Public Employee Press

Media Beat: DVD Review
“City of factories,” toxic waste and low wages

Carmen Durán works in one of Tijuana’s 800 maquiladoras, factories in Mexico near the U.S. border that take advantage of low wages and taxes and are owned by multinational corporations.

Her home is a dirt-floor shack she built out of cast-off garage doors, in a neighborhood with no electricity or sewage system. After years of exposure to chemicals at work, she suffers from kidney damage and lead poisoning. Carmen earns six dollars a day to support herself and her children.

Her neighbor, Lourdes Lujan, lives in a barrio bisected by a stream polluted by nearly 200 industrial plants expelling hazardous wastes. The residents suffer skin and respiratory problems and too many of their children are born with birth defects.

Carmen and Lourdes came to Tijuana, near San Diego, as did hundreds of thousands of Mexican workers, mostly women, to better their lives. These factories producing for the global market started in the 1960s and were given a boost by the passage of NAFTA in 1995. But in 2001, after a long boom, a recession hit the Tijuana workers as corporations chased after even cheaper labor in Asia.

The DVD documentary “Maquilapolis” (City of Factories) shows that globalization gives corporations the freedom to move around the world seeking cheaper labor and weaker environmental regulations.

The filmmakers worked collaboratively with the factory workers like Carmen, providing cameras to the women and teaching them how to shoot. For five years they documented their daily lives and the events in their communities, giving the film the intimate tone of a video diary. We really feel as if we know these women.

When the Sanyo plant where Carmen worked for six years moved to Indonesia, they refused to pay her the legally mandated severance money. Without a union, she became a grassroots activist, challenging the illegal tactics of the powerful transnational firms.

Through sheer persistence, Carmen and her fellow workers won their severance pay. With the backing of the San Diego Environmental Health Coalition, Lourdes and her neighbors launched complaints with numerous Mexican agencies. After 10 years of constant struggle, they forced the Mexican and American governments to begin cleaning up one of the polluted sites.

The DVD is available in the DC 37 Education Fund Library in Room 211 or for purchase ($24.95) at www.californianewsreel.com.

The moving film tells us that when workers fight back, they can sometimes win against the combined strength of the corporations and their own government. And through “Maquilapolis” we get to know these workers, even as globalization forces many of them to migrate again, this time to the United States, in search of a better life.

— Ken Nash