by the brand Wealth Bondage.
Last night I watched a well-crafted Colombian film titled “Maria – Full of Grace”, which depicts an assertive 17 year-old Colombian woman who quits a sweat-shop job after being psychologically manhandled by the sweatshop boss. At the same time that she quits she learns she is pregnant with a baby via a boyfriend she does not love and who does not love her.
After quitting her job, in order to make quickly what is to her a significant amount of money she becomes a drug mule to run some cocaine to New York.
The film follows her basic training as a mule and then accompanies her on her first trip to New York, which goes awry as another mule who she befriends becomes ill when one of the cocaine pellets in her stomach bursts. The thugs who receive them in New York kill the mule who has become ill, cutting open her stomach in order to retrieve the 50 or so cocaine pellets.
The film juxtaposes in what I perceived as a very subtle way the psychological and cultural difference between her environment in a poor small town in Colombia and the huge modernity that is New York. As the camera follows her through the cityscape of the skyscrapers and magnificent bulk of New York, I couldn’t help but think of all the men and women in the office towers of New York intensely driven by the shuffling of paper and concepts known as “making money”.
I kept thinking of the term and concepts of “wealth bondage”, and I kept realizing in various ways the layers upon layers upon layers of cultural conditioning that the history of capitalism has embedded in North America and, through its global economic hegemony, has imposed upon the rest of the world.
At a point about three-quarters of the way through the movie she visits a street-level medical clinic and undergoes an ultrasound, and is given a picture of her foetus.
At the end of the movie, just as she is about to board the plane to return to Colombia, she reflects upon what she is returning to and what I believe she sees as a better future for her baby. She turns back from boarding the plane, walking off into a future in the promised land of America.
I think we are intended to believe that this is the major life decision of a still-adolescent woman determined to offer her yet-to-be born baby a better life than she perceives is available to her and it in Colombia.
Maria – Full of Grace. One more believer in, and victim of, wealth bondage – the ultimate brand.
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