Maquilidaras and Disposability of Women

Discussed throughout scholarship, there is a prevailing stereotype of the Third World woman as rural, naïve, and incredibly sexualized. Melissa Wright in her analysis of the astonishing number of murdered and abused women in the City of Jaurez address this tendency to “blame the victim.”

(Crosses marking graves of murdered women in Jaurez)

A practice of blaming the victim has become standard toward mistreated women working and living in Maquiladora towns. The discovery of mass graves in the desert containing the bodies of hundreds of murdered women, most of whom were never even recognized as missing, was cited by the Mexican officials as an issue of behavior and dress of the victimized women. Believing that no real respectable woman would be out dancing or drinking in the city after dark, and therefore would not be in a position to be murdered, many felt the death of these women was a direct result of their sexual behaviors. For the men, who murdered, raped, and abused these, women could not be held accountable for their actions toward promiscuous, suggestively dressed women for, “Men will be men.”⁷

These beliefs held firm even after one woman survived a brutal attack and was deserted in the desert, only to name her bus driver, hired by the Maquiladoras, as her attacker. It was her commute to and from work, a service provided by the Maquiladoras, which put her in danger; nothing to do with questionable behavior.

I propose a deep connection exists between the disposable attitude toward the women of Jaurez, and other Maquiladora towns, and the treatment of these women within the Maquiladoras themselves. On the tenets of Wright’s argument presented in “The Dialectics of Still Life: Murder, Women, and Maquiladoras,” the attitude of women perpetrating their own decline in value can be seen both in the reaction to the Jaurez murders and the dismissal of high female turnover rates.

Many Maquiladora managers site women as inherently non-trainable and disloyal; therefore female turnover is only natural. Many women are never offered training, which leads to turnover as women burn out on highly detailed, low skill, repetitive tasks. Many women are medically forced to seek new positions after as little as year as the current task they perform has worn out some aspect of their body. With time, Maquiladora women depreciate (be it in society or in the workforce) from something of value, to that of waste.

“Mexican women depicted in the murder narratives as a life stilled by the discord of value pitted against waste…[ultimately] how does the value of her presence measure against the value of her absence?”⁷

The revolutionary documentary Senorita Extraviada

A short film clip from the documentary.