A Jumble of Needs: Women’s Activism and Neoliberalism in the Colonias of the Southwest

2. The Production of Women as Neoliberal Leaders

· 91 ·· CHAPTER 2 · The Production of Women as Neoliberal Leaders Mejor solo que mal acompañado. Better alone than poorly accompanied. Dile pinche chile.” I knew I was almost as red as the chile I was desperately trying to manipulate into a ristra when Estella made this off-color comment. At this point I had been working in the colonias for almost nine months, and I had a pretty close relationship with Estella. (Or should I say she had one with me?) Estella is a commanding woman and can be a very intimidating presence. When it came to ristra making, she was the queen. The group of us—Estella, her mother, myself, two or three of her cousins, and at least five nieces and nephews, depending on the day— were meeting in mid-September to make ristras as I described in this book’s introduction. By the time the chile harvest is in full swing, front porches across the Hatch valley become small-scale ristra production lines. In the colonia of Recuerdos, none is as lively as the one run by Estella and set up on the front porch of her parent’s trailer on the lot next door to hers (see Figure 2.1). So how did Estella end up speaking so poorly of my chile on my first day makingristras?AswithmanythingsinvolvingEstella,therewerealotofjokes told while making the ristras, and more than a few were colorful. She had a large repertoire of sexual jokes, and she loved to tell them. This made her mother quite uncomfortable, and I saw her blush intensely as the day went on but could also hear her laugh in spite of herself. Estella’s father, on the other hand, who helped with the crates of chile, tended to stay at the edges of these conversations.Thesewerewomen’sspaces,bothinworkandinjest. All the while, I labored diligently at my ristras, trying to find the magic tension between too loose where the chile falls out and too tight where it breaks right off, and trying to follow the conversation and jokes going on “ 92 THE PRODUCTION OF WOMEN AS NEOLIBERAL LEADERS around me. It is true my Spanish had improved vastly in nine months, yet my years of Spanish classes could never have prepared me for the jokes, puns, and sexual innuendoes Estella had waiting for me. What I could do was talk with the whiny two-year-old next to me. She was upset because her mother was talking to Estella and not to her. So I made a joke with her and told her to tell her mother what her mother kept telling her: “Mommy, hush, hush.” Jokingly, I encouraged her to tell her mother to be quiet. As children that age do, she parroted the phrase over and over and we all laughed. Not long after, I pulled too hard on a string and a stream of chiles came crashing down. I learned my lesson when Estella pronounced: “Dile pinche chile,” which roughly translates into “Tell it, ‘bad chile,’” like “bad dog,” or more literally and colorfully, “God damn chile.” During the day, it is women who are present in the colonias; the geography of colonia communities is the geography of the women’s daily lives. The processes of immigrating to the United States, seeking documentation, creating a new personal community, and making a living all play out in the practices and beliefs of their everyday lives, just as the practices of making ristras and gossiping about community news and events are central to women’s daily life. These are the processes that construct leadership in the Figure 2.1 All in a day’s work: Ristras lined up on Estella’s production line THE PRODUCTION OF WOMEN AS NEOLIBERAL LEADERS 93 colonias. With both the men and the women, their daily geographies dictate who they spend time with, what they have time to do, and how they share responsibilitiesintheirhomesandcommunity. By “dailygeography,”Imean the set of spaces and places through which colonia residents move daily. A careful examination of one’s daily geographies can map out the spaces one produces and reproduces, for example, or the spaces from which one is partitioned or excluded. These spaces tell stories that say a great deal about the relationships and power structures in which one is involved. Movingfromtheparticularhistoricalandgeographicaljunctureatwhich colonias were produced through neoliberal discourses of self-reliant communities , I will reveal that colonia leaders are produced as...