The Gender of Sovereignty

A recent documentary film by Vicki Funari and Sergio De La Torre, Maquilapolis: City of Factories (2006), both exemplifies and depicts these new forms of transnational political activism. A unique collaboration between Latino filmmakers in the U.S. and women working in Mexico’s maquiladoras, Maquilapolis depicts a group of women struggling for environmental justice in Tijuana, a major border site for electronics manufacturing in which over 80% of the factory workers are women migrants from southern Mexico. Multivocal and multiperspectival, the film’s selection and organization of images, narrative, and sound are the result of collaborative decisions among the women. “Maquilapolis” is composed of video segments that the women themselves have filmed and narrated, in which each presents her own particular story within the history of the border’s development as an export processing zone—arrivals at the border from rural Mexico, discoveries of toxic conditions in their workplace and in their colonias, decisions to take action and become promotoras, activists who educate other women in the community—these particular stories are enfolded within the growth of the maquiladora industry. The woman named Carmen begins: “My name is Carmen Durán… I have worked in nine assembly plants. I was 13 years old when I arrived in Tijuana.” Another woman, Lourdes, tells the viewer she is “turning on the camera” to show us the toxic river running through her neighborhood, placing her children and neighbors at risk for leukemia, cancer, and anencephaly; speaking directly into the camera, she points to the lesions on her own body. Carmen offers a tour through her daily routine: feeding and bathing her children in their house without running water, electricity or sewage, which she built of discarded garage doors bought in the U.S.; going to work; explaining that because she is exposed to lead contamination in the factory, she cannot wash her color-coded work smock with her children’s clothes. At a neighborhood meeting of women advocates, she describes her transition from being unknowingly exposed to taking action, “You’re a student, and then you become a teacher.” “We see things differently,” says another promotora.

This transformation of perspective occurs in both aesthetic form and thematic content; the women record the shift from being objects viewed as commodified yet disposable labor, to becoming subjects who depict themselves as analysts of these conditions and as activists working against them. For example, in one segment, Carmen films Lourdes as Lourdes films the U.S. side of the border through a space in the corrugated metal wall that divides the two countries: “I’m looking at the other side of the border,” her voice-over explains, “This is something new for me.” “I’ve lived here 18 years and I’ve never been to it,” adds Carmen. The segments, together, visually document various parts of the process through which the women—exposed to contamination in the workplace, raising their children amidst toxic pollution and waste—organize to make accountable the industries responsible for the environmental conditions causing disease and death in their communities. Contrary to state and industry discourses that represent the women workers as docile or passive, this environmental campaign is one of the many examples in which girls and women have engaged in struggles to transform the conditions in which they live and work.¹ Involved in what Melissa Wright has termed “a project of reversing the discourse of female disposability,” they counter the regimes that subject their communities to death, and they refuse to be treated as less than human.² In the last 35 years since the maquiladoras were established, women’s struggles have ranged from work stoppages on the shop floors, to organized protests against factory shutdowns and withheld severance pay, to organizing against routine sexual abuse and harassment—all indices of the multiple modes and strategies employed by girls and women at the border to counter their treatment as dispensable life.³

In this sense, the promotoras in Maquilapolis suggest that specifically gendered violence to life on the U.S.-Mexican border gives rise to political practices that cannot be remedied through rights-based citizenship, and whose strategies necessarily reach beyond traditional state channels.⁴ The activists are mostly women who migrated from rural Mexico at a young age, with sole responsibility for raising children, without extended family support.⁵ While traditional labor unions would organize around the workplace issue of wages, of greater concern for these women are the health and safety of their children with the high incidences of birth defects in polluted communities, and the vulnerability of girls and women to sexual abuse and violence.⁶ The film ends with the success of a decade-long campaign, in which their Chilpancingo Collective collaborated with the San Diego Environmental Health Coalition to publicly pressure the Mexican Procuraduria Federal de Proteccion Al Ambiente (PROFEPA), and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. International media coverage created enough pressure to obligate both to a joint clean up of the lead waste in Chilpancingo. Ultimately, “Maquilapolis” depicts an alternative practice of “sovereignty” to counter state-sanctioned death in their border community. Yet Lourdes comments that with of the hundreds of polluting factories that remain, the future is uncertain.

1. The public discourses—from industry recruitment, to newspapers, to popular stereotypes—construct border femininity as docile, abject, and sexually improper. Rosa Linda Fregoso argues that the targeting of the Mexicana as an endangered figure in need of discipline—and not unregulated capitalist industries themselves—is necessary to nation-state discourses on both sides of the border. Fregoso, MeXicana Encounters: The Making of Social Identities on the Borderlands. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. [↩]
2. Melissa W. Wright, “A Manifesto Against Feminicide,” Antipode 33:3 (July 2001): 550-66, 564. [↩]
3. Organizing strategies that emerge from specifically gendered discrimination imply neither the dispersal of struggle nor the passivity of exploited workers. They recognize and bring into evidence a “new” subject impacted by forms of domination that are political, economic, regional and cultural, and gendered within both national and international frameworks. For example, in one instance of cross-border solidarity, maquiladora workers protested a factory’s regular requirement of “beauty pageants” in which the women workers were required to parade scantily clad in front of factory managers. When the company responded by closing the factory and refusing the women severance pay, the women were joined by another workers’ organization that assisted them in targeting the U.S. parent company that owned the maquiladora, who they pressured to ultimately award the severance checks. With the feminization of work and preferences for women laborers in assembly and manufacture, different strategies for organizing have emerged. These mixed strategies go beyond traditional organizing strategies that focus exclusively on wages or on state remediation. See Norma Iglesias Prieto, Beautiful Flowers of the Maquiladoras: Life Histories of Women Workers in Tijuana. Trans., Michael Stone and Gabrielle Winkler. Austin: University of Texas, 1997; Lisa Lowe, “Work, Immigration, Gender: New Subjects of Cultural Politics,” The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital. L. Lowe and D. Lloyd, Eds. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997; and Grace Kyungwon Hong, The Rupture of American Capital: Women of Color Feminism and the Culture of Immigrant Labor. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2006. [↩]

4. The women activists are “non-state actors” operating as a transnational advocacy network to publicize human rights violations. The norms-socialization literature on international human rights suggests that such advocacy groups aim to establish human rights norms so that they may be internalized by national states who will implement change; such norms define a category of states as “liberal democratic states,” which respond quickly to such norms, and “authoritarian” or “norm-violating states” (e.g., China, Cuba) which do not. Moral consciousness-raising by the international human rights community often involves “shaming” of the norm-violating states as “pariah states who do not belong to the community of civilized nations.” See Thomas Risse, Stephen C. Ropp, and Kathryn Sikkink, Eds., The Power of Human Rights: International Norms and Domestic Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999, 15.

   To the contrary, however, the cross-border environmental campaigns I discuss here are not aimed at creating international norms of individual rights to create hierarchical classifications which discipline “norm-violating” states, but rather they consider all states as “violating” life at the border, and in effect, they target the governmentality—the larger set of social disciplines that includes state institutions, corporate industry, media discourses, border policing, and social norms themselves—that results in the treatment of the border as a zone of disposable life.

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5. Norma Iglesias Prieto, Beautiful Flowers of the Maquiladoras. [↩]
6. More than a decade of feminicides in Ciudad Juarez are the most publicized example of this gendered violence. See especially, Rosa Linda Fregoso, MeXicana; Alicia Schmidt-Camacho, “Ciudadana X,” The New Centennial Review 5:1 (Spring 2005): 255-292; Melissa W. Wright, “The Dialectics of Still Life: Murder, Women and the Maquiladoras,” Public Culture 11: 3 (1999): 452-74; Lourdes Portillo’s “Señorita Extraviada” (2001). [↩]