Author: Carolyn Tuttle
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 029273915X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 254
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Book Description
Prior to the millennium, economists and policy makers argued that free trade between the United States and Mexico would benefit both Americans and Mexicans. They believed that NAFTA would be a “win-win” proposition that would offer U.S. companies new markets for their products and Mexicans the hope of living in a more developed country with the modern conveniences of wealthier nations. Blending rigorous economic and statistical analysis with concern for the people affected, Mexican Women in American Factories offers the first assessment of whether NAFTA has fulfilled these expectations by examining its socioeconomic impact on workers in a Mexican border town. Carolyn Tuttle led a group that interviewed 620 women maquila workers in Nogales, Sonora, Mexico. The responses from this representative sample refute many of the hopeful predictions made by scholars before NAFTA and reveal instead that little has improved for maquila workers. The women’s stories make it plain that free trade has created more low-paying jobs in sweatshops where workers are exploited. Families of maquila workers live in one- or two-room houses with no running water, no drainage, and no heat. The multinational companies who operate the maquilas consistently break Mexican labor laws by requiring women to work more than nine hours a day, six days a week, without medical benefits, while the minimum wage they pay workers is insufficient to feed their families. These findings will make a crucial contribution to debates over free trade, CAFTA-DR, and the impact of globalization.
Author: Susie S. Porter
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
ISBN: 9780816522682
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 288
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Book Description
The years from the Porfiriato to the post-Revolutionary regimes were a time of rising industrialism in Mexico that dramatically affected the lives of workers. Much of what we know about their experience is based on the histories of male workers; now Susie Porter takes a new look at industrialization in Mexico that focuses on women wage earners across the work force, from factory workers to street vendors. Working Women in Mexico City offers a new look at this transitional era to reveal that industrialization, in some ways more than revolution, brought about changes in the daily lives of Mexican women. Industrialization brought women into new jobs, prompting new public discussion of the moral implications of their work. Drawing on a wealth of material, from petitions of working women to government factory inspection reports, Porter shows how a shifting cultural understanding of working women informed labor relations, social legislation, government institutions, and ultimately the construction of female citizenship. At the beginning of this period, women worked primarily in the female-dominated cigarette and clothing factories, which were thought of as conducive to protecting feminine morality, but by 1930 they worked in a wide variety of industries. Yet material conditions transformed more rapidly than cultural understandings of working women, and although the nation's political climate changed, much about women's experiences as industrial workers and street vendors remained the same. As Porter shows, by the close of this period women's responsibilities and rights of citizenshipÑsuch as the right to work, organize, and participate in public debateÑwere contingent upon class-informed notions of female sexual morality and domesticity. Although much scholarship has treated Mexican women's history, little has focused on this critical phase of industrialization and even less on the circumstances of the tortilleras or market women. By tracing the ways in which material conditions and public discourse about morality affected working women, Porter's work sheds new light on their lives and poses important questions for understanding social stratification in Mexican history.
Author: Leslie Salzinger
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520929302
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 236
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Book Description
In this engrossing and original book, Leslie Salzinger takes us with her into the gendered world of Mexico's global factories. Her careful ethnographic work, personal voice, and sophisticated analysis capture the feel of life inside the maquiladoras and make a compelling case that transnational production is a gendered process. The research grounds contemporary feminist theory in an examination of daily practices and provides an important new perspective on globalization.
Author: B. Christine Arce
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 143846357X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 352
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Book Description
2016 Victoria Urbano Critical Monograph Book Prize, presented by the International Association of Hispanic Feminine Literature and Culture Winner of the 2018 Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize presented by the Modern Language Association Honorable Mention, 2018 Elli Kongas-Maranda Professional Award presented by the Women's Studies Section of the American Folklore Society Analyzes cultural materials that grapple with gender and blackness to revise traditional interpretations of Mexicanness. México’s Nobodies examines two key figures in Mexican history that have remained anonymous despite their proliferation in the arts: the soldadera and the figure of the mulata. B. Christine Arce unravels the stunning paradox evident in the simultaneous erasure (in official circles) and ongoing fascination (in the popular imagination) with the nameless people who both define and fall outside of traditional norms of national identity. The book traces the legacy of these extraordinary figures in popular histories and legends, the Inquisition, ballads such as “La Adelita” and “La Cucaracha,” iconic performers like Toña la Negra, and musical genres such as the son jarocho and danzón. This study is the first of its kind to draw attention to art’s crucial role in bearing witness to the rich heritage of blacks and women in contemporary México.
Author: Josiah McConnell Heyman
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
ISBN: 9780816512256
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 268
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Book Description
Traces the development over the past hundred years of the urban working class in northern Sonora. Drawing on an extensive collection of life histories, Heyman describes what has happened to families over several generations as people left the countryside to work for American-owned companies in northern Sonora or to cross the border to find other employment.
Author: Michael Innis-Jiménez
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 0814760155
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 250
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Book Description
Since the early twentieth century, thousands of Mexican Americans have lived, worked, and formed communities in Chicago’s steel mill neighborhoods. Drawing on individual stories and oral histories, Michael Innis-Jiménez tells the story of a vibrant, active community that continues to play a central role in American politics and society. Examining how the fortunes of Mexicans in South Chicago were linked to the environment they helped to build, Steel Barrio offers new insights into how and why Mexican Americans created community. This book investigates the years between the World Wars, the period that witnessed the first, massive influx of Mexicans into Chicago. South Chicago Mexicans lived in a neighborhood whose literal and figurative boundaries were defined by steel mills, which dominated economic life for Mexican immigrants. Yet while the mills provided jobs for Mexican men, they were neither the center of community life nor the source of collective identity. Steel Barrio argues that the Mexican immigrant and Mexican American men and women who came to South Chicago created physical and imagined community not only to defend against the ever-present social, political, and economic harassment and discrimination, but to grow in a foreign, polluted environment. Steel Barrio reconstructs the everyday strategies the working-class Mexican American community adopted to survive in areas from labor to sports to activism. This book links a particular community in South Chicago to broader issues in twentieth-century U.S. history, including race and labor, urban immigration, and the segregation of cities.
Author: Vicki Ruíz
Publisher: OUP USA
ISBN: 0195374770
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 305
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Book Description
An anniversary edition of the first full study of Mexican American women in the twentieth century, with new preface
Author: Daniel James
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822319962
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 340
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Book Description
In Latin American countries, the modern factory originally was considered a hostile and threatening environment for women and family values. Nine essays dealing with Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, and Guatemala describe the contradictory experiences of women whose work defied gender prescriptions but was deemed necessary by working-class families in a world of need and scarcity. 19 photos.
Author: Vicki Ruíz
Publisher: UNM Press
ISBN: 9780826309884
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 220
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Book Description
This dramatic and turbulent history of UCAPAWA is a major contribution to the new labor history in its carefully documented account of minority women controlling their union and regulating their working lives.
Author: Norma Iglesias Prieto
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 0292788681
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 200
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Book Description
Published originally as La flor mas bella de la maquiladora, this beautifully written book is based on interviews the author conducted with more than fifty Mexican women who work in the assembly plants along the U.S.-Mexico border. A descriptive analytic study conducted in the late 1970s, the book uses compelling testimonials to detail the struggles these women face. The experiences of women in maquiladoras are attracting increasing attention from scholars, especially in the context of ongoing Mexican migration to the country's northern frontier and in light of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). This book is among the earliest accounts of the physical and psychological toll exacted from the women who labor in these plants. Iglesias Prieto captures the idioms of these working women so that they emerge as dynamic individuals, young and articulate personalities, inexorably engaged in the daily struggle to change the fundamental conditions of their exploitation.
