películas

This past week I watched two inspiring films about struggles for economic and social justice. Mexico has a rich history of people uniting together to work for social change and resisting the established and oppressive order. (although often the government makes that difficult… see police brutality, corruption, and massacres)

The first film, “El casino de la selva: La defensa del patrimonio,” was actually shown in our Spanish class. The Casino de la Selva was an old casino in the 1920’s, turned into a hotel in the 50’s, and was a symbol of Cuernavaca. The hotel’s walls were covered in murals by some of the most famous Mexican muralists, including David Alfaro Siqueiros, José Reyes Meza and Benito Messeguer. Unfortunately, the Casino went bankrupt and the government ended up buying the property for $63 million. Instead of turning the tree-covered land around the Casino into a park or the casino itself into a museum, municipal president Sergio Estrada Cajigal sold the land to the United States corporation Costco for $10 million, a give-away considering its original price. With no care for the murals inside or the old trees outside, Costco began to demolish the Casino and clear the land.


this not my picture, but a picture just the same of a partially destroyed mural in the Casino de la Selva

A group of citizens under the name of Frente Civco Pro Defensa del Casino de la Selva began to organize to ask the government and Costco to stop building over an important Mexican historical site. In fact, an activist in the movie powerfully proclaimed, “They are slowly building over all of our cultural symbols and cutting down all our trees, so eventually there will be nothing to fight for anymore.” While bulldozers destroyed the building, ancient Olmec pottery was also found at the site, but the government official stated that the artifacts were not of enough value, and the building process should continue. The Frente Civco kept protesting, and during a camp-out near the building site on August 21st, 2002, police came and pushed them all out, beating people and arresting 33 activists in the process. This struggle garnered a lot of attention, but in the end the Costco was built on the site. Now, there is a museum in the Costco with a few pieces of the old murals, which would have surely been destroyed if citizens did nothing.

This example of neo-liberal growth was both a blow to Mexican cultural roots and to the small store owners around the area. Sadly, this same kind of disregard of the local community and culture still goes on. As one of the activists said, “We welcome progress, but not at the cost of our culture, history, or environment.”

Saturday was International Women’s Day and I went to the movie “La Sal de la Tierra” and a talk afterwards to commemorate the day. The movie was about a miner’s union strike in New Mexico, in which many of the workers were Mexican-Americans and they demanded equal conditions and pay with their US counterparts. The labor movement and economic justice was a big part of the movie, but so were gender roles. The wives of the miners wanted to help with the strike, but many miners didn’t think it was a woman’s place to be on the picket line or pushing scabs back where they came from. Eventually, the women did get their way because the company put out an order that it was illegal for the miners to be in the picket line, so in a citizens’ meeting the women voted to take up the signs. The men had to take care of the kids, do the laundry, and make food, and they were not very happy. The women’s actions were pivotal in winning the strike, but as the main character said at the end of the movie: they won more than just the strike, but through the process they won a new sense of gender equality.

It felt really nice going to this event, because it was a group of socially and politically people, and seemed like something I would do with my family and friends back home and at school. Like if I actually was from Mexico, this would be my community. A teacher from the program and also Juana (my internship supervisor) were there, so I felt like I was getting to know some good people in the community. The movie was at the same place that I went to see the African dance concert, and I really want to keep tabs on what is going on there, because it seems like a lot of cool stuff.