You Know the Drill
By Vicente Rodriguez-Ortega
In the Pit
Dir. Juan Carlos Rulfo, Mexico, Kino
“In Mexico, you won’t do anything unless you corrupt yourself. With honesty, you can only get frijoles and eggs. Those who study, study to steal”
—Mexican construction worker
Juan Carlos Rulfo’s In the Pit ends with a breathtaking five-minute-and-30-second aerial shot of “El Segundo Piso,” an elevated freeway built above the Periferico, one of the main transportation arteries crossing Mexico City. This is the first time the filmmaker situates the spectator above ground, showing how the Dantesque four-year project the film documents is about to be completed and that cars are already circulating its finished parts. This grandiose finale is accompanied by the voices of several of the workers seen throughout the preceding 75 minutes. They express their pride as their work comes to an end, and yet they also mark themselves among those who won’t likely utilize the freeway since their paychecks, as one of the workers eloquently affirms, barely allows them to buy a bicycle. In this respect, In the Pit may be understood as a political project that gives voices to the invisible pawns of society’s underbelly. By doing so, the film unearths the exploitative dynamic of economic and social discrimination that characterizes the institutional policies of the Mexican government and exposes the perverted functioning of a contemporary social order in which class and race dictate who remains “down there” and who escalates to the higher spheres.
In this sense, the very elevated quality of the “Segundo Piso” of the Periferico freeway and its discriminating politics of accessibility are direct correlatives of the pit where the workers remain throughout the film’s entirety. For their only chance to be above the ground is to hang dangerously in the scaffolds and metallic structures they painstakingly shape for others to use. The closing aerial shot, with its almighty power to visually map out the gigantic structure we have only seen before as construction bits and pieces, points directly to the kind of propagandistic perspectives that governments use to remain in positions of privilege—it’s an abstract canvas, a non-human POV shot that vacuums out the human body, sweat, blood, and economic depravation that is behind the construction of the freeway. However, the voices of the workers Rulfo layers on the soundtrack go a long way to humanize this mechanism and to act as reminders of the thousands of invisible human beings that have remained (and will remain) below its ground.
In the Pit, however, is not simply an ode to the suffering worker as part of an abstract work force epitomizing the uneven distribution of wealth in our contemporary milieu. On the contrary it singularizes a few of these workers and, by performing this task, offers not only a polyphonic tapestry of competing voices but also explores the sweetest and darkest realm of their personae. As they speak, engaging in spontaneous reflections about who they were, wanted to be, have become, or wish to be in a future that does not seem feasible, or exchange words of camaraderie among themselves, they are pictured as profoundly disenchanted, generous, good-hearted but also biased, egotistical, on occasion homophobic and often misogynistic—human. Moreover, their dark skins remind us that the exports of Televisa and TV Azteca (the two biggest Mexican media corporations) are mostly fair-skinned. In Mexico, the indigenous Other is often treated as an uneducated pariah, an obstacle in the path of modernization— it’s a country stuck in a schizophrenic condition, caused both by the rampant racism of U.S. immigration policies and its own internal practices of epidemic racism against those who do not conform to the paradigm of modernity they wish to exploit for a “new and better Mexico.” Most Mexicans’ self-identification as North American rather than Latin or Central American is undoubtedly symptomatic of the internal network of racial and economic hierarchies that shapes the country’s social fabric—thus Rulfo’s depiction of the Mexico City low-class construction workers is inextricable from his country’s problematic contemporary in-betweenness.
Perhaps then truly the defining image of In the Pit is the lonesome way home “Chaparro” (“Shorty”), one of the worker, undertakes. As his freeway job has ended, Chaparro waves goodbye to his co-workers and the camera follows him to his bus stop. Chaparro becomes excited as the bus pulls up; he is ready to leave behind the 14-hour shifts he has endured for months. However, the bus skips the stop, leaving Chaparro behind. His reaction is neither one of frustration nor indignation nor sadness. “Now we have to walk,” and so he goes. For Chaparro, who is caged within a social fabric that needs his labor to keep functioning and simultaneously excludes his kind from the access to those venues of social, economic and physical mobility it designs to perpetuate the established order, knows there is no point in waiting for the next bus—the only way to get home is to walk and not look back.
