Short Description

”La Parada” is a corner in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn, NYC, where immigrant women, mostly from Ecuador, Venezuela, Mexico and Guatemala gather to make themselves accessible for potential employers. This coordinate has been informed by this specifically gendered labor dynamic for decades, the nationality and ethnicity being the main factor that changes, yet always gendered, always Global South, and always fighting against the violence of physical damage, labor neglect, and erasure from the hegemonic networks of NYC. 

The initial purpose is to help the immediate needs of the community at large, and the priorities are to build relationships, and the active participation on a collective project that seeks to explore language by bringing attention to the experiences of these women with U.S. nation-building attitudes and systemic practices against the undocumented communities that allow for such vulnerability to exist in the first place.

Campaign Story

This is a communal documentary that involves non-traditional filmmaking methods. The most present one is instructing the concomitant collaborators (who appear in the documentary) in the use of storytelling tools—whether cameras and microphones, poetry, drawing, or journalistic techniques— and their inclusion in the process/revision of a collective project that seeks to point towards the somatic repercussions of undocumented gendered work, exposing the century-old neoliberal practices that obscure due diligence to the legal inclusion of these transnational citizens. We will take some time during the first weeks to host one-on-one workshops for women of “La Parada” to learn these tools practically, to bring safety and visibility to their workspace. After four weeks, the hope is to invite those interested in the collaborative project to document their own experiences and emphasize what they deem necessary for the subsistence of their existing community. The workshop will let go of technicalities and encourage artistic, poetic, and resistance language formations. The communal project will take the form of a short experimental documentary composed of gathered footage and put into a conversation with archival documents that expose the history of the unregulated immigrant day labor economy.

Funding Goal 

$1000

Rewards:

$1-100 ticket to gallery opening

$100+ Support Credit on Film