Building the American Dream
The final feature of the SF Urban Film Fest took place Sunday night at The Lab, a nonprofit experimental art and performance space located in the Mission District of San Francisco. Audience members poured into a large unadorned room with white walls and wood floors to watch director Chelsea Hernandez’s Building the American Dream.
The film, set in Texas — home to five of the ten fastest growing cities in the United States, opens with a realtor showing a newly constructed downtown high-rise apartment offered at $3 million. Surrounding the unit are hundreds of others just as new and expensive; the new “Texas Miracle”. We quickly find that this is no miracle at all: it is the expected and planned outcome from years of appeasing businesses through corporate tax breaks and anti-union behavior. And with that outcome comes expected and planned (as much as the state may refuse to admit) consequences that fall entirely on the working class.
Building the American Dream focuses on the challenges facing construction workers as rapid re-urbanization creates unparalleled demand. With about half of construction workers undocumented, companies are able to exploit their laborers knowing they are fearful to campaign for their rights. Lack of regulations also means companies can ignore things like basic safety without consequences — every two and half days, a construction worker dies in Texas.
The film follows three families who are experiencing the effects of this firsthand. Claudia and her husband Alex, electricians from El Salvador, are victims of wage theft and are owed over $11,000. The Granillo family is mourning their son Roendy, a construction worker who died on the job after being denied a rest break despite having a 110 degree fever. Christian, whose father died in a work accident, works as a safety officer in honor of his father and to provide for his family.
Hernandez does a brilliant job of capturing how unjust and difficult their journeys are. Claudia and Alex are fighting to get their money back. When describing the events of the wage theft to a lawyer, Claudia recounts their supervisor telling them to meet him at the project site to get their money. When they arrived, he called the police on them for stealing tools and supplies. Through joining a wage theft support group, we find out they are far from alone: 1 in 5 workers in Texas are victims of wage theft. Roendy’s family, trying to ensure that Roendy’s preventable death does not happen to anyone else, petition Dallas City Council to pass an ordinance allowing workers to rest for 10 minutes every 4 hours. Councilman Lee Kleinman calls the grieving family ‘charlatans’ and props of the unions to their faces. Christian is a DACA recipient whose life in America is suddenly put in danger thanks to the Trump administration’s plan to terminate the program.
Furthermore, hard-earned small wins are brought down with the introduction of more obstacles. An especially heart wrenching scene was when Claudia and Alex get $400 back from their wage theft claim they made over 2 years ago. Grateful to have received anything at all, Claudia talks about their victory to the wage theft support group and the couple celebrate with their daughter’s birthday party. The very next scene, Claudia is pulled over while driving home and held overnight at ICE. Similarly, we cheer when the Granillo family manages to get their rest break ordinance passed in Dallas, and are honored at the National Conference on Worker Safety and Health for their accomplishment. Then it is revealed that out of all the cities in Texas, only Dallas and Austin have these ordinances.
Getting paid for the work you’ve done, being able to rest for a mere 10 minutes after performing strenuous work for 4 hours, feeling like your life isn’t constantly in danger, seem like no-brainers. But Hernandez shows us that for these families and so many others like them in Texas, it would be a dream to acquire these basic rights.
Following the film, director Chelsea Hernandez joined us for a post-screening discussion, along with Cynthia Gomez of Unite Here Local and moderator and former Executive Director of the Jamestown Community Center, Myrna Melgar. The panel was quick to agree that while the film focuses on Texas, this is a phenomenon that is happening across the country. While the Bay Area has more worker protection laws, there is still much work to be done to protect the workers and enforce the laws. They discussed local dynamics, recent strikes, and the increased vulnerability of undocumented workers against the backdrop of our quickly growing city. The importance of construction workers was also discussed, along with the irony of cracking down on half the workforce in an industry that is in desperately short supply.
When asking whether Austin and Dallas were planning on changing the narrative on regulation in Texas, Melgar hauntingly commented that human lives were currently being treated as an externality in a state focused on building upwards and outwards. As SF Urban Film Fest finished its week of films on urbanism and cities, it was fitting and important to close with one honoring the lives of those who help build them.
Dive into the panel discussion:
This event took place on February 9, 2020 at The Lab in San Francisco. For more information about SF Urban Film Fest, visit their website.
