Gendered Struggles against Globalisation in Mexico (review)

The violent images of life on the US-Mexico border fill the daily news. Thousands of women in the border city of Juarez have been murdered or have disappeared since the early 1990s, while hundreds of young men are gunned down in drug-related gang activity every month. Desperate people from Mexico and Central America daily flood across the border in search of jobs and a minimum of economic security. At the centre of this humanitarian crisis is the new global economic market which allows all manner of goods and services to cross international borders with one exception: the men and women whose cheap labour provides the foundation of this new world order. In her work, Gendered Struggles Against Globalisation in Mexico, Teresa Healy addresses some of the causes for this contemporary crisis in Mexico through an exploration of the decline of labour rights between 1968 and 1992. More specifically, the book focuses on the car industry and one particular union, the Confederacion de Trabajadores de Mexico (CTM) and its inability or unwillingness to represent the concerns of its members. At the core of this phenomenon, Healy argues, are the specifically gendered ways in which power relations were constructed, which in turn, have conditioned the country's relationship with globalization.

Mexico's border region with the United States has experienced dramatic economic changes since the 1960s. In 1964, a twenty year bracero program (Mexican Labour Program) with the United States ended. In response to the rapid increase in unemployment along the border, Mexican president Gustavo Diaz Ordaz developed the Border Industrialization Program (BIP). The program depended upon maquiladora factories built on the Mexican side with their "twin" factories just a few miles north across the border in the United States. This new manufacturing structure did not resolve the problem of male unemployment, however, and instead a highly feminized labour force appeared. The oil boom of the late 1970s only served to strengthen Mexico's corporatist economic model, boosting foreign earnings to a full 75 per cent of its GNP. (81) By 1982, in the face of plummeting oil prices, Mexico was forced to admit that it could not repay its considerable foreign debt. Its financial crisis brought Mexico's ruling elite into a direct relationship with the International Monetary Fund and an even deeper economic complicity with corporations centred in the United States. As a result, until the 1994 NAFTA agreement, Mexican labourers were pressured to accept reduced wages, to work longer hours, and to give up the little job security they enjoyed. Of course, since NAFTA has been implemented, the crisis has only worsened.

The feminization of the maquiladora factories has been well documented since the early 1980s, establishing a clear gender hierarchy which privileges men and disadvantages women. What Healy brings to this well studied region is an analysis of the male factory worker. She argues that working-class men have been just as enmeshed within gendered social relations as women. Expanding her analysis beyond the usual class argument dominant within labour studies, Healy identifies prescribed notions of masculinity within Mexican culture as one of the central foundations for its modern economic structure. The caudillo is a familiar political figure within Latin American politics who is defined by Eric Wolf and Edward Hansen as "a man, or men, who could assert their masculinity before other men by demonstrating their dominance over women, as well as their willingness to use violence to control others."(4) The caudillo plays a central role as political and social father within the patriarchal nation. While patriarchy by definition always privileges male over female, Healy suggests that it predominates within a far more complex social structure within the Mexican nation. Utilizing R.W. Connell's term, hegemonic masculinity, she identifies the hierarchy of relations among different groups of men. While she maintains that hegemonic masculinity is so pervasive as to be invisible, Healy convincingly argues that it is the cornerstone of Mexico's patriarchal and national gender structure. (151) Although patriarchy privileges all men relative to women, identifying...