Women on the Line, by Christopher Hammond -- Endeavors, Fall 1999

Women on the Line
by Christopher Hammond

Women and Work in Mexico's Maquiladoras. By Altha J. Cravey. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 176 pages, $52 (hardcover), $19.95 (paper).

The answers weren't ones she expected.

Workers that Altha Cravey interviewed in the Mexican border town of Nogales earn an average wage of $1.38 an hour. News stories about the booming manufacturing industry often are tempered by photos of surrounding squatter communities.

"No matter how bad I felt their situation was, most of those I interviewed were really optimistic about their future," Cravey says.

Mexico's 3,000 maquiladoras, American-owned assembly plants found mostly
in border towns, produce everything from aspirin tablets and television sets to artificial-heart valves. (The name comes from the portion of grain, or "maquila," Mexican millers keep as a processing fee.) Since the passage of NAFTA, maquiladoras have undergone greater scrutiny about toxic hazards and sexual harassment.

But more than work stories, Cravey wanted to hear about life at home. How many families lived in a household, who cared for the kids, and how did Mexico's socialized health care stack up?

Here's the hitch. Cravey isn't an anthropologist or a sociologist. The assistant professor teaches geography. So why would a geographer be asking about the family routine?

"I can see things that a sociologist or an anthropologist perhaps can't see," she says. "I have some insights about how maquiladoras happened without more of a reaction, without more strikes or riots, because of a shift in geography. A lot of the social consequences—like fractured families and a Mexican state that's subservient to capital—are invisible because they're removed to the border. To explain the social reality of the border, we have to connect cause and effect in a variety of local, national, and global processes. They're not something we walk by every day."

Cravey's interest in labor and gender began in college, when she was told she couldn't apply for an electrician's apprenticeship. A state employment agency official had told her she could take the test to be either a beautician or an upholsterer.

"He said, for the rest I had to be a man," Cravey says. The state changed its policy before she took her case to court. She became the first female union electrician in the Midwest.

"In hindsight, that's exactly why I picked the topic of maquiladoras, because I got interested in how gender is connected to work," she says.

Cravey's book describes how the factories have reshaped workers' daily lives. Women now make up about 70 percent of the work force. In some households, the principal breadwinners are children, 16- and 17-year-olds. Another big change is that some employers now provide services that were once government's domain—housing and child care.

Cravey says that Mexican labor laws farther south, especially in central Mexico, are much stronger than those in the north. For instance, oil worker jobs in the Gulf of Mexico's Ciudad Madero are renowned for high wages and full retirement pensions.

"Maquiladoras were created in the north because this kind of factory system would have trouble in a place like Mexico City, where people are expected to be pro-labor," she says.

Cravey lived in Nogales for a year to conduct maquiladora worker interviews. The persistence paid off when she uncovered a novel form of housing in Mexico—company-run dormitories. She says the dormitories reflect employers' increasing power and control over their employees.

"The hardest thing about the book was the information about the dormitories," she says. "I knew they were there, but I couldn't get people to talk about them."

Altha Cravey is chair of the group Geographic Perspectives on Women for the Association of American Geographers. One of her most recent papers is "The Changing South: Latino Labor and Poultry Production in Rural North Carolina."