Fires on the Border This page intentionally left blank Fires on the Border The Passionate Politics of Labor Organizing on the Mexican Frontera Rosemary Hennessy University of Minnesota Press (cid:46)(cid:74)(cid:79)(cid:79)(cid:70)(cid:66)(cid:81)(cid:80)(cid:77)(cid:74)(cid:84)(cid:1)(cid:116)(cid:1)(cid:45)(cid:80)(cid:79)(cid:69)(cid:80)(cid:79) The University of Minnesota Press gratefully acknowledges financial assistance provided for the publication of this book from the Office of the Dean for Humanities at Rice University. An earlier version of chapter 4 was previously published as “Open Secrets: Class and the Culture of Organizing on Mexico’s Northern Border,” in Researching Gender, ed. Christina Hughes (London: Sage, 2013). An earlier version of chapter 6 was previously published as “The Value of a Second Skin,” in Intersections in Feminist and Queer Theory: Sexualities, Cultures, and Identities, ed. Diane Richardson, Janice McLaughlin, and Mark Casey, 116–35 (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave, 2005). An earlier version of chapter 6 was previously published as “Bio-deregulation: Bodies, Jeans, and Justice,” in Kapitalismus Reloaded: Kontroversen zu Empire und Hegemonie, ed. Christina Kaindl, Christoph Lieber, Oliver Nachtwey, Rainer Rilling, and Tobias ten Brink, 278–304 (Hamburg: VSA-Verlag, 2007). An earlier version of chapter 7 was previously published as “Gender Adjustments in Forgotten Places: The North–South Encuentros in Mexico,” in “Invisible Battlegrounds: Feminist Resistance in the Global Age of War and Imperialism,” ed. Susan Comfort, special issue, Works and Days 29, nos. 1–2 (Spring/Fall 2011): 181–202. Portions of chapter 8 were published as “Notes toward the Political Valence of Affect,” in Gesellschaftskritik nach Marx. Philoso- phie, Ö konomie, politische Praxis, ed. Rahel Jaeggi and Daniel Loick (Berlin: Akade mie, 2013), and as “Bread and Roses in the Common,” in (cid:45)(cid:80)(cid:87)(cid:70)(cid:27)(cid:1)(cid:34)(cid:1)(cid:50)(cid:86)(cid:70)(cid:84)(cid:85)(cid:74)(cid:80)(cid:79)(cid:1)(cid:71)(cid:80)(cid:83)(cid:1)(cid:39)(cid:70)(cid:78)(cid:74)(cid:79)(cid:74)(cid:84)(cid:78)(cid:1)(cid:74)(cid:79)(cid:1)(cid:85)(cid:73)(cid:70)(cid:1) T wenty-first Century, ed. Ann Ferguson and Anna G. Jónasdóttir (New York: Routledge, 2013); copyright 2013 and reproduced by permission of Taylor and Francis Group, LLC, a division of Informa plc. Copyright 2013 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Published by the University of Minnesota Press 111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290 Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520 http://www.upress.umn.edu Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hennessy, Rosemary. Fires on the border : the passionate politics of labor organizing on the Mexican frontera / Rosemary Hennessy. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-0-8166-4758-3 (hc) — ISBN 978-0-8166-7962-1 (pb) 1. Offshore assembly industry—Employees—Labor unions—Mexican–American Border Region. 2. Labor unions—Organizing—Mexican–American Border Region. 3. Women offshore assembly industry workers—Mexican–American Border Region. I. Title. HD6534.O33H46 2013 331.89'1209721—dc23 2013030706 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer. 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 For Martha, fogata de amor y guía This page intentionally left blank When we do and think and feel certain things privately and in secret, even when thousands of people are doing, thinking, whispering these things privately and in secret, there is still no general, collective understanding from which to move. Each takes her or his own risks in isolation. We may think of ourselves as individual rebels, and individual rebels can easily be shot down. The relationship among so many feelings remains unclear. But these thoughts and feelings, suppressed and stored-up and whispered, have an incendiary component. You cannot tell where or how they will connect, spreading underground from rootlet to rootlet till every grass blade is afire from every other. Adrienne Rich, What Is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics This page intentionally left blank Introduction Labor is the living, form-giving fire: it is the transitoriness of things, their temporality, as their formation by living time. Karl Marx, Grundrisse Dignity is that native land without nationality, that rainbow that is also a bridge, that murmur of the heart that cares not about the blood it lives in, that irreverent rebellion that mocks borders, customs houses, and wars. Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (EZLN), Primera Declaración de La Realidad Maquiladoras are Mexican factories where workers assemble products for export. Established in the mid-1960s as the Border Industrializa- tion Program, the maquiladoras—or maquilas, as they are called— have assured companies a huge return on investment, but they have also offered Mexican workers a poisoned promise: poverty wages in exchange for a life cut short. The history of the maquiladoras has been punctuated by workers’ organized resistance to their working and living conditions. In the factory towns of Mexico’s northern border (or frontera), organizing propels the accomplishment of short-term goals and animates longer-term aspirations.¹ Short-term goals often begin with rights to collective bargaining or with health and safety in the workplace. But in the last decade of the twentieth century, workers extended their short-term goals to community concerns for clean land and water, health care, and education. Longer-term goals have been pitched at devising a coordinated social movement and sustainable measures to claim and maintain common resources. Labor and community organizing in this context entail intense «  xi  » «  xii  » Introduction immersion in political education, learning to strategize actions inside and outside the factory, to practice new forms of communication and leadership, and to maintain ties with allies locally and beyond. At times this political education enables workers to make connections between their short-term demands and the longer-range goals of a social movement. Embedded in these activities yet often formally unacknowledged is a dimension of organizing that not only binds people to a common cause and to one another but also at times an- tagonizes and pulls them apart. Over the years of my affiliation as an ally to workers involved in organizing campaigns, I was struck by features of their struggles that are not so easy to name. They have to do with the ways organizing is propelled by attachments of affection and antagonism, belief, be- trayal, identification, and frustration. Workers’ stories of life on the line, of their confrontations with bosses and corrupt officials, of the price they paid for their rebellion at work and at home, and of their motivation to carry their struggle beyond the abuses of the factory were invariably punctuated by intense feelings. Whether expressed in a negative or positive register, they were a vital part of what every- one involved invariably brought into the mix of things. I call this dimension of organizing its “affect-culture.” It is not unique to the border, of course, though the forms it takes here are shaped by the particularities of local communities and institutions. The hyphen in “affect-culture” marks an awkwardness. I use it pur- posely as the hinge of a neologism that like a hyphenated patronymic, defies conventional prescriptions for a proper name. In this regard, it bears witness in a small way to the unsettling affects I write about. Until recently, critical attention to affect was marginalized in aca- demic theory and ignored in the education of organizing, yet feelings are the daily medium in which concepts come to matter and orga- nizing efforts are lived. Fires on the Border: The Passionate Politics of Organizing on the Mexican Frontera is a study of this aspect of labor and community organizing on Mexico’s northern border and the strange attractors of sexuality and gender entangled in it. It is generally acknowledged that people make the decision to join a collective effort because they are moved to do so. But we have only a limited conceptual vocabulary for what that moving means or how it