If you’ve ever been to Mexico City, chances are you’ve sat in an old Volkswagen Bug taxi, painted in muted red and gold, stuck in Mexico City’s notorious traffic.

“Here we call them ‘Donkeys,’” says Victoriano Luna, a taxi driver who has been driving a Bug for 32 years. “A horse can run fast, but it doesn’t endure. A donkey does endure, just like this car.”

Volkswagen first came to Mexico in 1967, when it opened a plant in Puebla, a few hours drive from Mexico City. For decades, the Bug was the biggest-selling car in the country.

Today, the Peubla plant has expanded to become the largest auto factory in North America, employing 18,000 people. It’s a state-of-the-art facility full of industrial robots and blinking computer equipment. The plant has the capacity to produce 2,500 cars a day, in popular models such as the Jetta and Golf.

After rolling off the line, the cars are packed into trains and shipped off to retailers. Most of them are sold abroad. Mexico is now the eighth biggest auto producer in the world, as well as the world’s fourth biggest exporter, according to the Mexican Automotive Industry Association.

In 2012, the country produced almost 3 million cars, a national record. Experts say those numbers are on track to keep growing.

“Mexico is becoming quite an automotive powerhouse,” says Thomas Karig, a vice president at Volkswagen Mexico. Karig says Mexico is an attractive place for car companies to set up shop for several reasons: a great location for exporting to North and South America, an open trade policy, and experience in the work force.

Last September, Audi, a Volkswagen subsidiary , announced the construction of a new plant nearby. They’ll be assembling the luxury Q5 SUV. Eduardo Solís, president of the Mexican Automotive Industry Association, says it’s a watershed moment for the country.

“There is an important element here where Mexico is, currently in the automotive industry, associated with good quality, with good products,” says Solís. “We have been scaling up in the value chain.”

VW Factory in Puebla, Mexico (Photo: VW Mexico)

Hector Muñoz, a 48-year-old technician at Volkswagen, is a living example of that change. Muñoz comes from a family of street vendors, and scored a job at Volkswagen after an uncle got him interested in fixing up cars.

After 20 years working on the VW line, he makes 12,000 pesos a month. That comes out to only about $30 US a day, but its six times minimum wage in Mexico, putting him squarely in the country’s middle class. Thanks to this job, he’s been able to put his kids through college. Two of them are now engineers, a fact he’s really proud of.

“Before there weren’t as many opportunities as there are now,” says Muñoz. In my case, being at Volkswagen has really encouraged me to push my kids to learn more, to get better educations.”

There are a lot of others like Muñoz. According to the World Bank, 17 percent of Mexico’s population joined the middle class between 2003 and 2009, now making up almost a quarter of the population.

But there’s a long way to go – half of Mexico still lives below the poverty line. Victor Piz, editor of Mexico’s chief financial newspaper El Financiero, says those people are being left out this high-tech boom.

“I think the main problem in Mexico is the distribution of revenue coming into the country,” says Piz. “None of it goes into the pockets of Mexico’s poor. This wealth doesn’t matter to them because they’re not receiving any benefit from it.”

Piz also warns that Mexico could have a problem sustaining its recent growth – almost 4 percent for two straight years – because it relies too heavily on one trading partner, the US. Mexico has free trade agreements like NAFTA with 44 countries, but still overwhelmingly exports to its neighbor to the North.

“When the United States turns off its engines, inevitably, Mexico also has to turn off its engines as well,” says Piz.

Today, Mexico City traffic is no longer a sea of VW Bugs. There are the gleaming Lexuses of the wealthy, and the Nissans of the country’s middle class – not to mention the mini-buses that transport the working poor. But taxis are still being made in Mexico. New York City’s brand new taxi fleet is currently in production at a Nissan plant in Cuernavaca.

This story was produced in collaboration with reporter Javier Risco and Round Earth Media’s Mexico Reporting Project.

Reporter Marlon Bishop tells us about Sorie Kondi and his thumb piano.

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“I think it looks just kaleidoscopic,” said Karl Ryan, “Just cool colors.”

“Burnt siennas, oranges, yellows,” said David Barrish.

“It’s kind of aura based,” said Dana Dawson, “everything has outlines to it, growing out of some core object.
“Very vibrant, very interesting to look at, very appealing to the eye,” Ryan reiterated.

Without a doubt, it’s abstract art. The paintings wouldn’t be out of place hanging next to Pollacks or Motherwells. But these works weren’t produced in New York or Paris. They were painted in the Australian outback by indigenous artists – artists like Yangi Yangi Fox.

“We live in a country that has stories all around us,” said Fox. “And we put those stories in the painting so that people understand the stories. The canvases are a means of telling the stories.”

These so-called “dreaming stories” are a sort of aboriginal mythology passed down through the generations. The abstract forms in Fox’s paintings represent the actions of ancestral beings, and geographical features, such as hills and water-holes. The stories are an important part of traditional culture, regularly told verbally or sung at family gatherings.

Fox and the other artists from the exhibition live in Kalka, a community of 150 people in Australia’s vast central desert, a four hour drive to the nearest town with a post office. They paint at Ninuku Arts, one of about 100 indigenous Art centers that receive funding from the Australian government.

Claire Eltringham manages the center and came to New York with several of the artists to visit the exhibition.
“Art centers are community-based, indigenous-owned organizations,” Eltringham said. ”They’re one of the only places where people can find employment and earn money and support their families.”

For impoverished villages in the outback, that money is pretty significant. One painting at the SoHo show sold for almost $20,000. One Australian government auditor estimates that fine art sales bring in a total of $40 million annually to indigenous communities each year. The record sale price for a single painting is $2.4 million, for a work by Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri.

“You can’t go anywhere in Australia now and find a gallery that doesn’t have aboriginal art,” said Fred Meyers, an expert in aboriginal art and culture at New York University.

Meyers said says aboriginal painting caught on with international audiences in the ’80s, partially because of its resemblance to contemporary abstract art. Since then, proceeds from art sales have been used for everything from community swimming pools to dialysis centers. He said the art centers have created an economic model that allows aboriginals to stay in their traditional lands, rather than have to migrate to the cities for jobs.

“They want to stay on the land, they want to stay on their own country. They feel that their country is getting respect and value in the outside world. So there are many levels in terms of cultural respect that this has been important.”

In general, painting has been a much-needed success story for aboriginals. Indigenous Australians continue to suffer disproportionately from social ills such as poverty, alcoholism, and domestic abuse.

For Eltringham, the art movement provides a counter-narrative to the kind of patronizing and neglect has been endemic in Australia for decades.

“One of the reasons that I’m really proud to be involved in Aboriginal art is because I see it as one of the few places where indigenous people have got the power to actually determine their future,” she said. “And it’s also through the medium of paint, so it’s a really beautiful thing.”