Anay's Will to Learn: A Woman's Education in the Shadow of the Maquiladoras

1. Meeting Anay

I n the border areas, churches often serve as vehicles for cross-border connections and collaborations. My home, Las Cruces, New Mexico, is about forty miles up the Rio Grande from Ciudad Juárez. In 2002 a friend who is a member of the Church of Christ in Las Cruces invited me to go with a group from her church to visit another Church of Christ in Ciudad Juárez. The purpose of the trip was to worship with the Mexican church on Sunday morning and to visit with the church leaders about helping them replace a section of their roof. I had begun my research on the educational environment in Mexican maquiladora labor communities and was interested in the opportunity to meet some of the factory workers who lived near the church or attended it. The church was located in the southern part of the city, just one block east of one of the major north-south arteries, a fourlane street lined with small businesses. We made sharp turns into the very narrow, unpaved, alley-like street, lined on our right with the high-security walls of the church, eight to nine feet tall, and on our left, the high-security walls of three private houses. At the south end of the street was a large yonke, an unofficial Spanish term for auto junkyard. In the past, used autos, languishing in the last months of their working life, slid from the U.S. side of the border into Ciudad Juárez; now they fill the yonkes that dot the roads near the outskirts of the city| One | Meeting Anay | 26 | Anay’s Will to Learn where land is less expensive. Current laws restrict the importation of older cars into Mexico. This yonke was a large fenced lot with metallic racks where the bodies of spent automobiles were stacked four high, visible and accessible to the customer looking for spare auto parts. The tires from these spent autos were piled into a dangerous black mountain that polluted the desert sands south of the city. The solid metal gates in the church security wall were open, and we entered the small patio area where members conversed on their way into the church building. There, I saw Anay for the first time. The wife of a part-time minister, she was a busy young woman, interacting with the visitors and her fellow church members while holding a baby on her hip. Her face showed more Spanish features than Indian. Instead of the deep, rich black hair of many mestizos (people of mixed Indian and European ancestry), her hair was more of a chestnut brown. Instead of the deep coffee-brown eyes, her eyes had a little dance of hazel in them. On this side of the privilege line, we women often open our conversations with a comment on a pair of shoes or a piece of jewelry. On a previous trip to a Mexican community, I had complimented a young woman on her earrings. She took the earrings from her ears, handed them to me, and insisted that I keep them. I later learned that this is a Mexican’s very polite response to someone’s compliment, so I stopped complimenting women on their jewelry. But I felt very comfortable connecting through cuddly babies, and before long, Anay’s baby, Eva, and her soggy diaper were on my lap as the church service began. Soon the baby got restless, so I walked out the back door with her. Her mother followed me. We walked up and down the sandy road with baby Eva and visited while the church service continued inside. Anay told me that she and Enrique lived in one of the classrooms in the small church complex. Enrique was a parttime youth minister in the church, and he wanted to start a new church group in a low-income neighborhood in the sandy hills on the southern edge of the city. We had not walked far when Anay said, “I am really smart Meeting Anay | 27 | in school. Mostly, I love mathematics. I really want to finish my school and go to the university. I’m studying now on these books. When church is over, I’ll take you into my room and show you my books. I have to read a lot of books and take a lot of tests, but I’m going to do it...