Hi All:
Here's a book review cross-posted with permission. If you forward
it, please be sure to attribute it to H-Net.
Thanks,
Stefanie
----------Forwarded message----------------------
H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by [EMAIL PROTECTED] (March, 1998)
Devon G. Pena. _The Terror of the Machine: Technology, Work, Gender
and Ecology on the Mexican Border_. Austin: CMAS Books, 1997. xi +
460 pp. Tables, maps, notes, bibliography, and index. $45.00
(cloth), ISBN 0-292-76561-4; $19.95 (paper), ISBN 0-292-76562-2.
Reviewed for H-LatAm by William Schell, Jr. <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
Murray State University
Machine Breaking
As a boy in Lerdo Texas, Devon Pena had terrible nightmares about
the train which passed through the polluted industrial section of
the Three Points barrio of where he lived nearby a rattle-trap
cotton gin and a dangerously defective natural gas pumping station.
After a particularly bad dream, Pena's grandmother took him to the
tracks to confront the train.
"The train appeared, and my grandmother picked up a rock from the
ground. She put it in my hand and said: 'Defend yourself. Don't be
afraid of that train. Here, throw rocks at it and defend yourself!'
I did. She applauded my new found courage as I confronted my own
worst fears" (p. 334). But he did not banish his fears, rather he
indulged them. Pena says that he is not a technophobe but, decades
later, he is still throwing rocks at machines.
In _The Terror of the Machine_, Pena offers what he characterizes as
"a first-time look at the dialectics of domination and resistance in
the assembly lines of Mexico's maquiladora industry" (p. 20). But
in reality much of Pena's book is an old story oft told, original
only in its emphasis on gender issues. In describing the horrors of
these "postmodern dark, satanic mills" he focuses on "third-world
women" struggling against the dehumanization of the workplace. He
"traces workplace stories of struggle--the intrigue and stress,
mishaps and successes of workers' direct confrontations with
technology and management on the shop floor" as they are carried on
by "a subaltern organization created by workers inside the factory"
whose main form of resistance is the slow-down or _tortuguismo_
(working at a turtle's pace) and acts of "informal resistance and
sabotage" (p. 8).
Pena begins by introducing Juana Ortega, an indomitable, creative
and perpetually disgruntled worker, one of many such women whose
stories he uses to personalize resistance by female workers to the
ruthless, profit-mad maquila management. These vignettes are, to my
mind, the most interesting parts of the book which bring to life the
deep problems of racism, sexism, ethnocentrism, and cultural
misunderstanding that permeate that transnational maquila workplace.
He then launches into a brief (and unnecessary) description of the
origins of the modern factory system in Henry Ford's assembly line
and Frederick Taylor's time and motion studies (Fordism and
Taylorism). These, he notes, were leavened in the mid-century by
innovations of managerial sociology which put a smiley face on
transnational industrial capitalism and painted the bars of its
"iron cage" in soothing pastels. Pena explores physical
organization of the maquilas and workplace politics to discover
(surprise) that the factory setting generates a "subaltern life [on]
the shop floor [which] redefines the politics of production by
undermining the Taylorist and Fordist designs of the would-be
dominators" (p. 92). He "challenges the perspectives of both
conventional and Marxist scholars who tend to view the assembly-line
workers as thoroughly deskilled, haplessly exploited victims."
Rather Pena sees an "enormous reservoir of creativity and invention
in the daily ... activities of maquila workers" (p. 22) and
describes "the shop floor [as] a 'classroom' where workers first
'learn' the strategies of resistance and the nature of collective
organization" (p. 108). Pena attributes this subaltern resistance
primarily to the transnational and gendered reality of the maquilas,
but anyone who has worked in a factory anywhere will be quick to
point out that slow downs (tortuguismo), wildcat strikes, sabotage,
informal worker networks that subvert the official "chain of
command," and attempts by management to identify, penetrate and use
these informal networks, are universal.
Since Pena told a personal story, permit me. I worked for two years in a
paper mill and there, as in all factories, acts of sabotage to "get the man"
were commonplace. One tactic was to bust a roll of paper as it neared
completion by bumping it with a forklift. This gave great satisfaction to
the perps, but it worked an enormous hardship on "sparehands" like myself
who had to cut up the 10-foot long 5-foot high rolls by hand with our paper
knives for recycling. What Pena would call an act of resistance, I, and
the rest of us putting our backs and shoulders into cutting down the rolls,
called getting #**&ed. Similarly guerrilla job-actions by one shift, left
the next crew to deal with a load of $#*^. Pena's inability to see this
other side of workplace "resistance" reveals a certain myopic quality which
is also present in this book.
Pena's main contribution is his examination of the Centro de
Orientacion de la Mujer Obrera. COMO began as a grass roots
movement in Juarez and evolved during the 1970s and 80s to bring the
lessons learned in the maquila struggles to the wider community
through worker self-education and by establishing self-managed
cooperatives to promote workplace democracy and ecologically
sustainable development. COMO grew out of the collaboration of
Guillermina Valdes, a University of Michigan trained Marxist
sociologist then active in a middle class philanthropic
organization, Grupo Damas, and Maria Villegas, a nurse-practitioner
who had become radicalized by her work in the clinic at the Ciudad
Juarez RCA maquila in the late 1960s. Although the initial push for
COMO came from the Villegas' maquila experiences, she was soon
supplanted by the better-educated, upper-class Valdes who became
COMO's jefe. At first COMO pursued a radical agenda, educating
women on issues of gender and labor and training community
activists. COMO also moved beyond its strictly industrial origins
to assist Juarez Valley _ejidatarios_ to obtain credit from the
corrupt Banrural and to wrest justice from the PRI bureaucrats and
by organizing the poorest of the poor--the city dump workers--as
SOCOSEMA (Sociedad Cooperativa de Seleccionadores de Materiales).
But as the organization gained official status and international
recognition, it was coopted by the PRI, and Valdes took a full-time
position with Colegio de la Frontera Norte. This effectively split
the organization into an official male-dominated government-funded
COMO and an informal female-led COMO which, Pena argues, Valdes was
responsible for organizing in association with the St. John the
Baptist Community, a charismatic Catholic movement in Juarez.
In 1991, Valdes died tragically in a plane crash, and her daughter,
Luchi Villava, became director of the official COMO. COMO then took
a decidedly neutral position on NAFTA when the rest of the Mexican
left vocally opposed it as a green-light for even greater
exploitation of Mexico and Mexican workers by the maquila system and
for the acceleration of the pollution of the border. Because of
COMO's official (non)position on NAFTA, the final chapters of Pena's
book, which he was to have co-authored with his friend and mentor
Valdes, seem one long paradox. Pena lashes out at the awful
environmental degradation caused by the maquila program along the
border which he accurately calls a Mexican Bhopal and a 2000 mile
Love Canal. He predicts that NAFTA "will likely diminish the
prospects [for workplace democracy and sustainable development].
Mexico, like the maquila workers who struggle through COMO is at a
critical crossroads. It must decide if it wants to succumb to the
delusive seductions of free trade ... or it can emulate the
creativity and inventiveness of maquila workers and choose the
equally difficult path of cooperative development ... Guillermina
Valdes once said: 'It is simply a matter of appreciating the value
of your own culture enough to see that it provides plenty of
creative possibilities for a more just, more humane future'" (p.
173). Pena does not seem to notice the irony of this compared with
his earlier characterization of the formation of COMO's ideological
outlook as "reflective of Valdes affinity for the teachings of Erich
Fromm and Paolo Frieire" [that is, a product of her North American
university training] as much as it was a product of "Maria
Villegas's affinity for the working class perspective ..." (p. 139).
Most of Pena's research is over ten years old and the book does not
reflect the years since NAFTA's implementation nor mention the
ongoing anti-PRI/anti-NAFTA revolts. Although other reviewers found
Pena's work to be "action research at its best" and "an exciting
read ... powerful, moving, and convincing," I did not. I believe
students will find it dull and repetitious while specialist will
find little new or enlightening. Still, whenever reviewers disagree
so over the merits of a book, its best to judge for ones self.
Copyright (c) 1998 by H-Net, all rights reserved. This work
may be copied for non-profit educational use if proper credit
is given to the author and the list. For other permission,
please contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
************************************
Dr. Stefanie S. Rixecker
Division of Environmental Management & Design
Lincoln University, Canterbury
PO Box 56
Aotearoa New Zealand
E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Fax: 64-03-325-3841
************************************
