MAQUILAPOLIS, video still, 2003 [Enlarge in New Window]

Vicky Funari and Sergio De La Torre: MAQUILAPOLIS [city of factories]

Along the Mexican side of the border with the United States, there are hundreds of factories that produce TVs, stereos, car components, notebooks, and almost every variety of consumer product, using cheap Mexican labor to keep the retail costs down for American consumers. These factories or "maquiladoras" have been around since the 1960s and for decades were staffed by a primarily female workforce. Coming from poor rural areas, these young women are drawn to cities like Tijuana and Juarez by the lure of "large" salaries and steady work.

For generations, these women have sat at conveyer belts as machines bring them parts. They pick up the part, put it in position, adjust it or snap it in place, then pass it further along the production line. While the factories do provide work, they also create disastrous conditions for factory workers such as environmental and health problems.

Filmmaker Vicky Funari has earned acclaim by telling the stories of women at work -- 1999's Paulina was about a Mexican maid who raised Funari, and 2000's Live Nude Girls Unite! was about exotic dancers trying to unionize -- but she is trying something new with her latest documentary, Maquilapolis, which examines globalization through a look at Tijuana's assembly factories. Funari and co-director Sergio De La Torre want to further "reposition subjectivity," as she says, by helping a group of these Mexican factory workers tell their stories themselves.

"In all my films, I hope to engage viewers in questioning how they see particular individuals and issues," says Funari, who grew up in Mexico as the child of diplomats and is now based in the San Francisco Bay area. "For instance, when you see a maid, a stripper, or a working-class Mexican, on the street, at work, or on TV, who has the privilege of defining that person for you? All my work encourages viewers to open themselves up to redefinitions based on acknowledgements of power relations."

So while she is following five women in a traditional documentary process, part of her funding is going toward teaching video production and buying cameras for a group of activists in Tijuana who are making video diaries for the film. She says the material produced in collaboration with this women's organization, called Grupo Factor X, will act like a chorus in the film. "Ever since last December they've been going out and shooting video diaries, and they also shoot things they can use for activist work," says the 39-year-old filmmaker.

But most of all, the mind-numbing physical nature of the factory work takes center stage, both as simple fact and as a metaphor for societal and cultural constraints engendered by the global economy. One of the innovations of Maquilapolis is that the women go through the motions of their work on camera, without the machinery, to show what it is they actually do. Framed against brightly colored fabric backgrounds, their hands push and pull, flip and twist, and it's hard to tell exactly what they are making. Some are working with high-tech components; some are shuttling pieces of plastic from one pile into another. "We wanted to show the effect of that work when you're spending twelve hours a day doing it," Funari explains.

A harsh reality of the film is that the era of easily available employment in Mexican maquiladoras is ending, as hundreds of factories move to Asia for even cheaper labor. "Of the 14 women who took our last workshop, almost every one of them has since lost her job," says Funari. "It reminds me a lot of what happened to the U.S. when the steel industry died or when the car manufacturers laid off so many workers."

Like Michael Moore, who rattled auto industry honchos with his sardonic film Roger & Me, Funari wants to get the word out about how the lives of these women are affected by their work -- and the absence of it. So every time we turn on a TV -- and the majority of American TVs have some part assembled in Tijuana -- we know what went into the making of it. She hopes America is listening. "It's not just about what stories get told," says Funari, "it's if we hear them."

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THIS PROJECT'S CATEGORIES: Film / Video > Film / Video | Labor | California | 2001