Working Women into the Borderlands

Foreword

Importantly, and I would add, very proudly, Sonia Hernández ’s Working Women into the Borderlands is the first book in the Connecting the Greater West series. In so many ways, Hernández’s work embodies the very essence of the series, to explore the changing and growing ways that historians and others are coming to view the North American West, a West that includes the American West, northern Mexico, western Canada, and the borderlands areas between the regions. Subject areas of books in the series will include transnational history, borders and borderlands, immigration, environment and agriculture , and indigenous negotiations of bordered regions. Thus, the book before you here examines the bordered region between the northeastern Mexican states of Nuevo León, Tamaulipas, and south Texas—an area characterized by robust agricultural development (tobacco, cotton, ixtle fiber), and later, industrialization (textile and garment factories, industrial bakeries), on both sides of the Rio Grande that separates the United States from Mexico in this part of the continent. Working Women into the Borderlands also makes a welcome contribution to the ever-growing literature on borderlands history, and adds important research and analysis to the understudied gender history of the region. Indeed, Hernández “works” women into the Tamaulipas/Texas boundary region, but her book is also about “working” women, those norteñas who provided essential agricultural and industrial labor there in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries . You will read in this book how gender fits neatly into other themes to tell a more complete story of the agricultural and industrial history of the lower Rio Grande Valley. As she explains in the Introduction, “The process of negotiating the making of the borderlands involved the articulation of gender, racial and class ideologies, as well as ideas of modernization.” And you will get to meet many of these women, as Hernández through meticulous binational research has uncovered their voices via archival sources, and has interviewed others so that their memory of these times and places can be preserved and used to help us understand borderland labor history more thoroughly. So, you get many Foreword x • Verso Runninghead things with this book! Borderlands history, agricultural and industrial history, gender history, and labor history all blend here to relate a social history of this lower Rio Grande Valley region. Speaking of which, the northern Tamaulipas/southern Texas borderlands are among the least studied area along the long US-Mexico boundary. While certainly this literature is growing, it still lags behind that of the Arizona/Sonora or California/Baja California borderlands historiography. Working Women into the Borderlands helps to correct this lacuna and hopefully will stimulate other scholars to view the area as an important borderlands region worthy of historical inquiry. Other scholars may want to launch into comparative borderlands analysis , contrasting the labor or gender or agricultural history of Hernández’s study to that of other regions along the US-Mexico line. For the lower Rio Grande Valley, Hernández shows how women’s work and their labor activism helped to transform the region—helping in a big way to make it more productive, and therefore more modern. The transformation of the region that Hernández tracks was characterized by a change from smaller, light industries in Tamaulipas to larger, heavy industries that developed in regional cities. As she evidences here, women workers played an integral role in this process. But the industrial development was also dependent on capital investment from north of the border. That kind of investment flow illustrates once again the transnational nature of this story that played out in a borderlands region. The work environments, however, were genderbased , based on notions of expectations of “women’s work” and what their place in society should be. But instead of victims, many women you will meet here became activists and fought for their and their fellow women workers’ rights. Some responded by crossing into Texas to add their work skills to industries there, adding yet another transboundary dimension to this fascinating history. Combined, all of these dimensions show how women shaped the economic development of a dynamic borderlands region, and add to our understanding of the Greater West. —Sterling Evans Series Editor x • Foreword ...