Film Review - No Man's Land: The Women of Mexico

Filmmaker Dana Romanoff’s fourteen minute film is the best examination I have seen of the effects of immigration on a small village in Mexico. In this case, as in much of Mexico, the immigrants to the U.S. are the men, who have no other options. This video concerns the small Zapotec indigenous village of San Marcos Tlapazola, in the largely-indigenous state of Oaxaca. A drought has existed in this area for a number of years. That, combined with the effects in Mexico of the passage of NAFTA (The North American Free Trade Act), means that the formerly-subsistence farmers can no longer exist on their traditional lands, where they raised corn, beans, squash, tomatoes, and chiles on their milpa.

Watch the film after the jump.

The only option left to the men is to emigrate to the United States to become farm workers, busboys, construction workers, etc. This means that boys as young as fifteen are making the trek to Tijuana and then making the increasingly-difficult border crossing. Often their mothers do not hear from them again and do not know if they are alive or dead. Often their wives and girlfriends do not hear from them again and suspect that they have new wives and girlfriends up north.

The Zapotec people have a long and proud history. Many of these women work in some of the traditional crafts of Oaxaca, including crafting items of barro rojo and barro negro (red and black clay) and weaving rugs.

Now there are villages entirely made up of women, old people, and children. The women manage on their own, or, as they say, “Aqui es pura mujeres.” (Here we are all women.) This is their story.

No Man's Land: The Women of Mexico from Dana Romanoff on Vimeo.