El Cambalache, a moneyless economy project in San Cristobal de las Casas, Chiapas, is screening a documentary we created! The title, “El Cambalache: el valor de inter-cambiar” is a play on words. In English it means “The Swap: where we have the courage to change within ourselves and/or where we have exchange value”.

Our trailer is at https://vimeo.com/144836896
(English subtitles are available by pressing the cc button at the bottom of the video).

We are screening the film this month in New York City; Stockholm, Sweden; and the Bay Area in California. Confirmed dates and time are:

New York City
3/12 8pm The Base in Brooklyn https://thebasebk.org/moneyless-economies-in-chiapas-an-evening-with-el-cambalache/
See also: https://www.facebook.com/events/1055818891105802/

3/13 7:30pm ABC No Rio, Manhattan
http://www.abcnorio.org/pcgi-bin/suite/calendar/calendar.cgi?request=detail&event_id=11957&user_id=100001&page=featured&session=56df2a3c1e293e9d
See also: https://www.facebook.com/events/230716997278613/

Stockholm
3/20 2:30pm Kafe 44

San Francisco/Bay Area
4/1 7pm omni commons, oakland
https://omnicommons.org/occupy/events/documentary-el-cambalache-el-valor-de-inter-cambiar-the-courage-to-inter-change/

About the film:
Shot over five months and collectively directed, the film is 25 minutes long and explains our concepts of value and the modalities of exchange. It documents how the El Cambalache project works, the community that is created, why people participate and how people can create their own Cambalache, starting where they are.

More about the El Cambalache Project:
The capitalist economic system has provoked social rupture and loss of communal values; such as mutual aid, sharing and exchanging. This rupture foments a sense that people and things are discardable. In El Cambalache (The Swap in English) in San Cristobal de las Casas, Chiapas, Mexico, by using exchange and inter-change we work to generate change from the inside out to those around us while putting to use things that appear to no longer have value. We seek to mend the fragmentation that we see in our worlds.

The Cambalache, with its nucleous generating group of six women, involves people through their visits to exchange day by day. We re-enforce the development of the Cambalache through constructing networks with people and organizations that have similar goals. In this way we share the construction of an inclusive community through workshops and mutual aid where economy members gather participants to take part in/of the knowledge, abilities and services that are offered. We walk hand in hand with these and other social and political processes. El Cambalache is an economy built in feminism and decoloniality. As women, Mexicans, Americans, and Indigenous people we can create an economy in our own visions that is liberating from the weight and exploitation that comes with capitalism.