Youtube!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UKV9e_ZDBWU

I’m an avid viewer of Youtube.com and found this video when I was searching for information. Nogales, Mexico: Las Maquilas, is a short documentary that captured the essence of maquiladoras in Nogales. Teresa Leal, an activist, is trying to help female employees better understand their rights in the factories. She contends that, “victims don’t realize they are being battered.” Many workers do not understand that they long hours they are working in such hazardous conditions can be bad for their health and are not legal

Change in me

I am surprised how little I actual new about Native American society. Having already taken various women’s studies classes, I expected this class to elaborate on the same issues. However, to my surprise, this class taught me so much more. Learning the history of how the children were forced into a school system that disrupted their native culture and taught them to be more western civilized shocked the hell out of me. I never realized how strongly we have imposed our culture onto an already civilized nation. In addition, the continuing battles of lands that we American’s have taken from the Native people who are striving to get it back. It is embarrassing to see what our country has done to these people who are just like us. I mean, realistically, they were here first and we have no right to take all their land and treat them like dirt. In a society where parents are teaching children how to behave and share with one another, our country can’t even follow those guidelines with the natives that were here first. It is unfortunate that schools aren’t teaching more about our history in relation to the Native American’s and how Christopher Columbus day truly shouldn’t be celebrated and is honoring a man that murdered thousands of natives.

Chapter 5: The Changing Gender Composition of the Maquiladora Workforce along the U.S.-Mexico Border

· Women’s massive influx into maquiladora jobs represented a dramatic departure from previous labor market dynamics in Mexico, where prior to the 1970’s women had on e of the lowest rates of formal labor force participation in the hemisphere
· Between 2000 and 2003 led to the loss of almost one-third of a million maquiladora jobs.
· In turn-of-the-century Mexico, when textile production was the main form of manufacturing, about 76,000 women held factory jobs; after forty years of industrial diversification, the female labor force had been reduced by half.
· Among many of the ironies of the maquiladora program is that, although it was intended to provide jobs for men, women were preferred for assembly jobs.
· The maquiladoras’ hiring practices continued despite criticisms, creating in the first decade of the program a workforce in which between 80 and 90 percent of the maquiladora workers were women.
· In the industry’s early years, most women workers were young, single, and childless. Their recruitment reflect TNC labor practices worldwide, which favored younger women because they were seen as being easier to train, less apt to organize, and unlikely to acquire the job seniority that could legitimate demands for wage increases.

The trend shifted:

· Now they related that married mothers made better workers because they were more mature, reliable, and less apt to jump from job to job than single women, who were immature, frivolous, and more interested in finding a man that in devoting themselves to their jobs.
· In 1980, the maquiladoras employed about 120,000 workers; by 1990, their numbers had risen to over 400,000; and at its high point in 1999, some 1.3 million held maquiladora jobs.
· The preferential recruitment of women that characterized the industry’s early years had by 1997 given way to alternative practices that were pulling men into the workforce. That year, when job growth peaked at 18 percent, women constituted a very slight majority (50.9 percent) of maquiladora workers:

1998—men 49.9 percent, women 50.1 percent
1999—men 50.9 percent, women 49.1 percent

· Since then, women’s proportionate representation in the border maquiladora labor force has shown a slow but steady decline, with women constituting less that 48 percent of the border maquiladora workforce in 2003.

Why?

· In Mexico border cities, where the recurrent economic crises plaguing the country have forced most of the working-age population to generate income through any available means and steady stream of migrants has augmented the economically active population, firms have generally enjoyed a plentiful supply of applicants for maquiladora employment.
· The composition of the maquiladora workforce has thus depended on recruitment practices that reflect employers’ demand for workers with specific characteristics and qualifications.
· Men’s increasing participation in skilled assembly jobs, in effect masculinizing jobs that were originally defined as women’s domain. The changing gender composition of the maquiladora industry, where men have increased their representation not merely as technicians, engineers, and administrators but also as production operatives, reflects this dynamic.

Nogales, Mexico

When I was searching for a picture of a maquiladoras town I came across Nogales, Mexico. The major problem in this town is the toxic drinking water that has been contaminated by the factories that flood the city with toxic waste. The town is using a 50-year-old water distribution system that is leaky and does not produce clean water anymore. With more and more people moving to the border region to acquire a job at one of the maquiladoras, “An estimated 40 percent of residents on the Mexican side lack water, sewers, or both,” (Davidson). As I was talking with Margo the other day, most money in Mexico is being spent on developing a new military to keep the maquiladoras from protesting. The time and money that could be spent on fixing the toxic waste dumping is being spent on developing a military. Along with Nogales, Ciudad Juarez and many other towns and cities along the border are being affected by this devastation.

http://www.aliciapatterson.org/APF1901/Davidson/Davidson04.jpg
This pictures illuminates the 80 or so maquiladoras in Nogales.




http://www.aliciapatterson.org/APF1901/Davidson/Davidson07.jpg
I found this picture to be interesting. This young woman is walking on the U.S. side of the border while smoke from a plastic burning factory trickles over the fence.

Davidson, Miriam. “Bridging Troubled Waters in Ambos Nogales.” 1999. http://www.aliciapatterson.org/APF1901/Davidson/Davidson.html

Women vs. Men

When maquiladoras were first being thought about, men were the targeted audience. They could do the heavy lifting and more labor intensive things. However, will the economy the way it was, men didn’t want cheap labor jobs, so it became the target for women. As Doreen Mattingly and Ellen Hansen suggest, “ Women are preferred both because they are less expensive to employ than men are and because their gender socialization and inexperience with labor unions presumably make them more docile and less easy to organize,” (Mattingly, 74). Young, single, childless women were originally the most wanted employees for the factories. They were naïve and wouldn’t think to organize against such torturous working conditions. In addition, they were easy to train and didn’t need any prior experience. Overtime, however, these young women would jump from job to job hoping to find something better that paid more leaving these factories without any employees. The trend started to shift towards older women with children who would be less likely to move from one job to the next. Factory owners, “now they related that married mothers made better workers because they were more mature, reliable, and less apt to jump from job to job than single women, who were immature, frivolous, and more interested in finding a man than in devoting themselves to their jobs,” (Mattingly, 80). Having to take care of a family, especially children, kept them rooted at one job with no intention to leave. In addition, they were more mature and could perform the daily tasks more eloquently.

Mattingly, Doreen, and Ellen Hansen. “Women and Change at the U.S.-Mexico Border.” The University of Arizona Press. Tuscon, Arizona. 2006.

Carmen Durán & Lourdes Luján

I have lived a sheltered life unaware of what the rest of the world is like. Through watching the “Maquilapolis: City of Factories” I was exposed to a whole different world I hardly understood. Several women suffered health problems because of the chemicals used in the factories. Carmen Durán contracted anemia and was forced to stop working. As a mother of three, working at the maquiladoras was her only form on income. The doctors basically told her if she continued to work in the factories, she would experience severe health problems that would eventually lead to death. Soon after she left, the factory was closed down and transferred to a new location in Indonesia. The relocation provided even cheaper labor costs for the parent company, at the same time putting thousands of workers out of business. Carmen, along with her co-workers faught the company and demanded their deserved severance pay that was striped and left the women with nothing. In the end, Carmen won $2,500. This sum of money does not even begin to cover everything she’s lost and her declining health.

Another heroic women’s story is Lourdes Luján. Lourdes lived in a neighborhood where the toxic chemical waste was poured down into the streets during a rain storm. This was how factories disposed of their left over waste chemicals. When Lourdes was growing up, she used to play in the waterhole near her home, now being filled with toxic chemicals children are contracting diseases and women are given birth to children with deformed bodies and mental illnesses. It is apparent that these communities receive little if any attention from the government and environmental and health services. Lourdes, along with others helped form the Chilpancingo Collective for Environmental Justice to bring this problem to the public. Their main goal was to get the toxic waste dump left behind from a battery recycling factory cleaned up and disposed of, no longer dispensing those hazardous chemicals into the community. Their protests and complaints proved noteworthy because the government soon listened to their complaints and took action in cleaning up the factory remnants.

Sweatshops

One interesting thing that I read, was that at Duke University students, “stages a sit-in in the university president’s office to ensure that clothing bearing Duke’s name is not made in sweatshops,” (Kirk, 391). It is a dramatic move for students of a university to take a stand and demand that their own clothing is not made by poor children. Through this protest, hundreds of other schools took the pledge to ensure that their logos are not being sewn in a sweatshop either. In response to those protests, the U.S. Department of Labor, “mounted a media campaign focusing on industry ‘trendsetters,’” (Kirk, 391). This caught President Bill Clinton’s attention that in return formed the Apparel Industry Partnership that combined the industry, labor and human rights organizations. The partnership created a code of conduct which limited the number of hours someone could work, strict regulations for healthy and safety measures and no forced child labor. One big different it made was that wages must meet the minimum wage.

http://www.tabberone.com/Trademarks/SweatShops/LittleSweatShop/sweatshop.gif

In 2002, the partnership, “won another victory…when twenty-six major apparel companies (including Gap and Gymboree) settled a lawsuit in favor of workers on the island of Saipan in the western pacific,” (Kirk, 392). The companies agreed to pay back several wages in a total amount of $20 million. This sparked sweatshop and maquiladoras workers all over the world. In Mexico, several women after being laid off established the Maquiladora Dignidad y Justicia (Dignity and Justice Maquiladora Company).


http://www.montgomeryschoolsmd.org/clipart/jpeg/IndiaLarge/sweatshop_mumbai.jpeg

Kirk, Gwyn, and Margo Okazawa-Rey. “Women’s Lives: Multicultural Perspectives.” The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. New York, NY. 2007.

My inspiration

For my final project I have chose to switch from my original topic to Maquiladoras. The film “Maquilapolis: City of Factories”, encouraged me to rediscover this issue and explain more about it. As Americans, we do not consider where our clothes are being made; we just purchase them at various malls and retailers. Especially here at WSU, being in a college town secludes you from the rest of the world, the outside world. I rarely watch the news and really explore the big issues that exist in the media. Last year in my women’s studies 200 class, we began to touch on the topic of sweatshops and maquiladoras. Although we did not watch a film, the text and articles that we read illustrated the horrific working conditions most women in these jobs suffer. Through my final project I hope to explore what a maquiladoras is and the effects it has on society, mostly the women who they employ.

Maquilapolis

This film truly opened my eyes to what a maquiladoras is and how it affects women on the Mexico/United States border. I had recently learned about maquiladoras last year in another women’s studies class, but only read various texts and articles. Actually seeing the different factories and communities and how they affect the lives of women was heart breaking. It was startling to see how the factories tempered with the health and lives of women and their children. One woman for instance experienced severe health problems from the content of lead in factories. She was forced to take a leave of absence from her job and quit soon after. If she would have continued working, the possibility of contracting leukemia would have gotten greater and greater.

The communities were greatly affected by these factories. When a rainy day would present itself, the factories would dispose of their water runoff channels and release them into the streets and streams of the communities. Years ago, children used to bathe in the streams, but now most communities fear the possibility of contracting something. It is no longer a safe and healthy environment.

The premise of the movie was to get the Environmental Board of Mexico to look at how the communities have been affected by this runoff and to make changes. There are various sites where bins of toxic waste are just sitting in fields and contaminating the surrounding areas. The communities are trying to clean up this mess and once again be able to live in a clean community. In addition, various families won settlements from one factory for health problems that have affected their work and cost them their jobs and salaries. This was a very significant movie in my opinion.

Many Tender Ties: Chapter 2

The North West Company took more advantage in forming unions between themselves and an Indian woman. The Indians believed that marriage to a fur trader would provide social and economic benefits. The “alliance created a reciprocal social bond which served to consolidate his economic relationship with a stranger,” (29). The Indians were given prestige and promise of security when their daughter married a fur trader. In contrast, fur traders were given a portion of the “bountiful hunt” from the leading hunter or chief.

One interesting observation was how closely and intimately the fur trader cared for his wife and family. In some respect, become a parent enforced the bond between husband and wife. Due to life in Indian country, there were not many other options for a wife and family for a fur trader. No white women were present leaving Indian women as the only option.

In the process of courtship, the fur trader was required to pay a bride price, as it was customary for Indian culture. This included: blankets, kettles, beads, hawk-bells, guns, etc. These customs were generally followed as respect and to value the Indian tradition. The amount of goods would depend on the rank, status, and overall attractiveness of the girl. When the Indian women were preparing for marriage she exchanged her traditional clothing for European styles. They wore a shirt, short gown, petticoat and leggings. However, Indians did not view marriage as a “life contract.” When fur traders would leave for long periods of time, it was not uncommon for women to seek affection elsewhere. If and when the fur trader did return, it was the woman’s option whether or not to go back to him. In addition, polygamy was somewhat common practice among the Indians. Some fur traders participated in this practice, but most remained in monogamous relationships.

Despite the bond formed between fur trader and Indian woman, the women were not allowed to travel overseas to the trader’s native land. The problems existed within the European culture not accepting Indian women into their culture.

Gender in Inuit Society

As in most societies, men portray the dominant role and are responsible for hunting. Women, perform their tasks based on the “language of work performance.” Their main responsibilities are cleaning and constructing clothing from animal skin and running the household.

The Western Eskimos live in a matrilocal society where the husband resides with the wives family. In some circumstances, “this may limit husbands’ ability to control their wives affairs,” (21). In my opinion, this could be considered a good thing since in most cases women must remain quiet. Most decision making is done by males with little or no input from women. In some cases, women will give their opinion in the presence of their own home when no other male authority is around besides her husband. As the author states, in some instances the husband will listen to his wives opinions and take the information into consideration. However, older women do not fear expressing their opinion and put forth their own vote. This can sometimes signify the overall female vote.

From the beginning, boys and girls are treated differently. Around the age of six, they are separated and start playing apart from the opposite sex. Soon after, boys start participating in men’s work while girls take on the women’s role. However, from birth, Inuit names are gender neutral, so perhaps there is some equality after all.

Don't Let The Sun Step Over You: Chapter 2

Kids shouldn’t be afraid to go to school; however, the government boarding school at Rice is closer to a jail than academics. I mean, there is a fence around the buildings so the children can’t escape. Besides being underfed and malnourished, girls learned how to sew while boys did outside chores including cleaning the outside toilet. It doesn’t sound like they were earning much of an education. If a child disobeyed, they were whipped. Most often, children tried to escape out of that treacherous place and head back home where they truly belonged. Indian police would patrol the land and look for children who weren’t in school and take them there if they found any. It’s not as if these children were orphans, they just weren’t in school. Is this a justified way to educate one’s child?

Many Tender Ties: Intro & Chap #1

The fur trade in Western Canada created a new way of life for Indian, mixed-blood, and white women. Despite the good generated from fur trading, the role of women was brought into question and their identities exposed. Many Indian women married fur traders to help form a bond between trade relations and various tribes. Through marriage, Indian women were offered a new way of life that was “easier physically and richer in materials,” (6).

The relationship between whites and Indians was characterized by equality and the ability to act civilized towards one another. The reliance on each other was significant enough to keep the fur traders from imposing or trying to control the Indian people. Instead, they all connected on a social level and made the effort to get to know one another’s culture. The two main trading companies’ were Hudson’s Bay and North West trading company. The North West Company saw the advantage of establishing a relationship and the possible benefits and knowledge that could be obtained.

The treatment of Indian women was surprising and downright appalling to the fur traders. Instead of performing the feminine tasks, most women participated in carrying and hauling various materials and collecting animals that hunters had killed. One observer, Alexander Mackenzie commented, “They are…subject to every kind of domestic drudgery, “(18). Mackenzie goes into detail about how most Indian women make the clothes, collect wood, weave nets, etc. The unfortunate consequences of daily life for Indian women forced them to practice infanticide. The ability of a woman in an Indian society, including strength and economic skills, contributed to how Indians made money and were able to live. European society portrays women as delicate and feminine, but these characteristics would not benefit the fur trading industry and contribute to the clan. This observation made European men realize that perhaps they women in their country are too pampered.

Indian Women as Cultural Mediators

As children, we were all influenced by the various Disney movies including Pocahontas, the story of a Native American girl who has a significant impact on the Jamestown colony. Pocahontas, Sacagawea and Done Marina are three Indian women who are characterized by myths in our history. As the article demonstrates, “The voices of Indian women are not heard in written documents or in the history books,” (55). The tales of these three women are cut and pasted illustrating only what society wants us to know about. We are programmed to believe that Pocahontas was a beautiful young woman who befriended an English settler and showed him the ways of her world. Despite just being a cartoon, those images are engraved on the youth of today’s world. The actual story of Pocahontas must be revealed and shared to show her true existence and identity. One the same page, Sacagawea was more than just a pretty face, but an insightful communicator and interpreter for explorers. “Her importance in history is to show us how she was valued by two cultures: translators and as a sign of peace,” (59). The importance of her life and how she helped various groups of people has influenced the course of history.

The "Squaw Drudge"

Native Americans had been living on American soil generations before English colonists invaded. Their way of life had never been witnessed before and was considered savage to the newly arriving colonists. The colonists made assumptions and judgments based on what they felt were normal. In the first paragraph of this article the author, “Depicted Indian women as little more than “drudges,” overworked and otherwise exploited by their Indian husbands,” (27). However, throughout his research, he realized that this misconception was produced through Euro-Americans. The article includes various accounts and “evidence” from numerous English colonizers and explorers. I place evidence in quotes because through further investigation, these misconceptions were made in comparison to the norm of English society. Placing women in the fields to work and harvest crops portrayed the men as lazy. The English sought to colonize the Native Americans forcing and spreading Christianity and their way of life. In addition, they felt that the luxurious land was not being used to its full potential.

This article demonstrated how English colonizers and explorers felt their ways of life were superior to all other forms of natural life. They viewed women’s work as taking care of the children and completing all house chores. One interesting assumption made was native agriculture was frowned upon because it was considered women’s work. The colonizers went as far as to use God in justifying their usage of the land, claiming, “To live by tilling is more human,” (37). Even in today’s society, Americans still feel that they are superior to other cultures. We had no right to force our civilized world on the Native American’s because they already had a perfectly adequate lifestyle that didn’t need to be meddled with.