The Terror of the Machine: Technology, Work, Gender, and Ecology on the U.S.-Mexico Border

by Devon Gerardo Peña

Born of thirteen years of field research, this interdisciplinary work explores the complex intersections of technology, class, gender, and ecology in the transnational milieu of Mexico's maquiladoras, foreign-owned assembly plants located along the U.S. border. Devon Peña examines workplace and community struggles from the perspective of the women who work in the maquiladoras. He describes the workers' struggles for workplace democracy, social justice, and sustainable development. He also observes the circulation of struggle from the factory to the community, highlighting the efforts to establish worker-owned cooperatives in the border region during the 1970s and 1980s. Female maquila workers are typically portrayed as passive, apolitical, and easily exploited. This book, however, presents an opposing view, investigating the "subaltern life of the shop floor"—the workers' informal methods of resistance to hazardous conditions, sexual harassment, and managerial tyranny. Using survey research, oral history, discourse analysis, and site ethnography, the author develops a cogent critique of labor-process theory, a critique grounded on his extensive study of actual workplace politics in the maquiladoras. The Terror of the Machine is a trenchant analysis of the political, cultural, and environmental effects of maquila industrialization and an eloquent and persuasive call for alternatives in the direction of ecologically sustainable and culturally appropriate modes of development.

477 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1997

Reviews

[Empanadani · Rating 4 out of 5]

The voices of the workers abound in the book which I really like in addition to the author’s own voice. It’s about the maquiladoras on the Mexico-U.S. Border. Peña says that the terror stems from the repetitive labor of the assembly line process which was not invented by Henry Ford but Fordism used it for mass production. It also stems from Taylorism or scientific management by the industrial engineer Frederick Winslow Taylor and his ‘time and motion studies’ to basically make the workers’ output more efficient and productive by standardizing each job task. In Japanese-operated maquiladoras, there is also the hyper-management style of Toyotism/Fujitsuism. In the informal shop floor, there are a lot of gender politics occurring since most of the workers, at the start, were women, and the supervisors were mostly men. There was resistance by tortuguismo, or purposefully slowing down and decreasing your output by sabotaging the machine. Also, though it’s said that these jobs/capital deskill the workers (i.e. they aren’t crafts[wo]men anymore). They are actually more knowledgeable about fixing the solutions than the engineers are, so they are gaining skills. There were more formal channels of resistance whereby the women would gather in groups and stage protests until a social justice organization was formed called COMO. It talks a lot about the organizing and education that COMO does including with the pepenadores, the marginalized dump workers that lived in shanties until they formed a cooperative. Peña also questions ‘marginalization.’ Marginalized groups are not in the peripheries of the center, but outside. “Marginality as inventive force involves a quest for autonomy.” Something that I want to learn more about it is ethnoscience. “We must defend the fact, we must legitimize the idea, that scientific knowledge is not the exclusive province of experts, engineers, and trained scientists.” by Guillermina Valdés, a worker, is one of my favorite quotes in the book. Also, I am myself trying to understand what an alternative science that “is not the science of domination, but of liberation from toil.”Also, thinking about a different ecological sustainability as in recycling where it’s “a much older practice, especially in the third world, where situations of resource and job scarcity have long led to the intense utilization of wastes by both rural and urban poor…Recycling is not something one does to rationalize or diminish the harmful effects of excessive consumption. For the dump workers, recycling is productive consumption. It produces shelter, clothing, tools, and even food.”