Feminine Villains, Masculine Heroes, and the Reproduction of Ciudad Juarez

I will tell you something about stories. . . . They aren't just for entertainment. Don't be fooled.

--Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony

"The reality of Juárez is the reality of the whole border," said Gustavo Elizondo, the mayor of Juárez. "You have a city that produces great wealth, but that sits in the eye of the storm. In one way it is a place of opportunity for the international community. But we have no way to provide water, sewage and sanitation for all the people who come to work. . . . Every year we get poorer and poorer even though we create more and more wealth."

--New York Times, 2 February 2001

"ORION wants to bring hope to this city," explained the human resource manager of the ORION Corporation's Ciudad Juárez operations. ¹ ORION, a multinational manufacturer of automobile components, employs some 20,000 people in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, a city now known as one of the most troubled urban areas in the Western Hemisphere, with high rates of drug violence, exploding squatter settlements, and environmental degradation (Hill 2000; Nathan 1999). The city is also known for its export-processing sector, part of the maquiladora industry, which has operated since the mid-1960s and currently employs almost 400,000 people in some three hundred facilities. Almost 50,000 people migrate to Ciudad Juárez annually, many of them seeking employment as unskilled maquiladora laborers, and they shelter in the city's southwestern stretch of squatter settlements. But now ORION, and many other maquiladoras, have decided they need a new city, one that will be attractive to skilled professionals, such as engineers and top managers. As part of an effort to found this new city, ORION managers and engineers have spearheaded a plan to redevelop Ciudad Juárez from an unskilled, low-tech, high-crime ghetto into a high-tech, value-adding city, one teeming with middle-class services, skilled professionals, and safe neighborhoods. In 1999, these engineers and managers formed a team to present this proposal to its own corporate board, to other maquila corporations, to the Mexican government, to Mexican educators, and to international nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) as part of a strategy to raise the venture capital required for getting its plan off the ground. The team anticipates raising several million corporate dollars over the next five years and is generating "in-kind" support from the Mexican government, Mexican universities, and area vocational schools, which have redesigned their curricula to suit the corporations' requirements for engineers and other technical staff. As ORION's human resource manager, Paula, put it: "We think Ciudad Juárez can become the next Silicon Valley of Mexico."

In this essay, I attempt to demonstrate how this development plan for "the next Silicon Valley of Mexico" necessarily requires the reproduction of the current city, marked by poverty, inadequate infrastructure, and unskilled, low-waged laborers who work in labor-intensive industries. ² This contradiction becomes clear upon close inspection of the proposal's internal design, which is revealed through the narratives used to describe and justify it. These explanations reveal that the Silicon Valley of Mexico proposal does not call for the replacement of the unskilled laborers who live in squatter settlements and attend overcrowded schools. Rather, ORION's plan for the Silicon Valley of Mexico promises to join high-tech, design-oriented operations with the labor-intensive manufacturing facilities that still mainly rely upon low-waged workers who live in poorly serviced areas of the city. These are the very workers that ORION's team needs in order to convince potential investors that the proposal for developing the next Silicon Valley of Mexico is a viable plan.

To unravel this internal paradox, I combine a Marxist critique of the crises of capitalism (see Harvey 1982) with feminist interrogations into the naturalizing narratives of sexual difference (see Scott 1988). With these theoretical tools, we can see how the Silicon...