Genders in Production: Making Workers in Mexico's Global Factories

by Leslie Salzinger

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.

Genres: Sociology, Ethnography, Academic, Nonfiction, Feminism, Gender Studies

230 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2003

Reviews

[Lara Torgesen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Leslie Salzinger’s book Genders in Production is a fascinating ethnography focused on the global factories of Mexico’s northern border. Known as “maquiladoras,” these production factories of many multinational corporations are well known for their cheap labor. In contrast to the “first-world” labor workforce, where the ideal worker is typically imagined as the “unencumbered white male,” the ideal worker in the “third-world” labor workforce is imagined as cheap, docile, dextrous, and female. The title of the book plays on two concepts: not only are the workers producing items for mass consumption, they are being produced themselves. Salzinger shows how gender is produced, or called into being, by the fantasies of significant powerful others. Only one of the factories actually fits the transnational stereotype. However, Salzinger shows how gender matters in all four of the factories she studied.

I’ll admit, the idea of transnational global production factories immediately brought to my mind a vision of rows of third-world women, quickly and quietly performing mindless assembly all day long. Perhaps this is because every depiction I’ve encountered of these factories shows these types of women at work. I’ve always focused my attention on the perceived exploitation of cheap laborers and the possible hazardous health conditions that surround them on a daily basis. But I never questioned the actual stereotype of the cheap, docile, dextrous third-world woman. Perhaps I shared the basic assumption of transnational capitalist structures that there is always a pool of ready-made female workers who fit the basic description. Salzinger finds that this type of worker is actually produced on the shop-floor and that there are many local variations of the iconic worker. Gender, she finds, is indeed a fundamental element of transnational production, but, since the self is always in a state of (re)construction, the type of gendered worker that emerges on the factory floor is dependent upon and relational to a number of different social processes. The process by which a person “becomes” the particular sort of worker by which he or she is explicitly addressed is called interpellation. I don’t think interpellation occurs exclusively on the shop floor of the maquiladoras. The description of the first factory very much reminded me of the perception that I had of Las Vegas and the general gaming industry when I was there recently for a conference. “Panoptimex” is a very visual name to me, and the idea of “seeing” and “being seen” is very much a theme here. The workers mostly fit the stereotype of the cheap, docile, dextrous female worker. Most of them are young and dress the part with miniskirts, high heels, and lots of make-up. They play the part of the “watched” worker while male managers play the part of the “watchers,” with decision-making power. Likewise, the female workers on the casino floors tottered around in revealing outfits, high heels, and lots of makeup, carrying trays of drinks to the high-rolling gamblers (mostly men) who obviously had the money and power. Advertisements all over the walls and littering the streets offered up women as entertainment in the singing/dancing shows as well as “private adult entertainment.” At the time, I wondered if Las Vegas just happened to have a very large pool of these types of female workers. After reading this book, though, I’m more inclined to believe that they are created rather than ready-made for the casino/entertainment industry, which I believe is a highly gendered industry much like transnational manufacturing. And, like the different factories, there are probably many different “types” of genders that are manufactured there. Within each, though, gender matters.

[Lindsay Allyson · Rating 3 out of 5]

"In this engrossing and original book..."

No. This book was not engrossing. There were definitely areas that were interesting. And there were some thought-provoking points made about the influence of management on the definition of gender norms within the factories and how they played against local communities' definitions of gender. But at no point was I engrossed with this book.

As most academic books are, this was hard to follow at times. And there were so many points where the author was repetitive. I felt like she was trying to be beat me around the head with "It's the femininity! See this? See how gender is why this happens? See! Femininity! It's all about productive femininity!" Just over and over and over and over. Like, we get it. Gender plays a huge role in who gets jobs and how those jobs are performed.

Definitely had some interesting arguments and I think her work is important, I just didn't think much of her writing style.

[Christine mary · Rating 2 out of 5]

Leslie Salzinger takes readers through the author’s experiences, perceptions, and analysis of working on the shop floors of four maquilas in the city of Juarez. Ever since the lifting of trade barriers to Mexico in the 1970s, transnational export-processing plants, or maquilas, have sprung up in cities just south of the U.S./Mexican border to take advantage of cheap labor. Women make up an overwhelming majority of this labor. After working in four distinct Juarez maquilas, Salzinger concludes that the femininity that managers seek out in employees is in fact not found, but created. Just as plant managers produce commodities, they also produce the “feminine productivity” (Salzinger 51) of their subjects. Hence, docility and dexterity are produced through production relations; women do not automatically enable these traits. Salzinger’s argument is well defended and it is clear that she conducted thorough research. However, the book lacks a compelling writing style, does not give the reader a sense of what the maquila industry is like as a whole, and fails to address the reasons why her findings matter.

Salzinger’s first point of entry into the maquila industry was Panoptimex. Panoptimex workers “make flesh the image of productive femininity upon whose existence an entire global political economy claims to have stacked its success” (51). Rows of high-heeled young women wearing bright make-up and elaborate hairdos lock their eyes downwards toward computer boards as their supervisors observe their every move. Panoptimex only hires women to work on the shop floor. The criteria for the right kind of line worker begins with “being female and young and continuing with being slim and having thin hands,…not being pregnant, using birth control, and being childless, or, if absolutely necessary, having credible childcare arrangements” (58). Unlike their female counterparts, male workers must have someone in the plant to vouch for them and hold a high school diploma. The only jobs open to them involve heavy lifting. So desirable are women workers that during a shortage of female workers in the 1980s, Panoptimex did not hire men, but rather began recruiting women from rural villages, offering to pay for their transportation to and from the plant every day. As one Panoptimex supervisor divulges, “In Panoptimex they do not look for workers, they look for models” (59). This sexualized dynamic results in sexual objectification of the workers. Managers inspect assembly as well as legs as they walk down the lines. Plant beauty contests reveal managerial favorites. A worker recounts her supervisor telling her that any woman who makes more than her husband is not desirable—legitimizing the low pay of barely forty dollars per week. A worker judges how well she does by how much attention she receives from her supervisor, during and after work hours. This competitive atmosphere produces gendered and efficient workers.

Particimex offers a different, and even more effective, process of genderization. Particimex moved to a rural outpost far from the border in the 1980s to access the women of Santa Maria who had few other working opportunities. Unlike Panoptimex, Particimex highlights, “independence, assertiveness, and the capacity to make decisions” (76). These qualities contrast with the sexualized labor control of Panoptimex, the accepted maquila ideal, and the local community’s outlook towards women. Workers in the plant, be they male, female, supervisor, or line worker, dress the same. Sharp distinctions are erased to increase the sense of personal involvement in production. Teamwork maximizes cooperation and creates efficient “lateral” (84) pressure from co-workers. This apparent lack of genderization in fact, says Salzinger, creates gender distinctions. The culture of Santa Maria outside the factory “deeply, consistently, and pleasurably” (89) accentuates gender. Assertiveness and leadership appeal to these women who are brought up to believe that men should be the breadwinners and women should tend the home and obey their husbands. Because of local culture, Particimex “promises a level of shared partnership that it cannot possibly deliver. Within the shop floor’s persistent trope of homemade feminine diffidence, Particimex’s women workers have come to understand their own implacable feminine distaste for power” (89). Even in this seemingly “genderless” setting, all of top management and ninety percent of supervisors are men, even though women make up seventy-five percent of all workers. Particimex naturalizes docile femininity:
Supervisors rarely suggest women workers for coordinator jobs, but
complain at length that no matter how much they encourage their women
workers to be coordinators, ‘They won’t make the leap.’ One supervisor
says that he thinks half the supervisors should be women, but
unfortunately, ‘la cultura mexicana…’” (97)
Such comments confirm inequalities among the sexes and attribute them to the “backward culture from which workers (but not managers) come” (97). Women are told that they could rise up and take charge, but that they probably do not want to sacrifice their femininity to do so. Unsurprisingly, most do not.

Andromex takes a sharp turn from global expectations by masculinizing its workers. As women workers became scarce in the 1980s, Andromex did not recruit rural women or move the plant. Instead, they hired men. Today, half the workforce is female but still all workers must wear the same smocks, cover hair, wear goggles, and remove jewelry and make-up so that everyone looks the same. In order to de-feminize maquila work, Andromex work “was restructured to be (relatively) autonomous and (relitavely) well-paid” (126). Competition to produce the most in one day is the game, and workers are encouraged to think creatively to come out on top. Both men and women workers work under this structure of what Mexico sees as masculine effectively.

Anarchomex, a harness assembly plant, is a failure. The managers instate an unwavering gendered framework that emasculates their male workforce. Men make up sixty percent of Anarchomex employees, but managers still regard maquila work as feminine by definition. Humiliated, “male workers spend their days contesting such aspirations. They claim the work as masculine territory…and address their female counterparts as potential sexual partners rather than co-workers” (129). Gender operates at Anarchomex as an obstacle, rather than an asset, to production. According to managers, because of finger dexterity, superior morals, the willingness to perform menial and repetitive tasks, the readiness to work for less, better attendance, and manageability, women are much more desirable as maquila workers than men. For these reasons, explain the managers, job advertisements always ask for women workers to come in for an interview. With a greater demand for women workers than supply in Juarez, however, men answer those advertisements and are hired begrudgingly. Because Anarchomex does not provide jobs that allow men to assert authority, win a wage that can support a family, be creative, or hope for advancement, male workers feel emasculated. The men’s attempts to re-define maquila work as masculine is a "Never-ending struggle, and in waging it, they employ a variety of tactics: feigning ignorance that others define harness assembly as feminine; portraying female sexuality as inherently disruptive on the shop floor…Allusions to the managerial preference for women is met with as incredulous, 'They say they prefer women?' even though each one of them has, in fact, responded to an ad or sign the specifically requested women workers. (143) Consequently, the shop floor emerges not as an arena of production, but of machismo and sexual play. At Anarchomex, created gendered meanings disrupt production.

Salzinger conducts great research. She gets as “inside” the field as an outsider possibly can. She goes through interview processes, works the lines, makes friends with co-workers, interviews managers and workers, lives in Juarez, and gets a variety of experiences at four different plants. Her commitment to the reality of the Juarez maquila scene provides her book with unique insights and well-defended arguments. That said, I expected much more from Genders in Production.

Salzinger spends a great amount of space ambiguously repeating her points over and over again with different words. Not only is this tedious for the reader, but also it wastes space she could have utilized to delve deeper into her findings. Firstly, while each of the four plants offers a distinct view of worker genderization and how it affects production, Salzinger does not offer the reader a sense of what the average maquila along the border is like. She calls Andromex and Anarchomex “anomalies” (161), leaving only two maquilas that might reflect the norm. No one would expect her to extensively research all the maquilas along the border, but she could have borrowed research from others or even just provided some statistical data so that readers could formulate some sort of idea as to what the average trends are. Without a clue as to where these four plants stand in the overall maquila industry, readers are left wondering why the study of these few particular plants is important.

Secondly, Salzinger fails to convince the reader that her findings are significant. With the extra space she could create by adjusting her verbose writing style, she could have elaborated upon her final statement. It reads, “As we can get up close to these processes and delineate the logics of self and meaning through which they emerge, we can begin to question their inevitability and imagine other worlds” (171). From this statement the reader can clearly assess that Salzinger hopes to see changes in the maquila industry, but throughout the book, she does not delve into why this global system of creating gendered workers, as a whole, is undesirable. One path she might have explored is the recent violence against female maquila workers in Juarez. Since 1993, nearly five hundred women, mostly maquila workers, have been murdered or disappeared in the state of Chihuahua. One third of the victims suffered sexual assault before being murdered. Some blame sexual objectification in the workplace as well as the lowering of women’s worth as human beings to the level of their production value for this growing trend of violence against women. Amnesty International writes,
"Young women from poor backgrounds are abducted, held captive and sexually assaulted in a most ferocious manner before being murdered…All the evidence seems to indicate that these young women are chosen by their killers because they are women who have no power within Chihuahuan society" (Amnesty International).

The UN Commission on Human Rights adds that the “obvious indifference shown by some state officials in regard to these cases leave the impression that many of the crimes were deliberately never investigated for the sole reason that the victims were ‘only’ young girls with no particular social status and who therefore were regarded as expendable” (“Mexico: Intolerable Killings”). Not only does the mass exploitation of cheap and “unskilled” labor leave workers with an insufficient paycheck and a home in the slums, but it also generates a widespread association of femininity with cheapness. One can turn to Karl Marx, who, according to Ethnography at the Border, attests that there is a “visceral connection linking the manufacture of commodities with the conceptualization of people as embodiments of a specific value that can be transferred to inanimate objects that no longer belong to them” (Vila 24). In capitalism, the value of goods relies upon the capacity to imagine people, the producers, in terms of value. “To view the Mexican woman as naturally adept with electronic assembly and therefore cheap because she has no skills is at once a construction of her labor as cheap…The trick is to take advantage of cheap labor power without jeopardizing the value of the product” (33). This means “guaranteeing that evidence of Mexican women is not found in the things that they make. The value of their labor power resides both in its cheapness and in its disappearance” (33). She casts a shadow of nonvalue. Perhaps the violence against women and the lack of will among police and politicians to capture the culprits is legitimized in Chihuahua state because society runs on the devaluation of replaceable, “unskilled” women workers, and the loss of marginalized women carries little cost. Women are often hired at maquilas because they are seen to have no drive for creative ingenuity, no long-term career goals, no demands, and no other option. Salzinger quickly mentions how female worker agency is irrelevant to the success of the labor process and that in maquilas a worker is converted from “subject into object” (Salzinger 17), but she does not hint as to what consequences in society there might be from this objectification of supposedly disposable women. While the impact of gendering maquila work on society does not need to match my analysis or be the focus of her book, Salzinger should provide some space to convince readers that her findings matter.

Gender plays an enormous role in the transnational export-processing plant industry, but not because gender is a fixed entity or because femininity is inherently productive in the maquila. Through their hiring policies and labor control procedures, managers create gendered subjects of their employees. Genders in Production outlines this gender creation and the consequences for production in four distinct maquilas. While her years of dedicated research in the communities and maquilas of Juarez bring her to an interesting and well-defended argument, I expected the book to go deeper.

[Meg · Rating 3 out of 5]

I thought Salzinger was a little too self-conscious in this ethnography, which perhaps is just representative of the state of anthropology at the time: lots of positioning of the author within larger relations of power, lots of discussion of the author's particular vantage point, the lack of complete objectivity, etc. But despite this, she provides an excellent analysis of the way shop-floor arrangements in several maquiladoras help forge the gendered subjectivities of both male and female workers.

[a · Rating 5 out of 5]

fascinating ethnography about the uses of gender to organize production in four Mexian maquilas. contests the transnational image of the "docile third world woman worker." shows how gendered subjectivities are produced through workshop organization.

[Sarah · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting ethnography of women in factories in Juarez, although it was overstated at points.

[Gabriel · Rating 5 out of 5]

excellent account on genderised global factories!