Joana Knezevic

“Maquilapois” or Make the invisible visible

Watching “Maquilapois” I felt very sad and moved at the same time with the (non)circumstances that those people live in Tijuana. I found myself very emotional and inspired with the power of women in that community, how they came together and localized the problem of exploitation that their community has and how they decided to help each other and change their environment, actually to change the(eir) world. Following the stories of these brave women, I started thinking how and when this all consumerism craziness in our society will stop and will it stop ever? Can we call this consumerism A Modern Slavery period in the USA, in the world? 

If we want to fix this we have to work hard on it, through our way of being, through our art …and to try to bring awareness to the people (kids and adults) and to teach them that they are able to change their community if they really want to. I really liked the fact that this group started with the very few members and how they grown as a team. 

The strategies that artists employ in this movie are:

-Bring the issue home: The audience followed their personal stories and through the lenses of the camera we discovered their brutal circumstances that they live in and that they are surrounded by. We see the workers faces, we often hear their names. Watching this recording from their perspective we became a family member.

-Challenge patriarchy as you organize:  By making this movie those women challenge patriarchy in the core. They don’t ask for help to the male figure, they are able to do everything by themselves because they have each other and their friends-co-workers that they trust a lot. They are the wonder women. Most of them are the single mothers with a couple of children and they don’t give up. Watching this I also realized how they are such a great examples to their kids, especially to female kids. The mother is more than the mother, the mother becomes a superhero mother-SUPER MAMA.

-Lead with sympathetic character:  They are a small group of women that share their personal stories with us and we empathized with them. In this film, we follow the characters of low and high classes with the focus on the low class of workers - heroes and the high class, invisible directors of those factories, who are actually villains. Those voices that we hear, those faces that we see are memorable and we follow them very precisely because they are brutally honest with us, especially when they show us their pain through the images of the catastrophe that their families are surrounded by.

-Media-jacking:  They use the film as a tool to target the problem and share the problem with the rest of the word. You just need to click the button on Youtube and start to watch. This was easy way to spread the word and go and do some actions. This movie was watched 58,952 times on YouTube so far. They also used a film to name some of the companies who have very bad standards for their workers. Now we know their names. Those are huge corporations with the best lawyers but those ladies show us that everything is possible you just need to fight for your rights.