The blacklisted American documentarian Willard Van Dyke filmed this tale about tobacco workers in the heart of the Puerto Rican countryside. Heeding their wives’ advice, individuals join forces in a cooperative so they can sell their crop of tobacco leaves at fair market value.
This documentary was produced to educate the community about medical care. The story revolves around the sickness of Dona Julia’s daughter Maria. After a bad experience at the local hospital, she seeks cures through non-traditional medical care. When the potions that she administers fail to cure her daughter, she is persuaded to return the girl to the hospital where she is properly diagnosed and cured.
One of the DivEdCo's films that best depicts the history and evolution of another genre of popular music from the coasts and of African origin: the plena. It presents sequences of interpreters of those rhythms in Ponce, in the dances of the coastal areas, and the fusion of popular and refined genres in presentations by Ballets de San Juan of the ballet-plena by Amaury Veray, "Cuando las mujeres" ("When the Women").
It presents of one of the major challenges faced by DivEdCo’s fieldworkers: how to convince the island’s rural farmers of the continued importance of traditional agricultural practices in the face of Puerto Rico’s rapid modernization and industrialization under Operation Bootstrap. The film encourages families to make good use of arable land by cultivating healthy and affordable crops.
