"Port Triumph": Film Screening & Director Q&A
Department: History
Date and Time: March 13, 2018 | 12:00 PM-2:00 PMEvent Location: HG 1070
Event Details
PORT TRIUMPH (a film on El Salvador)
Screening and Q&A with Director/Professor Jeffrey Gould (History Department. Indiana University)
Tuesday, March 13th
12:15 – 1:50 PM; McCormick Screening Room (HG 1070)
Synopsis:
During the 1970s, a military regime ruled El Salvador, violently repressing worker and peasant demands for basic rights. Despite the adversity, the 1500 shrimp packinghouse workers of Puerto el Triunfo – mostly women – organized unions and successfully fought for decent wages and working conditions. At the start of a 12-year civil war, security officials executed or drove into exile the union leaders. When the unions reemerged several years later, the largely female plant workers union entered into a debilitating conflict with the fishermen’s union, while management attempted to eliminate the fishermen’s union. By 1991, the industry had collapsed. Port Triumph provides a window onto this landscape of tropical industrialization and offers insight into the global defeat of labor and the transition to neoliberalism.