BULLETIN NO. 12

GRITOS POETICOS DE LA URBE and
CIUDAD ADICTA

Two video by las Mujeres al Rescate de la Cultura de la Calle (Women to the Rescue of Street Culture)

Susana Quiroz and Ines Morales are two young women from Mexico City who make videos about chavas banda - street kids, girls. "Our aim is to let them speak, let them say what they feel, what concerns them. Whether they speak the gritty truth or whether they invent, that doesn't matter, we want to give them a chance to express themselves".

This objective springs from an innate rejection of documentaries about street kids that use voice- overs and give statistical data. Susana and Inés aim to present the story from the inside, they tell us that street kids too are writing poetry, making videos, and seek creative expression.

In their video Gritos Poéticos de la Urbe (22 mins) they film and interview chavas banda (girls from the gang). One young woman sits on a park bench and reads her poetry passionately, another leans against a wall and denounces many chavas who "just want the same old things women traditionally want: husband, family, all that." The camera moves about the city, until the dramatic ending when we go to a place in Santa Fe (Mexico City), home of the gang. A young woman stands in the wasteland beside a former river (now a drain), and shouts frantically beside a supine body on the ground: "they killed her, they raped her, they killed her".

Street life is hard, can lead to addictions, diseases, early, maybe violent death. For girls it's harder - you gotta be tough, very tough, says Susana, who has moved with the street gangs for years. "Some guys are bastards, they really want to fuck you over". Many girls prostitute themselves - "even if they tell you they don´t" - to raise their children, or to buy drugs.

Ciudad Adicta (10 mins) presents a series of boys and girls, women and men, who talk about drugs. Most of them use one drug or another. They like it, mostly. Not all street kids use drugs, like some who work on the streets, singing in buses, washing windscreens. Susana and Inés don´t make any judgements in their videos, but in their conversation with Video Red Mujer they expressed their frustrations with chavos who can´t kick the habit of drugs.

Susana had her own peculiar beginning to working with video. One day she was paid some money she was owed and she bought a Beta video camera in Tepito (a well known market in Mexico City). "Then I had to figure out how the thing worked". She pressed buttons until she found out what they were for, learned how to hold the camera steady. Later she took courses in CICAM on visual creativity and on video with Alejandra Novoa in Telemanita.
We can see the results of this anarchic self-taught process in the videos, Gritos Poéticos is somewhat diverse and disperse. Now -with the help of Inés- Susana is beginning to accept the ordering of ideas as a first step, and following a script. (They both laugh.)
Now Ines and Susana are preparing a video on women who work in the streets - singing on buses, selling chewing gum, selling their bodies, whatever.

You can order their videos directly from the video makers by calling them at:
55 55 9756 in Mexico City