The The Struggle of Electric Workers in Film: The Cases of La boquilla (1978) and La otra historia. La Tendencia Democrática (2006)

Abstract

As far as it could be inquired, the first film testimonies on the Tendendencia Democrática de los Trabajadores Electricistas (Democratic Tendency (DT) of the Electric-Industry Workers) were filmed on super 8 between 1971 and 1972 by the Cooperativa de Cine Marginal, sort of a filmic movement leaded by Paco Ignacio Taibo II, Enrique Escalona, Víctor Sanén, Eduardo Carrasco Zanini, Gabriel Retes and Guadalupe Ferrer among others, most of them activists or supporters of the Movimiento Estudiantil Popular which shook Mexico in 1968. The movement of the DT went on for years, and those pioneering examples were followed by others addressed in detail in the present text: the short “La Boquilla” made in 1978 on 16 mm. by Alejandra Islas and the one originated on materials filmed by Julio Pliego around  1975, and eventually integrated into the documentary “La otra historia. La Tendencia Democrática”, edited in 2006, both of them examples of a cinema tending to be at the height and at the side of the struggle of the dissident workers.