Invisible Foundations: Construction Workers in En El Hoyo

Abstract

In 2003, the filmmaker Juan Carlos Rulfo began to document the construction of what was to be the longest elevated highway in Mexico City. Running above the peripheral highway called Anillo Periférico, the elevated was meant to relieve heavy traffic in certain areas of Mexico City and move thousands of vehicles at a greater speed. This public megaproject inspired Rulfo to anchor the plot of his documentary around the lives of some of the more than 7,000 workers who labored on the construction of this elevated highway. This paper analyzes the documentary En el hoyo/In the Pit (Rulfo, 2006) in order to more closely address the role played by construction workers, a voiceless guild in the history of construction in Mexico, through an architectural work that in its time was a symbol of urban development. It explores the visual mechanisms used in the film to represent reality. Using the notion of countervisuality—a term belonging to the field of visual studies—the paper assesses whether or not the documentary is an attempt to set up a counter hegemonic vision of architecture by directly engaging with the practices and ideologies pertaining to architecture and urban development. The paper concretely alludes to practices and ideologies related to the lives of a subalternate group that makes it possible to construct large-scale public works.