old-fashioned story of potential, and of what can be accomplished through simple determination."
English Closed Captions
