November 5, 1999
Barbara Martinez-Jitner, Producer of Gregory Nava's documentary The American Tapestry, lived in Tijuana in one of the shanty towns that have sprung up around the Maquiladora factories sparked by NAFTA. She lived in a makeshift shack with Eva Canseco, a Mixtec Indian factory worker from Oaxaca and her family. She posed as a Maquiladora worker and even documented Eva's preparations for her attempt at crossing the border illegally to create a moving personal look at the crippling poverty and gender discrimination that forces thousands of women to enter the U.S. illegally.
This November 8th, Showtime Networks will premier the last documentary of The 20th Century, a series of films made by famous Hollywood directors like Norman Jewison, Barry Levinson, Robert Zemeokis and Gary Marshall. The last film is director Gregory Nava's The American Tapestry, a look at America's immigrant roots that covers the migrations of Europeans, Blacks, Asians and Latinos into the United States throughout this century. The documentary premieres in November and continues airing throughout December on Showtime.
As Director of the Mexico sequence, Latina filmmaker Barbara Martinez-Jitner immersed herself into the world she was to document by living and working with Eve Canseco, an impoverished factory worker in Tijuana, Mexico. Canseco has hopes of crossing the U.S. border illegally to seek a better life for her family. Martinez-Jitner lived with Eva and her husband and three children in a makeshift shack with no electricity and running water for weeks. The Cansecos make out a meager existence on Eva's wages at a Maquiladora. Eva is the only breadwinner since the factories will only hire women because they can pay them less money and are less apt to complain. Posing as a factory worker herself, Martinez-Jitner uncovered a dark world of grueling poverty and abuse. Japanese and American companies taking advantage of the cheep labor by employing mostly women to assemble electronics or other products.
After being fired on her 30th birthday, Eva Canseco makes the painful decision to leave her family and make a break for the U.S. But before she leaves, Canseco must return to her homeland in the southern Mexican State of Oaxaca. She returns to her ancestral land to visit her mother's grave, seeking a blessing for she must now commit the horrible act of abandoning her children in order to provide for them a better life. Canseco's family was forced to move to Tijuana to find jobs to pay for new land taxes the Mexican government had imposed. "As we leave, our culture is erased," says Canseco from the Mixtec ruins of Monte Alban. "My village and my people will be forgotten and lost for all time."
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