Rusted has been featured on the front page of @TheRepublican and MassLive

Hello, my name is Jaime Cornejo.

For the past several years, I’ve been working toward my Master’s degree in the IMA program at Hunter College. I live in Western Massachusetts, and every semester I commute to New York City while working and continuing my studies in filmmaking and storytelling.

The last five years have been intense—full of dedication, setbacks, learning, crises, and persistence. I’m now at the final stage of my degree, close to graduation, and working on a documentary project that feels urgent and deeply personal.

This film is called RUSTED.

Making this project has pushed me to do everything myself: producer, director, camera operator, sound recordist—every role, often at the same time. It’s been exhausting, frustrating, and at times overwhelming, but also meaningful. Still, I can’t finish this alone. That’s why I’m here asking for your support.

I began RUSTED with the limited equipment I could afford through years of work: an old Canon 5D Mark III, a small audio recorder, a few microphones, and borrowed or slowly purchased lenses. With that—and a lot of stubbornness—I’ve managed to build the foundation of this documentary. To complete it properly and responsibly, I need help.

What is RUSTED about?

RUSTED is a documentary about the working class—specifically, the lived experience of working-class communities.

Just minutes from my home, across the Connecticut River, is the city of Holyoke, Massachusetts. Over 150 years ago, Holyoke was designed to be a center of industrial power. It became a hub for textile and paper production and a magnet for generations of immigrant workers.

Irish immigrants fleeing famine carved the canals that made the city possible. They were followed by Polish, French Canadian, and Italian workers, and later by Puerto Rican migrant workers. For decades, Holyoke thrived. Then came the economic shifts of the late 1960s and 1970s. Industries left. Jobs disappeared. An entire city was pushed into long-term economic hardship.

RUSTED asks a simple but difficult question: what happens to a working-class community when the work disappears?

The film centers on interviews with working-class residents of Holyoke who lived through these changes. They speak about survival, loss, dignity, identity, and what it means to belong to a place that history has largely moved past—but never erased.

As I continue this work, bigger questions keep surfacing:

Is the American working class largely made up of immigrants and their descendants?

Is the persecution of immigrants—especially Spanish-speaking communities today—connected to a broader, ongoing attack on the working class itself?

RUSTED doesn’t claim to have easy answers. But with your support, it can create space for these voices, stories, and questions to be heard.

How your donation will be used

Your contribution will directly support the completion of RUSTED and the preservation of Holyoke’s working-class and immigrant history:

* Production costs: equipment rentals, crew support, travel, and interview logistics

* Archival research and licensing: accessing and legally using historic photographs, footage, and documents

* Post-production: editing, sound design, color correction, and graphics

* Community engagement: local screenings, Q&As, and an online archive where full interviews can be publicly accessed

* Project sustainability: basic administrative costs like website hosting, legal fees, and outreach

Every dollar brings this film closer to completion.

Thank you for helping preserve these stories and for supporting a project rooted in labor, memory, and community.

RUSTED is not just a documentary.

It’s an act of preservation, a reckoning with history, and a tribute to a city—and a working class—that refused to disappear.