June 2009
3 posts
Radiohead – Maquiladora →
Is this about the Mexican reality?
“Be the change you want to see in the world.”
– Mahatma Gandhi
May 2009
20 posts
Response
This video brings up a very interesting point discussed through post colonialism and a women’s place in society. All Different All Equal says that in some nations/societies, a woman is still viewed as an item to be bought and sold by men and violence against women is seen only as a minor infraction of the law. I most definitely did not think that today, in the 20th century, countries such...
Response
Now here is an issue at home. Rather than being hundreds or even thousands of miles away, both Los Angeles and Forever 21 are American. Who can say that they have never bought anything from Forever 21? I definitely have. It is cheap, it is fashionable, and the stores are convenient. It has never occurred to me, or probably many others of our age, how and why these clothes are extremely...
Response
This video makes me want to pull my hair and scream. It is so frustrating to me that a country so close to ours and a country acting as the site of our production lines can have such abominable problems. How is it that all these murders happen so close to our own home yet go seemingly unnoticed? Why is it that the Mexican government chooses to ignore these murders rather than figure out the...
Response
Relating seemingly perfectly with an issues discussed last week — masculinity and male domination. Masculine authority and ownership is a huge issues within the factories. Women are perceived as weak and unwilling to stand up for themselves therefore being the ideal worker. They concede to their every wish of their male boss. While the women work for cheaper pay in sitting jobs, a direct...
Murder in Juárez Gender, Sexual Violence, and the... →
Background information on Ciudad Juarez and the murders that have occurred over the past decade.
Response
The more and more I delve into this idea of unionizing and worker rights, the more I see how similar it is to our own unionizing efforts of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Back in the day, the United States had these same problems — factories forcing their workers to work in terrible conditions, going as far as to lock them in, and very poor pay. Grassroots were as key to...
Of Labor Tragedy and Legal Farce →
“It is commonly assumed that transnational activist networks have greater power to compel state and private sector actors to address rights-based grievances as networks grow and activists gain greater visibility in the mass media. However, evidence from case studies of transnational mobilization suggests that the opposite may hold true under given circumstances. This article examines the...
Response
Transnational unionizing made this organizing campaign successful. The women of the Honduras maquila did not have the resources and power to make such a campaign successful. However, through transnational networks and open lines of communication, U.S. based organizations came in to aid the women in their struggle.
So what would happen if the women of the maquiladora industry in Mexico simply...
Globalization and Transnational Labor Organizing →
“The proliferation of garment industry sweatshops over the past 20 years has generated numerous cross-border (transnational) organizing campaigns involving U.S., Mexican, and Central American labor unions and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). This article examines one such campaign that took place at the Honduran maquiladora factory known as Kimi. The Kimi workers (along with their...
Response
These videos seem to be a very good aid to the reading we had this past week, “Engendering the ‘Right to Have Rights.” Over the quarter we have studied many ways in which women stand up for themselves and their rights. The examination of Mexico’s indigenous women and their idea of strength in numbers to prove aptitude over perceived ineptness is quite telling. In the same way in which the...
Response
On a more personal level, I find this documentary very intersting. We, as a globalized society, are constantly passing judgements upon our Third World neighbors; pay your workers more, give them rights, better working conditions are a must, sweatshops should be shut down. Our demands upon the globalized factory markets are endless. However, rarely do we stop to take a moment and question what...
