To film the movie Titanic, Twentieth Century Fox built a sort of "movie maquiladora" in Popotla, and surrounded it with a giant cement wall to keep the villagers out. The wall cut the village off from its beach, and the studio hopelessly chlorinated the crop of sea urchins that Popotla had fished for decades. In reaction, the Popotla villagers decorated the wall with rubbish, and made a media spectacle out of it.

In 1998, the technology trade fair Ars Electronica awarded the Titanic special-effects lab its coveted Golden Nica. Ars Electronica also invited ®^TMark to jury another $1000 prize, which ®^TMark awarded to Popotla itself, for its symbolic low-tech resistance to real high-tech destruction.