Madonna of the Maquiladora (review)

This story appeared in a science fiction magazine, but it could have appeared, and I think it has, several times, in newspapers, news magazines, academic anthropology journals, and perhaps other print media. It is so real that it can turn up in a science fiction magazine as fantasy. This reality/fantasy takes place in the U.S.-Mexico border cities of Colonia Juarez, Nuevo Leon, and El Paso, Texas. The story centers around a maquiladora on the Juarez side of the border, where workers assemble parts for complex control devices that go to the company's base plant in Iowa to be become part of a system for a NASA flight to Mars. The workers are people from rural communities in Mexico, many of them indigenous people, Maya from Chiapas and Tarahumara from the sierra of Chihuahua.

The corporation that owns the maquiladora where the parts areassembled and the U.S. plant where the control devices are made isAmerican. Labor unrest, as it is euphemistically called, threatened thesmoothness of operations. Two photographers, one an American photojournalist for an El Paso newspaper and the other an independent Mexican woman photographer, join together to do a story on an assembler on a production line, Gabriel Perea, called El Hombre de la Madona. Gabriel sees and hears the Virgin Mary on the factory floor. He tells the workers what messages the Virgin has told him to repeat to them. The messages are: be patient, endure the hardships, all will find grace in heaven by and by.

This is the way the labor unrest was dissipated and is now controlled. Through some device in the goggles Gabriel Perea wears, he hears the Virgin's voice and can then tell her message to the workers. Her message is to accept the shacks, the polluted water, the blighted landscape, the sordid exploitation of the border that those who have been driven out of their rural villages find waiting for them in the maquiladoras of the North. Gabriel Perea, a simple Chamula campesino from Chiapas, does not know he is being used as an interpreter in a circuitry system controlled by the maquiladora management. The American photojournalist switches goggles with Gabriel Perea and finds that the image of the Virgin is transmitted by the system that is monitoring the wearer's vision.

Anyone with any knowledge of the history of Mexico recognizes that the author, Gregory Frost, has written a twenty-first-century replay of the story of the Virgin of Guadalupe and the simple Nahuatl peasant Juan Diego, created early in the Spanish conquest of Mexico for the same purpose: control of the indigenous people. Colonial control, in the centuries since the Spanish invasion and destruction of theindigenous cultures—Maya, Aztec, Zapotec, Totonac, and all the rest—and now in the time of twenty-first-century neocolonialism, is done through electronic circuitry. The Spanish hacendados have been replaced in this story by Texas Republicans. But it is the same image of a Virgin who never was, projected to the slaves of the maquilas for the same purpose.

At the end of the story, the Chamula from Chiapas has disappeared, the Mexican photographer has been murdered, the American photojournalist has taken a beating that stopped just short of death, and the newspaper editor has been shocked into sullen despair. Perhaps now there is an AI and a method of floating the image of the Virgin onair. The man who owns the company said to the photojournalist: "What we know to be feedback looks like behavior, which is where people start saying that the things are alive and thinking" (70).