Las Matanzas de Ciudad Juarez, Teoría y Aplicación

What has been a popular area of study in NAFTA and women, have been the very visible abuses of women in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. Ciudad Juarez borders El Paso, Texas and the explosion of the maquiladora market in border regions have created urban sprawl, bottlenecking and an infrastructure on the Mexican side that has failed to catch up with the speed in which industrial parks are built and maquiladoras have grown.

Aside from the problems of cities in dealing with the rapid growth, is the failure of enforcement of laws that protect women in México. The lack of protection of women’s rights is something that is experienced in both the United States and Mexico. The Violence Against Women Act is a recent legislative venture to try to correct the visible, blatant wrongs that are committed against women in the United States on a daily basis, and this type of legislation (as well as its findings) are proof that the lack of protection from women’s own political and legal resources that are afforded to everyone in their respective countries are not enough in curtailing violence against women.

In Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua, where police have been complacent in investigating cases of missing persons, and city managers have publicly claimed that the missing women were likely prostitutes or runaways, the environment of non-enforcement almost seems to encourage predators to abuse women where an opportunity lies.

Melissa Wright finds a correlation between maquiladora owners and managers treating women as capital who lose their value after a work-term and also being perceived by the men of Juarez as having lost their value as women. In her article, “The Dialects of Still Life” the value of women in border factories is said to have little economic value in the "maquiladoras" by those who employ them. There the bosses complain that girls only work for a little while and there is such high turnover, however, as the article progresses, it is discovered that maquiladoras encourage high turnover, since the managers "know" that women "don’t want to stay very long" at their posts, managers use this as a tool when there is high productivity and little productivity. It is easy to hire a lot of women during periods of high production, then lay them all off a few months later when demand fluctuates.

And if women lose economic value because they either become pregnant and need days off form work (and therefore lose their value to the maquila) or because it is perceived that they’ve stayed at the maquila for too long, such as a two-year period (in which they are still perceived to have lost their value because it is ‘only a matter of time’ before they leave) then they are no longer required and their turnover becomes a benefit.

And in a hyper-industrialized, commerce-heavy region such as northern México, where one’s own survival is dependent on the maquilas, Wright argues that men of the area begin to think of women as value-less in other aspects of life. For example, working women have obviously been influenced by American culture to work and buy things, so men feel don’t feel obligated to feel anything towards them because they’ve ‘lost their culture’.

The issue of violence against women and their de-valuation in Juarez is perhaps unique to this area only because it has been an environment where opportunity lies and there is no enforcement against it, thus it is repeated. However, the violence against women by Mexican men is not a new concept.

There is a rather touchy and controversial subject that has been discussed among Mexican psychologists as well as philosophers about the mind of the typical Mexican. I say that this subject is controversial because it brings up very nationalistic excuses for behavior as well as an argument about a psychological complex that seems to want to excuse men for their actions. This is not a defense of any of these ideas, however, I will briefly explain the subject because it seems to still have a lot of popularity among Mexicans at least as an explanation to how corrupt the country is rather than as a defense for the behavior of men against women.

In the Sixties and Seventies, several Mexican authors wrote books about the Mexican complex or about the question, “What does it mean to be a Mexican?” Among one of these authors was Samuel Ramos who wrote, “Hijos de la Malinche”. He focused a considerable part of his argument to the words Mexicans used to describe emotions. The most used word in his thesis was “chingada” or “chingar” which is, roughly, “to fuck”. He noticed this word was almost exclusively a Mexican word because no other Latin American nation used it as much and for as many things as Mexicans did.

The idea goes back to the conquest of Mexico, when Hernán Cortez came onto the shores of México and was given, as a gift, a young Indian girl who was called, “la Malinche” or ‘Malintzin’. La Malinche helped Cortez conquer the Aztecs, and many would argue that the firstborn of Hernán Cortez and la Malinche would be the first ‘Mexican’ because Mexicans are the infusion of the Spanish and the indigenous American. The complication, though, is that in popular Mexican history la Malinche is seen as a traitor the Mexican people because she let herself be taken by Hernán Cortez rather than defend the Aztecs. The phrase “malinchista” is usually used to negatively label someone who says something unpatriotic.

Ramos argues that Mexicans are all descendants of la Malinche and so Mexicans are all ‘hijos de la chingada’. To clarify further: in Spain, a common insult is, “hijo de puta” which translates into ‘son of a bitch’ or literally, ‘son of a whore’ which infers that the woman willfully gives herself to men in exchange for money. ‘hijo de la chingada’ literally means, ‘son of a raped woman’ the difference is that sex is forced, not chosen, which makes the psychological complex worse for Mexicans because it has forced a generational trend where they see everything in their lives as a sequence of situations where one must either take from others or be taken by others. The choice is to “chingar” or to be “chingado”.

Although the first part of the argument is certainly the most radical because it essentializes all Mexicans, the following part is the most widely accepted by Mexicans who understand the level of corruption and fear within the population. The crime rate and corruption in México ranks among the worst in the world. Police are well-known for their corruption and the criminal and innocent alike fear the police as though they were a gang of organized criminals because….that’s what they are. And in a country where even the enforcers of the laws manipulate them as they choose, and politicians use of public funds for their own use is so well-known that no new charge in an investigation would so much as raise eyebrows among the public, people have to fend for themselves.

I have mentioned this to very many Mexicans including family, friends, co-workers and there is a general agreement that in México, everyone is pretty much out to protect themselves and to take as they will. And so violence escalates in México for a variety of reasons ranging from narco-trafficking to the killings of women in Ciudad Juarez.

Questioning the behavior of women in these border towns, the constant, "what was she doing out at night?" attempts to devalue women by suggesting they are prostitutes or immoral or lost to American culturism to imply that they have lost value and are worth only the opportunity to die. This goes back to what Melissa Wright argues about the factories and society devaluing women so that they can get rid of them. Perhaps the violence in Juarez has been accelerated by the inclusion of hypercapitalism where the worth of human life is beginning to be shaped by their worth in a factory funded by foreign capital and aided by NAFTA.

This is an excellent argument against the system of so-called “open trade” that has been established by the United States and defended by international organization such as the World Bank, the IMF and the NAFTA treaty. As has been said before, these international trade organizations and treaties have predominately been more favorable to the developed, wealthier nations and end up setting the guidelines that the weaker nations are forced to follow.

The visibility of the maquiladora issue (although critically important) has many times been the breadth of scope of any discussion of NAFTA, without lending to a discussion of national economic effects on women or an effect of a different economic sector such as agriculture, which arguably has the biggest impact on Mexican families.

I encourage the reader, as the following piece is read, to consider what isn’t discussed when NAFTA is brought up into a US-Mexico discourse; and to consider that perhaps the maquiladora issue receives more visibility than any other NAFTA effect—this is not to say that it is ‘hyper-visible’ which would imply some level of deception about the issue, which is certainly not the case—and to consider the very word ‘maquila’ or ‘maquiladora’ which are known as the foreign-owned factories that employ Mexican labor in the border regions.



Five years ago, my mother reported the meat processing plant she worked in (Lufkin TX) to the EEOC and Department of Labor. Two months later, ConAgra sold its plant to a different company (Armour Eckrich Foods) after firing its top management and after conclusions of many many violations of equality and work standards.

Although she still feels that there are bad practices at the meat plant, she still works there where the working conditions have improved a greath deal but still with a wary eye of how management treats the workers.

About two weeks ago while visiting home, I made the comment, "at least it's not like a maquiladora." She looked at me and asked, "how is it not?" And I said, "no, the maquiladoras are practically sweat shops, they exploit women and pay low wages", I then referenced the killings of women in Ciudad Juarez, and she responded by saying, " factories all over Mexico pay little and treat people badly, and what happens in Juarez is especially horrible and dangerous, but the plant I work at is still a maquiladora".

Then I stopped. Thought about it, and asked, "is the word maquiladora synonymous with factory?" She said, "yes."

looking up the word maquiladora in critiques of NAFTA, they are explained as factories (usually textile) that are foreign-owned (usually American) and are predominately on the Mexican side of the border with the US, but are also all over Mexico.

And I wonder, do we all use the word "maquila" to be culturally sensitive? I DON'T THINK SO. And I say this sincerely.

It seems to me that maquiladora has a negative connotation here in the United States. When I think of "maquilas" I think of sweatshops and human rights abuse. But when I ask my mother, who lived on ther border (Matamoros, Mexico) and worked for Fisher-Price Mexico in a maquiladora during the Eighties....to her "maquiladora" is interchangeable with "factory" or "plant".

I had no idea that people in Mexico did not distinguish the two, because everything I've ever read about maquiladoras is always about abuses that take place in the factories. I am not at all suggesting that abuses do not occur, or that they should be excused in any way. I am only saying that to many Mexicans, factories all over Mexico are full of these abuses (especially in the so-called "maquiladoras" of the border towns which are predominately textile plants).

But the use of the word "maquiladora" by well-to-do Americans (including feminists) as an attempt to be culturally sensitive is actually (I believe) a situation where Global North Americans are speaking on behalf of Global South Mexicans and trying to tell someone else's story through a veil of cultural sensitivity by knowingly using all of the negative energy, history and connotation behind the word "maquila".

I personally think they are ALL bad. But even foreign companies that are in the interior of the Mexican republic such as Germany's Volkswagen abuse Mexico and Mexicans both economically as well as physically. But they are usually not called "maquilas" they are auto part manufacturers. And if we were to call all of them "maquiladoras" that is--every single factory in Mexico-- then we essentialize! And if it is indeed true that every factory in Mexico deserves the negative tone of the word "maquila" (which I think would be appropriate) I think it is fair to consider the abuses to women all over the republic, and not just Ciudad Juarez.

To sum it up, I really would rather that transnational feminists call them "factories" not "maquiladoras" because women who work in either, do not distinguish the names, but those of us who read about the abuses are liable to hear "maquiladora" and "factoria"/"planta"/"empresa" and gather different conclusions as to what each does based solely on the name--when in fact they are all potentially very guilty of abuse.
I will extend on this further in me blog, but I want to add that based on this weeks readings, it is clear that the situation in the border-town factories are especially horrendous because the relationship between Mexican workers and American administrators is highly visible--however, when we reference them as "maquiladoras" it is easier for us to distinguish exactly what kind of factory we are talking about...and the thoughts that always enter our minds are those of abuse--not of a foreign relationship between Mexican women workers and American business owners and administrators.

NAFTA affects women in México as well as in the United States, it is something that is truly transnational. We do nothing more than avoid a discussion of class and poverty if we focus on terms like ‘maquiladora’ because then it seem like a Mexican phenomenon, and keeps us from having a discussion about the industrial system in the United States as well as México.
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