The Terror of the Machine: Technology, Work, Gender, and Ecology on the U.S.-Mexico Border

Near the end of Clockwork, Eric Breibart’s perceptive 1982 documentary on scientific management, deskilling, and the computerized factory, the narrator observes that Frederick Winslow Taylor suffered from a recurrent nightmare throughout his life. Each night Taylor would dream that he was trapped in a giant machine from which he struggled vainly to free himself. Taylor’s nightmare provides the film with its ironic coda. In formulating his principles of scientific management, Taylor saw himself creating the basis of an “industrial utopia,” one in which every human motion was regulated with clockwork precision. Nevertheless, “in his dreams there was still resistance.”

Devon G. Peña also concludes The Terror of the Machine: Technology, Work, Gender, and Ecology on the U.S.-Mexico Border by recounting a nightmare, one from his childhood. Here again the monster is mechanical, in Peña’s dream a cotton gin located next to the train tracks that ran by his barrio home in Laredo, Texas. When he was about ten, his grandmother led him to the tracks to confront his demons. As a train appeared, she picked up a stone, put it in Devon’s hand, and told him, “Don’t be afraid of that train. Here throw rocks at it and defend yourself!” (pp. 333–34). The moral for Peña, and the coda for his book, is that resistance to “the terror of the machine” is not only necessary but liberating.

Drawing on ten years of field research and personal activism, Peña has written a passionate indictment of the human and environmental devastation wrought in the maquiladoras, the foreign-owned, automotive-parts and consumer-electronics assembly plants along the U.S.-Mexico border. Peña chronicles the attempt by transnational corporations operating under the Border Industrialization Program, a bilateral agreement negotiated in 1965 by the United States and Mexico, to impose first-world technology on third-world workers. Peña describes factory production and workplace organization in the maquilas as a destructive mix of Taylorism (the principles of scientific management), Fordism (Henry Ford’s system of factory control based on mass production and automated, assembly-line technology), and the social engineering theories of “managerial sociology” associated with Elton Mayo and George Homans.

But the “politics of production,” that is, the resistance of workers to management domination, is what most engages Peña. The strongest parts of the book resonate with the voices of maquila workers engaged in shop-floor struggles and other forms of resistance. Juana Ortega is typical of the more than two hundred workers, most of whom were women, interviewed by Peña. Through tortuguismo—working at the pace of a turtle—maquila workers like Ortega resist becoming automatons, the helpless victims described by management theorists and even radical scholars (especially as presented by Harry Braverman in Labor and Monopoly Capital [New York: Monthly Review Press, 1974]). Ortega is proud of her skills and determined to improve her lot and that of workers like herself.

An ally in maquila workers’ collective struggle to create alternatives to maquiladora industrialization has been the Center for the Orientation of Women Workers (COMO). Organized in 1968, COMO is a grassroots movement to promote workplace democracy and ecologically sustainable development. In the early 1980s, Peña participated in COMO’s “transference project,” an effort to document the innovations and inventiveness of maquila assembly-line workers and then develop strategies and programs, such as worker-owned, self-managed cooperatives, that would transfer, or better, translate, these skills into general efforts to improve working and living conditions.

Covering mainly the years before the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) took effect in 1994, The Terror of the Machine succeeds best as a vehicle for articulating the human costs of globalization in Mexico and other developing areas of the world. But can there be victimization...