A non-fiction feature film by Vicky Funari, Jennifer Maytorena Taylor and Paulina Cruz Suárez
1998 / 16mm / 88 minutes

Synopsis

A Mexican domestic servant returns to her home village to confront her family about a painful memory from her childhood:  she was used as a pawn in a land rights struggle, traded away by her parents to the local political boss, and at age 12 taken as one of his “women.”  As a middle-aged woman, Paulina returns to her village to confront her family about what happened and encounters a web of intrigue and denial.  Paulina interweaves documentary and narrative styles to explore the characters’ radically different perspectives and memories of this vital, resilient woman.  The film is an exploration of the lasting impact of systemic violence against women, and a testament to the power of resilience.

Paulina had its world premiere in Havana in December 1997 and its U.S. premiere at Sundance in January 1998.  It was released theatrically in the U.S. in 1999, and was broadcast on the Sundance Channel in 2000 and on Televisa in 2002.  It is currently available for educational and non-theatrical exhibition in the U.S. through Icarus Films.

Filmmaker’s Statement

Our Process:  The working process for Paulina was collaborative, involving the producers, Vicky Funari and Jennifer Maytorena Taylor, and Paulina herself.  Paulina had a strong and critical voice at all stages of the process, collaborating on the script and weighing in on casting, location scouting and other aspects of the production.  During post-production, Paulina travelled to the Banff Center in Canada, where we were editing, to give feedback on the cut and to write and record her final narration.  This relationship between filmmakers and subject was at the time unusual in documentary practice, and it went against some of the dominant tenets of documentary filmmaking.  We intended to challenge traditional notions of the filmmaker as “auteur” and of the “objectivity” of the documentary genre, while ensuring that Paulina would be in control of her image in the final film.  We sought to confront a prevalent pattern in so many documentary and fiction films, in which women, people in developing nations, and those in marginalized communities are represented as “other,” “exotic,” or “victim.”  We knew Paulina as a resilient, creative woman, a survivor, and we wanted our film to reflect this.

We also wanted to challenge mainstream, simplistic ideas about Mexico and about the relationship between Mexico and the United States.  We made this film from 1989-1998, a decade when the physical frontier between the United States and Mexico was becoming increasingly blurred and when tensions were rising over immigration and economic interdependence.  We are mixed-culture filmmakers, and we are women filmmakers.  We believe that collective well-being depends on the ability of Mexican and U.S. cultures to bridge cultural and psychological borders.  We believe that women in particular need to listen across cultures, identify our commonalities, and communicate our differences.  We want to see mass media images that tell real and complex stories, with central characters who are Mexican, female, and fully-drawn.  We want media images that foster deep understanding.  We knew we’d have to make these images ourselves.

In 20^th century U.S. media, images of Latinos were scarce, one-dimensional and often denigrating.  In Mexican media, working-class and provincial women had been the central characters of fiction films, but these stories typically came to a tragic end.  In both U.S and Mexican media of the era, a Mexican maid, when she was seen in films at all, was usually no more than a passive object in the background of a scene.  In this film, Paulina is both subject and shaper of her story.

Jennifer Maytorena Taylor, Producer:  Paulina explores the ways in which significant social, economic, and human rights issues intersect at every turn in one woman’s life.  The film provides for critical discussion of deeply political issues that are at once specific and universal.  The crushing poverty that is endemic to rural life, a hemisphere-wide caste system based on amounts of European blood in the veins, and the often violent subjugation of girls and women are all crucial aspects of life throughout the post-colonial societies of the Americas, including the United States and Mexico.  Time and time again, these themes are left unaddressed by media producers and distributors in favor of “hard” news (i.e. guns, drugs, and dictators).  With Paulina, we have attempted to meet the need for films about the lives of women in rural and urban Latin American while focusing on Paulina’s inspiring and extraordinary character and life story.

Vicky Funari, Producer/Director:  This film grew out of a personal connection from my childhood.  When I was nine and my family was living in Mexico, Paulina came to work for us.  Although all the power dynamics that are typically in play between employers and servants must have been part of the scenario, as a child I only perceived love and mutual respect.  Paulina lived in our home and temporarily became a second mother to me and a friend to our family.  Her daughter Rosita became my playmate; I loved not being the youngest one in the house anymore and taking on the role of big sister.  Paulina soon knew everything about me:  she cleaned up after me, washed my clothes, found my hidden dens of Twinkies and stolen comic books and dismantled them without telling my parents.  But she rarely spoke to us of her own life.  As a child, I never noticed her silence.  She did give me one potent image from her far-away home village:  she told me about a tree in her garden that bore more avocados than her family could eat.  It rained avocados, each as fat as two of her fists.  I was thrilled, certain that Paulina and her family could get rich from that tree; but she explained that in order to sell avocados you had to have money to rent a truck to get them to the city.  Long after my family and I had left Mexico, I could still picture those avocados, rotting into Paulina’s distant, imagined native soil.

Eleven years after we’d left, I returned to Mexico, now a young woman, expecting a tender reunion with Paulina.  I got a polite, friendly handshake.  She asked why my hair was so short, offered to cook me my favorite meal of green enchiladas, and said, “Bring me your laundry, I’ll do it for you.”  But I was no longer a child, and she was not my family’s servant.  Instead of laundry, we told stories.  I told her about my life, and she began to tell me about hers.

When Paulina chose to speak, she opened a door between our worlds.  Our commonalties as women drew us together in easy understanding; yet our different experiences of class, race and culture had given us false pictures of each other.  Was this defiant, passionate, witty woman the same motherly Paulina who had cared for me when I was a child?  In the years since my family had left Mexico, my parents had spoken of her as a victimized woman, a single mother locked with her daughter into a cycle of poverty.  I was now facing a courageous soul who had defied the power structures of her village and her family, and who had raised her daughter into independence and self-respect.  My family had missed something.  Now I listened, mesmerized.  When Paulina joked, “You should make a movie about me,” I thoroughly agreed.

For me this film was a way to explore the silences between us and to replace them with speech and listening; a way to acknowledge the struggle of a respected elder; and a way to challenge oppressive norms.  For Paulina it was a chance to share her true self with a world that has so often failed to see her or hear her voice:  “I hope for the film to speak of the culture of Mexico and of how the powerful mistreat the weak.  I don’t know where this horror comes from.  I’d like to make a different world.”

2006 / Digibeta / 68 minutes

A feature documentary by Vicky Funari and Sergio De La Torre, in collaboration with the women of:

• Chilpancingo Collective for Environmental Justice
• Women’s Rights Advocates
• CITTAC, Workers’ Information Center
• Grupo Factor X, Women’s House

a co-production of the Independent Television Service (ITVS)
a project of Creative Capital
supported by a grant from the Sundance Institute Documentary Fund

The Film

Carmen and Lourdes work in Tijuana’s maquiladoras, the multinationally-owned factories which came to Mexico for its cheap labor. Each day these factory workers confront labor violations, environmental devastation and urban chaos — life on the frontier of the global economy. In MAQUILÁPOLIS, Carmen and Lourdes reach beyond the daily struggle for survival to organize for change: Carmen takes a major television manufacturer to task for violating her labor rights. Lourdes pressures the government to clean up a toxic waste dump left behind by a departing factory. The women also use video diaries to chronicle their lives, their city and their hopes for the future.

As they work for change, the world changes too: a global economic crisis and the availability of cheaper labor in China begin to pull the factories away from Tijuana, leaving Carmen, Lourdes and their colleagues with an uncertain future. As promotoras – community advocates who fight for social justice – Carmen and Lourdes serve as role models for taking action in the face of adversity.

The Process

We began the Maquila Project in 2000, by inviting factory workers in Tijuana and community organizations in Mexico and the U.S. to join us in creating a film that depicts globalization through the eyes of the women who live on its leading edge. The factory workers who appear in the resulting film MAQUILÁPOLIS [city of factories], have been involved in every stage of production, from planning to shooting, from scripting to outreach. We wanted to engage in a collaborative process that would break with the traditional documentary practice of dropping into a location, shooting and leaving with the “goods,” which would only repeat the pattern of the maquiladora itself. We sought to merge art-making with community development and to ensure that the film’s voice would be truly that of its subjects.

One thing all the workers in MAQUILÁPOLIS had in common was a sense of agency: they were promotoras, women who sought out training in human rights, labor rights and environmental justice from non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and who became advocates committed to passing their knowledge on to their communities. When we met the promotoras, they were each at a point of discovery in their lives, blossoming as women, human beings and activists. We knew that working with them would be an amazing way to tell the intertwined stories of globalization, of the maquiladoras and of citizen activism. We hoped the collaboration would yield a documentary which would be useful to the promotoras and their communities. We also hoped to further the promotoras’ work by providing them with the equipment and skills to create their own videos in the future. After the completion of MAQUILÁPOLIS, we continued to work with the same group of promotoras as well as a broad cohort of partner organizations on a Binational Community Outreach Campaign.

The Campaign

Our Binational Community Engagement Campaign, designed and implemented collaboratively with factory workers and stakeholder organizations in the U.S. and Mexico, used MAQUILÁPOLIS in diverse education and advocacy contexts to create meaningful social change around the issues of globalization, social and environmental justice and fair trade. The primary strategy was to use the film to promote dialogue and as an organizing tool: to get people involved and mobilized for change and to support cross-issue and cross-border activism.

Our campaign team included dedicated activists on both sides of the border, mediamakers commmited to social change, and most importantly a group of women factory workers struggling to bring about positive change in their world. Our core Campaign Partners were: Chilpancingo Collective for Environmental Justice; CITTAC/Worker’s Information Center; Binational Feminist Collective; Environmental Health Coalition; Global Exchange; Maquiladora Health and Safety Support Network; San Diego Maquiladora Workers Support Network; SweatFree Communities; and Women Thrive Worldwide. Other organizations have also partnered with us to organize and promote events, including the Sierra Club, Comité Fronterizo de Obreras (CFO/Border Workers’ Committee), Students Against Sweatshops and many others. The campaign ran formally from 2006-2009, and in some ways it continues informally to this day. We invite you to participate by using the film and the information available on our website in your own organization and community.

Filmmakers’ Statement

As to our personal motivations for making this film, we are both artists who believe that art can and does participate in a cultural dialogue concerning social change and justice. Our work is informed by our own hybrid lives: Vicky is a U.S. citizen who grew up in four countries and six cities, including Mexico City. Sergio is a U.S. and Mexican citizen who was raised in Tijuana and migrated to the San Francisco Bay Area as an adult. Our work on MAQUILÁPOLIS is part of our ongoing investigations into biculturality, migration, gender, and labor.

While films rarely effect measurable, concrete changes in the world, they are powerful tools: they open minds and create dialogue, necessary precursors to and ingredients of action. One of our great pleasures has been to watch this film open up new realms of thought, emotion and experience for audiences, just as the process of making the film opened our own minds and hearts. We hope that through this film viewers come to understand their own intimate relation with Tijuana, with Carmen, Lourdes and other maquiladora workers. We hope that people on both sides of the production/consumption equation begin to recognize each other as global citizens rather than simply as consumers and producers. We hope that people will understand that NAFTA-style treaties do not benefit the many but the few, and that one way to combat them is to support causes like those of the Chilpancingo Collective, CITTAC and the NGOs that organize to question and to resist the darker side of globalization. We hope that you will be inspired to action, so that the work of women like Carmen and Lourdes can lead to ever greater changes for the better, in Tijuana and around the world.

You can watch an interview with Vicky Funari and Sergio De La Torre on PBS.