Table Of ContentFires on the Border
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Fires on the Border
The Passionate Politics
of Labor Organizing on
the Mexican Frontera
Rosemary Hennessy
University of Minnesota Press
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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.
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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
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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
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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
