Analysis Of The Movie Maquilapolis

For my cultural activity, I watched a Spanish-language movie with English subtitles in order to better understand the film. The purpose of this paper is to express my reactions concerning the Puerto Rican film Casi Casi. In summary, Casi Casi is a high school romantic comedy about a boy who runs for Student Council President who is attracted to a girl who also decides to run against him. At the beginning of the film, my initial reaction was that the film was going to be very difficult to view and interpret due to the fact that it was produced in a foreign language that I am not fluent in.

The film Pelo Malo takes place in the city of Caracas, Venezuela and is about a young boy and obsession with straightening his hair. In the movie, the main characters Junior his single mother Marta and baby brother live with in an apartment complex with in the city of Caracas. This movie takes place in 2011, during the time that Hugo Chavez came down with cancer. The film’s primary themes were homophobia, and racism. The movie detailed a young boys struggle for acceptance and love from his mother and his struggle to obtain his desire of straight hair. Throughout the movie, the young child is seen living in an apartment complex that is located within a lower socioeconomic status area. When Marta, was not able to find a baby sitter to watch over her children when she worked she was forced to take the children with her on the bus through the city to her work. One of the places that she was shown to work was in a gated residence where she worked as a security guard for the area. The primary conflict in the movie revolved around the mothers fear that her son was “gay” due to his obsession with straightening his hair and his singing. Due to many of the things that the young boy does in the movie, the mother Marta fears that her child is homosexual and during one particular scene is worried that she was the cause of it. Since during the scene where she is speaking with a doctor about her son, she discussed how it was her fault because she did not ‘touch his thing’ and that she

Andrei Codrescu author of Notes of an Alien Son: Immigration Paradoxes, informs us of what and how immigrants who come to America feel about moving away. The move across land of ocean can feel overwhelming, and after reading Codrescu essay I can understand why some immigrants do move to America. Change must happen with countries that don’t hold respect for their own people. You hear over and over again in the media that sadly owns America and the world about how thousands upon thousands of immigrants from all over the world are making their way to the edge of America.

The film La Bamba showcases one of the most important historical moments in not only music history but also Latino music history. The star Lou Diamond, portrays Ritchie Valens originally Valenzuela. Ritchie was a boy who did not grow up in a normal childhood. In the film Valens played by Lou diamond is shown working hard alongside his mother Connie trying to make an honest living. His older brother Bob finds his way to his mother and young brother convincing them both to leave the fruit fields where they were working. While Ritchie should have been at school he was working. Once they moved to Los Angeles, Ritchie started attending high school like a normal teen should. His love for music grew strong as he became fond of a young girl named Donna. Donna was from a middle class white family, while Ritchie was from a poor Latino American family. Donna’s parents wanted to keep the two apart from each other as her father did not approve of the romance because Ritchie had nothing to offer his daughter. Ritchie had nothing to offer Donna but his music and hope of someday making a name for himself. One-day Ritchie and his band mates are having a show and a man by the name of Bob Keane stops by to see the performance, while there Keane shows a great interest in Ritchie and reaches out to him. Keane soon convinces Valens that he didn’t need his band mates, that Ritchie was all the talent. Bob Keane not only manages to get Ritchie to drop his band, but he also convinces him to change

Serpico” is a film that based on the of New York City Police Officer named Frank Serpico and the difficult obstacles he had to face working for the NYPD. Serpico is a “cops cop” that had to deal with persuasive organized corruption, police crime, and ethical dilemmas etc. All these obstacles were hard for Serpico to work with on a daily basis. He refused to take bribes and his co-workers begin distrust him. Serpico informed his superiors about the corruption but they did nothing about it. The superior’s just transferred him from the Bronx. Brooklyn, and Harlem. The higher ups in the police department were more concerned if Serpico spoke to any outside private organizations about the police misconduct.

Babies born to migrant workers suffer 25 percent higher infant mortality than the rest of the population. Malnutrition among migrant worker children is ten times higher in the nation. (Chavez)

Black Fish is a documentary film about a famous and well known corporation called SeaWorld, corporations like SeaWorld have impacts towards culture, people and business. There are few corporations like SeaWorld in the entertainment/amusement park industry that are profitable, such as Disney and Six Flags, who make millions to billions of dollars every year. People love entertainment and are willing to spend lots of money to acquire it; this is why entrepreneurs who developed these different forms of entertainment are successful. Black Fish is an evidence revealing documentary that breaks down the flaws and issues associated with SeaWorld. The work and success of the filmmakers are well acknowledged, impressive and can relate to a cultural theory stand point.

In this week’s “Working with Evidence”, the primary focus was on globalization, which is the process of businesses or other organizations developing international influence or operations on an international scale, after World War II. Based on the provided six images and the text of Chapter 23, it presented different ways various groups of people experienced globalization since the end of World War II. To begin, visual source 23.1 (‘Globalization and Work’) shows a Chinese-owned company producing jeans in a small country in southern Africa called Lesotho - this image shows the economic benefits of globalization. Many companies in wealthier countries would often find advantages to build facilities in places where labor is less expensive or environmental regulations are less restrictive. However, some companies would abuse the process of economic globalization as shown in visual source 23.3 (‘Globalization and Protest’). Visual source 23.3 shows a protester in Sao Paulo, Brazil, holding up a sign that reads “A better world according to Monsanto is a world with more cancer.” The company Monsanto is a major producer of herbicides, genetically modified foods, and many highly controversial chemicals such as DDT, PCBs, Agent Orange, and bovine growth hormones. In dozens of developed/developing countries activists have demonstrated or riot against government policies that removed subsidies raised prices on essential products, frozen salaries, or cut back on social services. Although

Often times the very workers that make globalization possible are the ones being mistreated and are being adversely affected by it. Steps must be taken to fix the moral oversight of globalization. Specifically I would like to look at the use of illegal immigrants to reduce the wages of workers. I want to look at the use of unfair competition to put the workers, farm workers in particular, in a very disadvantaged position. Steps can be taken to make the situation more just for all parties, but it may take a change in Mexican-American border policy.

In the peer-reviewed article Elvia R. Arriola postulates an, “Accountability for murder in the mquiladoras: Linking corporate indifference to gender violence at the U.S. Mexico border” (Arriola, 2007). Arriola describes the treatment of girls and women on the U.S. Mexican border who are employees of the maquiladora, which are a creation of corporations that move over to the U.S. Mexican borders because of the low salaries they pay to their employees due to the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) between Mexico, the United States, and Canada (1993). In fact, violence, human rights violations, and crimes against women occur more frequently regardless of corporate policies and laws. Additionally, the maquiladoras are a severe indication of Mexico’s corporate and governmental patterns of abuse, harassment, and violence against women who work in the maquiladoras that violate their human

Migrant workers are the reason our families to have the fruits and vegetables they need year-round. I have read the article on Cesar Chavez’s, a man who was born into a family of migrant workers, and watched a video about migrant workers. The video and article are similar, but also different in the following ways.

A clear factor in the staggeringly high number of femicides is the economic relationship between the multinational corporations who own the maquiladora plants and the economic policies in place that established this ownership at the same time as the femicides began to occur in the mid-90s. Neoliberalism spread so easily as it was a bipartisan movement that swept the United States. This lead to the signing of NAFTA, where now “Ciudad Juárez is also an emblematic place of economic globalization and neoliberalism, with its insatiable hunger for profit” (Fregoso and Bejarano 70). This hunger for profit is a neoliberalism view, where there is a disregard for the consequences of cheap labor and how that devalues someone. Juárez is now a symbol for what can happen when the interests of one particular market far outweighs the other.

than all of Mexico, but it came at a price. In Maquiladoras these factories are operated by

As a major contributor to the global economy, Mexico’s sweatshops have contributed to the United States’ wealth and economic growth. It is the unfortunate truth that many individual workers have suffered as a result of this prosperity. The sweatshops, known as maquiladoras, are in debate because of the ethical and lawful reasoning behind their existence and conditions. How can we, as a First-world nation, allow such industries to exist where people are denied basic and fundamental human rights? What, if any, laws and regulations are put into place for the maquiladoras? Are these laws and regulations hindering, harmful, or helpful? Are they enforced emphatically? If not, how does this affect development? After

Set in revolutionary Iran during the 1980s and 1990s, Persepolis, a beautiful film, tells the story of a young girl, Marjane, growing up during the revolution. The theme of Persepolis is about tension and freedom: the tension of the country, the self-inflicted tension of Marjane, and the need of freedom for everyone. Director Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud uses movement, humor, expressions, sound, and editing to pull this theme together. The combination of these different techniques in each scene completes the total effect of the movie.