Abigail Stanton
10/19/18
Maquilapolis is a transparent political documentary. La Promotoras have an empowering story to share. Their story challenges multinational capitalist and the toles it takes on the environment and addresses their human rights as workers demanding better working conditions. The relevance of the film is extremely provoking.
Carmen and her fellow promotoras show us a small victory which seems mere as we leave their community still struggling at the credit. The film has ethnographic qualities as female workers in Tijuana capture the environmental devastation and health issues industrial waste cause. Mass dumping is documented as we watch the streets of Tijuana flood with chemical discharge. Toxic smoke and ash pollutes the local communities harming the locals. Mothers and children show the dark spots on their skin to the camera. Abandoned factories fill the air with lead contamination, nondecomposable materials bury the Earth’s surface, nothing has been done to clean up the toxins. The imagery shown reminds me of that in the 1901 novel The Jungle, which decides the horrible working conditions of the meat packing industry. History is repeated, this time its repeated in an environmental/industrial context with corporate factories abusing the environment and treating Tijuana like a “trashcan”.
The administration doesn’t enforce any of the union policy the Mexican government has passed. This is in complete violation. We’re asked, who’s to blame? ‘The government which is corrupted by multinationals or the multinationals which pay Mexico to break the law?’ It’s the capitalist stride in life that fuels evils like this to continue. Corporate factories care about profit. Once they discovered there was cheaper labor in Asia they didn’t hesitate to move production and leave thousands unemployed.
We asked the question in class but what do we do with this information? What can be done?
The heroines of this film, a group of 5, women, workers, and mothers, demonstrate the power of making a change. Banning together with your community is the first step. Especially for females everywhere seeing this type of movement is empowering.
Maquilapolis
ReplyDeleteWhat resonated with you? What tactics/strategies did the artists employ in this piece in order to engage with the issues identified by the groups they worked with in Tijuana?
What struck me the most about Maquilapolis is how planned out the abuse against these communities is. The offer to give Mexican government money in exchange of the assurance that Tijuana workers will remain exploitable goods, the factories having “ghost unions”, outrageously contaminating the environment (as heavily as causing birth abnormalities resulting in immediate death), all the tricks they have to skip the law to abuse as much as possible the workers, and on top of it all the low conditions in which they had to work.
As an artistic point of view, I think it was a well-done documentary because it wasn’t repetitive, the alternance with artistic shots and real footage was well balanced, and the point came across very clearly without over-dramatizing or controversy. They succeeded in portraying the painful reality of this community through testimony and real images, showing how these brave women fought to get their rights respected.