Carmen Durán & Lourdes Luján

I have lived a sheltered life unaware of what the rest of the world is like. Through watching the “Maquilapolis: City of Factories” I was exposed to a whole different world I hardly understood. Several women suffered health problems because of the chemicals used in the factories. Carmen Durán contracted anemia and was forced to stop working. As a mother of three, working at the maquiladoras was her only form on income. The doctors basically told her if she continued to work in the factories, she would experience severe health problems that would eventually lead to death. Soon after she left, the factory was closed down and transferred to a new location in Indonesia. The relocation provided even cheaper labor costs for the parent company, at the same time putting thousands of workers out of business. Carmen, along with her co-workers faught the company and demanded their deserved severance pay that was striped and left the women with nothing. In the end, Carmen won $2,500. This sum of money does not even begin to cover everything she’s lost and her declining health.

Another heroic women’s story is Lourdes Luján. Lourdes lived in a neighborhood where the toxic chemical waste was poured down into the streets during a rain storm. This was how factories disposed of their left over waste chemicals. When Lourdes was growing up, she used to play in the waterhole near her home, now being filled with toxic chemicals children are contracting diseases and women are given birth to children with deformed bodies and mental illnesses. It is apparent that these communities receive little if any attention from the government and environmental and health services. Lourdes, along with others helped form the Chilpancingo Collective for Environmental Justice to bring this problem to the public. Their main goal was to get the toxic waste dump left behind from a battery recycling factory cleaned up and disposed of, no longer dispensing those hazardous chemicals into the community. Their protests and complaints proved noteworthy because the government soon listened to their complaints and took action in cleaning up the factory remnants.