Daniela Robles Manhattan College Senior Thesis

Somos una fuerza: Latina Leadership and Organizers in the Garment Labor Movement

Abstract Latina women have historically participated in the labor movement and labor struggles in the United States. This has been acknowledged only very recently by researchers and scholars. The lack of attention that Latinas, as organizers and workers in the garment industry, have received is highlighted throughout this paper. Drawing on three ethnographic case studies, I discuss the experiences of Latina organizers in the garment industry, experiences which involve dynamics of race, gender, and class. To theorize the relationship between organizing, identity, and the global capitalist processes in which Latina garment workers are situated in, I use the work of contemporary Marxist-feminists who advocate for an analysis that looks at race, gender, and class as modes of production (as experiences that are not outside of or removed from the history of particular imperialistic, colonialist, and capitalist practices but deeply steeped in). Recent Marxist-feminist theory has also urged feminists to be aware of cultural differences, of particular and different identities, between women, and has called for using differences as a basis for strengthening solidarity amongst marginalized women in the struggle against global capitalism. Using a critical analysis, my intention is to highlight the unique role that Latinas have played in the labor movement and argue that their efforts are rich contributions to history and feminism.

Somos una fuerza: Latina Leadership and Organizers in the Garment Labor Movement Introduction Latina women have historically participated in the labor movement and labor struggles in the United States. This has been acknowledged only very recently by researchers and scholars. The invisibility of scholarship on Latina women in social movements within the U.S. is problematic. Contemporary social movements, however, have begun to draw attention to the presence of Latinas as both leaders and grassroots organizers, such as in the Immigration Rights movement (Milkman and Terriquez 2012; Delgado 2011; Herrera 2011). The obvious lack of attention that Latinas, as organizers and workers in the garment industry, have received is highlighted throughout this paper. Moreover, this paper seeks to apply a Marxist- feminist and critical analysis to this history of agency and the concrete experiences of Latinas in the garment industry, a perspective which has been lacking. While some researchers have documented the presence and struggle of Mexican and Chicana garment workers, highlighting for example their experiences with race, gender, and exploitation, more contemporary feminist and sociological literature has neglected to apply theoretical frameworks in which we can understand the relationship between race, gender, and class struggles that Latinas situated in wage-labor work have confronted. Much advancement has been made in feminist literature. Post-colonial feminists have made steady advances in critiquing western feminist discourses that have constructed ideological versions and realities of non-western or non-white women, particularly women of color who live in the U.S. and women who live outside of the U.S. in underdeveloped or developing countries (Spivak 1988; Mohanty 2003; Casteeda 1992). Chandra Talpalde Mohanty (2003)
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has called this the construction of the Third world woman and has critiqued western feminists for overlooking the different realities between women from different cultural backgrounds. More importantly, Mohanty has reminded feminists of the necessity of grounding our analysis, vision, and practices in a critique of capitalism, not only because it is the global social organization we live in, but because as Mohanty suggests capitalism is seriously incompatible with feminist visions of social and economic justice (Mohanty 2003, P. 9). If feminists are to battle for a world that liberates both men and women from patriarchal practices and social inequality, then feminism cannot lend itself to an analysis that ignores the conditions under which these social inequalities and oppressive practices arise from, or are heavily intertwined with. I agree, therefore, with Mohanty that as feminists or researchers for social justice initiatives, we need to orient ourselves to analyses that critiques the fundamental sources of oppression. Why am I interested in a Marxist-feminist approach? A Marxist-feminist analysis of Latina women in the garment industry will not just shed light of the importance of looking at class in conjunction to race and gender, but it will allow for an approach that unifies race, gender, and class experiences within the context of capitalism as an oppressive global social organization. Many researchers have documented how Latinas in the garment industry are heavily exploited, work in subhuman conditions, and that their experiences, and location within the labor market, are heavily shaped by racism and sexism in American society. But they have failed to link racism, sexism, and their status as an exploited group in the U.S. to the globalized economic system that makes their marginalization possible. More importantly, there has been little attempt to theorize the relationship between garment work and the social identity of these women who are heavily concentrated in this area. I use the work of Marxist-feminists such as Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Sara Carpenter,

Himani Bannerji, and Martha E. Gimenez, who advocate for an analysis that looks at race, gender, and class as modes of production (as experiences that are not somehow outside of or removed from the history of particular imperialistic, colonialist, and capitalist practices but deeply steeped in) and who also highlight the necessity of a sensitivity to cultural differences, to particular and different identities, between women. While many Marxists and sociologists have argued that stressing cultural differences leads to arbitrary identity politics, it is the goal of this paper to demonstrate, as Bannerji and Mohanty have, that in the case of Latina garment workers and their struggles to organize, identity can actually be a source of solidarity and empowerment in social movements. Different identities can engage feminists to practices that acknowledge and transcend the borders and experiences that are unique to women located in different countries and cultures. Bannerji has also been critical of the popular analytic framework of race, gender, class known as intersectionality. While I am convinced that the intersectionality framework has been extremely useful in illuminating that race, gender, and class do not operate autonomously in society, I have also been troubled by the underlying assumption and the common conception that race, gender, and class are somehow separate spheres that converge or intersect in some nether space of subjectivity. Bannerji speaks to my concern when she writes: Yet, speaking of experience, nonwhite and white people living in Canada and the West know that this social experience is not, as lived, a matter of intersectionality. Their sense of being in the world, textured through myriad social relations and cultural forms, is lived or felt or perceived as being all together and all at once (Bannerji 2010, p. 144). In the case and history of Latinas in the garment work industry, we can observe from their experiences that it has not been an experience of race, gender, and class coinciding in particular spaces, but rather dynamics experienced as

both part of their identity and their location and histories within global capitalism. The guiding questions of this thesis are the following: What have been the political and intellectual experiences and contributions of Latinas in the garment industry? How do we talk about working-class Latina women workers interests, their agency, and their (in) visibility in socalled democratic practices? What is the location of Latina garment workers and their collective struggles? How can we understand Latina garment workers through a Marxist-feminist approach that analyzes their experiences of race, gender, and class? How have Latinas been historically situated to perform garment work? While one of the goals of this paper is discuss a particular theoretical framework, my intention is not to shove the main empirical interest and topic in the background as a kind of backdrop. It is critical to recognize the unique role that Latinas have played in the labor movement and that their efforts are rich contributions to labor history and theory. Methodology The first part of my thesis will set up the Marxist-feminist framework and literature that I am particularly interested in using to illuminate the experiences of Latina garment workers and organizers. This section will consist of an overview of the problems of the traditional Marxistfeminist framework, and a critique intersectionality and the gaps it creates as a framework for understanding race, gender, and class. Then, I will proceed to a brief history of Latinas in the garment industry. The second part of my thesis concerns itself with the actual discussion of the experiences and struggles of Latina workers and organizers in the garment industry, and this will consist of referring back to the Marxist-feminist theoretical approach which complements these experiences. The purpose of using the Marxist-feminist framework is to situate and understand the
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experiences of Latina women in the garment industry within global capitalistic processes that reproduce the race, gender, and class dynamics that forms the bulk of their experiences as organizers and workers. I draw upon three ethnographic case studies of Latina garment workers in the United States; one focuses on the organizing experiences of Latina garment works in the International Ladies Garment Union (ILGWU) in Los Angeles, the second is a narrative of two Latina garment workers who organized in Los Angeles, and the focuses on the organizing challenges of garment workers who worked with the community-based organization, La Mujer Obrera, in El Paso Texas. These case studies focus largely on Mexican and Chicana garment workers, whom out of all other ethnic groups have been researched heavily in organizing efforts in garment sweatshops. I use the term Latina and Latina women throughout the paper conscious of its problematic implications. I use the term here not to imply that women from Spanish-speaking and indigenous-speaking countries of the Caribbean and Latin-America are a monolith or form a pan-ethnic identity. I am conscious of the differences in identity, experience, and history between, for example, a Puerto-Rican woman and a Mexican woman. I use the term Latina here to designate geographic locations and socio-historical junctures. It encapsulates, therefore, women from the Spanish-speaking countries of the Caribbean and Latin-America and women from these countries whom have migrated to the U.S., and women who are born in the U.S. from families whom migrated earlier on. I also use the phrase Latina women in the garment industry several times throughout this paper. It should be noted that I am referring to Latinas working in sweatshops as piece-meal workers (getting paid per piece of clothing that they sew) or as wageearning sewers, cutters, and dyers.

Moving away from traditional Marxist-feminism Marxist-feminism in the U.S. developed as a response to both Marxist and liberal feminist academics and activists who neglected to analyze patriarchy, gender oppression, and gender inequality as part of the larger economic exploitation that capitalism rests on. Using Marxs theory of capital, Marxist-feminists sought to understand and situate womens labor in the household as contributing to the production of commodities, the sexual division of labor, class exploitation, and thus, the accumulation of capital (Glenn 1985; Brown 1981). While nearly all Marxist-feminists have agreed that patriarchy existed prior to the development and rise of capitalism, they have also recognized that patriarchy cannot be analyzed outside of the current capitalist system in which it has taken on specific forms of organizing and reproducing gendered divisions of labor (Hartmann 1979). Recognizing that patriarchy heavily shapes the work men and women are assigned to do, Marxist-feminists have traced the history of womens labor both inside and outside of the home. A brief overview of the general Marxist-feminist theory is necessary here. After production became increasingly industrialized on a large-scale in most societies, the household became a major source of consumption. Women were assigned and relegated almost exclusively to household consumption and reproduction. Beginning in the 18th century, households were increasingly dependent upon the market for goods and therefore on wages to purchase goods and services for survival. Men became intensively integrated into the workforce as wage-laborers and this left women assigned to household duties, which includes shopping and negotiating for services, child care, cleaning, preparing food and providing emotional support for

the breadwinner (Glenn 1985). This division of labor made women subordinate to and dependent upon a male wage-earner. Given that cultural norms and domestic codes also demanded that a womans place was in the home, women who deviated from these norms were threatened with the loss of their feminine identity. Those who attempted to live independently were barred from ever finding employment outside of the home because of gender discrimination. However, as Glenn (1985) points out, the separate ideals of man as the breadwinner and woman as the homemaker fell short of the harsh economic reality. Many fathers and husbands were unable to earn a family wage and therefore, women were forced to engage in incomeproducing activities. Because of the ideological construction of women as consumers and their status as second-class citizens, women found their status in the labor market equally depressing. The jobs available to women were typically at the bottom of the authority hierarchy; jobs that were low-paid, insecure, and dead-end. This made it nearly impossible for women to significantly shift the burden that men were faced with in having to provide a family income. Womens labor in the home was more valued as a result and continues to be seen as more valuable in some countries. Therefore, according to traditional Marxist-feminism, womens labor has largely been restricted to the home. The Marxist-feminist analysis allows us to understand and link the experiences of women in the workplace to the broader and global economic system. Glenns analysis of women of color in the workplace, however, demonstrates that this traditional framework, which implies a particular history of particular women, did not account for the different histories and realities that women of color workers as colonized minorities were situated in. The traditional Marxist-feminist model and theories which focused on the colonial labor system did not speak to the experiences of women of color in the United States (Castaeda 1992; Glenn 1985) These frameworks rendered invisible the fact that women of color in the U.S.,

specifically Mexican-American, Asian-American, and Black women had been wholly integrated into the labor market and in addition to being paid less than their male counterparts, were paid significantly less than white women workers. Women of color did not have the luxury of solely working at home. Because men of color were also heavily discriminated against in the labor market and earned the lowest wages in all work sectors, women of color had to constantly search for work outside of the home and engage in activities within the home that could provide income. In highlighting that the Marxistfeminist model did not account for the specificities of women of color, Glenn applies and reevaluates three key concepts within the traditional Marxist-feminist literature in analyzing the situation of ethnic minority women: the separation and alienation of the private and public sphere of production, gender conflict within the family, and the division of reproductive labor. Drawing upon case studies and statistics of Mexican-American (Chicana), AsianAmerican, and Black women in the labor force from the 1860s-1930s, Glenn argues that the concept of the separation of production in the home and production in the labor market does not adequately apply to the experiences of women of color. For example, in the 1900s Chinese men with minimal capital were able to establish laundries, restaurants and stores, which qualified them as merchants who could bring over their wives to the U.S. However, these businesses were a form of self-exploitation for the family. As Glenn observes, they were only profitable because all members of the family contributed their labor and worked long hours. Living quarters were often in the back of the shop or adjacent to it (1985, p. 19). Chinese women were expected to help their husbands maintain their businesses in addition to being largely responsible for childcare and domestic chores. Chinese women during this period were also employed in garment industries, sales and trade, and laundry operatives. Similarly, between 1880 and 1930,

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Mexican-American women in the South-west largely worked as farm laborers; they had to raise children, cook and keep house, while also working long hours in the field. Eventually, they also began to find more work in the garment industry. Black women throughout this period did heavy housework and childcare for white women; a role in which they were subjected to abuse and even physical beatings by their mistresses. Their role as a house worker for white women made it difficult to ensure that their own children received adequate care. Women of color, therefore, did not experience a separation of labor and production between the home and the workplace outside. Indeed, work meant work within the home and work outside of the home. The case studies discussed in the later part of this thesis also demonstrate this artificiality between production outside of the home and production within the home. Marxist feminists have also argued that gender conflict ensues because women (i.e. white women) and men have disputes over economic inequality. However, in the case of women and men of color, this observation also falls apart. Because the colonial-capitalist system did not allow for men of color to support their families with their labor alone, gender conflict between men and women of color was not an issue of income inequality between the two sexes, but rather an issue of providing an adequate family income (Glenn 1985; hooks 1989;). In terms of the division of labor, traditional Marxist-feminist theory has held that men benefit largely from the services that women provide. However, in the ethnic minority family, conflict over the division of labor is muted by the fact that institutions outside the family are hostile to it. The family is a bulwark against the atomizing effects of poverty and legal and political constraints (Glenn 1985, p. 103). Glenns analysis directs the discussion to a need to understand how race, gender, and class cannot be discussed independently or ignored in a serious analysis of women and labor in a

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capitalist society; nor in an analysis of men of color in the workplace who are also subject to particular oppressions. Earlier Marxists had taken for granted the view that that the experience of the male white worker accounted for the experiences of all workers around the world, a view which universalized an image of workers as genderless and colorless (Skelton, 2013). Similarly, earlier Marxist-feminists took for granted that the history of white women workers was adequate enough to explain and theorize the experiences of women of color, whose identity and experiences are situated in colonial histories.

Capitalism and Women of Color: Critique of Western Feminism and Intersectionality The debate of looking at race, gender, and class extends beyond a discussion with Marxists and Marxist-feminists. Efforts to describe womens location and experiences in the context of globalization, and research that has used a liberal feminist approach have oriented the overall discussion on women in the workplace to a view that is western, homogenous, and insensitive to cultural, political, and economic differences (Mohanty, 2003; Bannerji 2010; hooks 1981; Lazreg 1988; Loomba 1993; Collins 2000). Similarly, the intersectionality approach which claims to show how race, gender, and class intersect without fundamentally linking these intersections to the global social organization that perpetuates these dynamics obscures the context of womens experiences. This section follows with two main goals: 1) understanding how western and academic feminism has homogenized the experiences of women in the workplace, and has actively constructed women of color and women in third world countries as victims and 2) analyzing how intersectionality has rid itself the responsibility of linking three major forms of oppression to lived and informed realities within the context of global capitalism. Glenns analysis follows the trajectory of other post-colonial feminists and Marxist-

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feminists who also critique westernized knowledge of women elsewhere in the world (Castaeda 1992; Lazreg 1988; Spivak 1988; hooks 1981; Loomba 1993; Doezema 2001). In her essay, Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses (1988), Mohanty analyzes how western academics and feminists have typically used categories of analysis which homologize and homogenize the experiences and identities of women in the so-called East. She critiques the notion and standard of woman as a categorical analysis used by western feminists which implies a gendered body that is experienced similarly everywhere across all cultures and contexts, implying that this gendered body confronts and experiences the same version of patriarchy, oppression, and victimization that women in the west do. Mohanty also argues against the bulk of literature produced by western feminists that speaks of experiences of poor women in Third World countries and systematically constructs women of color as victims who have little agency, have no understanding of or practice of feminism, and therefore cannot speak for themselves. In addition to this, women of color in the Third World are constructed and understood as ignorant, poor, uneducated, tradition-bound, domestic, family-oriented while western women are scripted as being educated and having control over their sexualities and bodies (Mohanty, 2003). This also speaks to Maria A. Soldatenkos critique of researchers who portray Latinas in the labor movements as backwards and ignorant, difficult to organize, and are not leaders (Soldatenko 2002, p. 46). Mohanty urges feminists, scholars, and activists to become conscious of the multiplicity of experiences of women around the world, in terms of women in the workplace, women in the household, women confronting men in different cultural spaces, and women engaging in feminist practices. This also entails revisiting westernized notions and versions of agency. Mohantys analysis of case studies of lace makers in India, Mexican women who work in maquiladoras and

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Third World women who work in the electronics industry demonstrates how developing a politics of feminism and solidarity becomes contextual and embedded in the myriad relationships that women experience with other women and men in the workplace, home, and their culture. Contrary to the western assumption that women in the East are victims, have no political culture, and experience a worse kind of patriarchy, research on women in the workplace in non-western countries shown that women do organize, mobilize, and even theorize feminism and political practice. The important lesson to draw from Mohanty is that it is crucial to understand how the identities of these women are experienced by them and are also situated and located in the globalization of low-wage labor and the capitalist narrative of citizens as consumers (Mohanty, 2003; Bannerji 2010). Mohantys notion of citizen-consumer here refers to the ways in which being a citizen is increasingly defined and articulated by exercising choices in the marketplace. Essentially, wealth determines whether or not someone is a citizen. Wealth can not only buy someone legal status within and across borders, but allows people to participate in public life and to influence decision-making: Private sector decision making is privatecitizens have no rights to discuss and make policy. Instead of people governing, markets govern it is not citizens who make decisions, it is consumers (Mohanty 2003, p.184). The international division of labor and the history of colonialism that it is embedded in has fostered the development of some countries as being the primary consumers of the world and positioned other countries (i.e. third world countries) as producers (Mohanty 2003; Gimenez 2010). Acknowledging, however, that there are also inequalities within developed countries themselves, we must analyze how colonized minorities and the working-class in these countries also facilitate and produce the visions, dreams, and material comforts for the citizen-consumer in their own countries as well.

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This includes women whose work enables mass production of commodities; it is their bodies that are used to consolidate global dreams, desires, and ideologies of success and the good life in unprecedented ways (Mohanty 2003, p.147). Connecting the labor that women of color do to the ideological and material reality produced and facilitated by a capitalist mode of production is critical to the discussion on Latinas in the garment industry; it is their labor in garment factories, in being paid low-wages for piecework on the sewing machine, that has enabled the fashion industry and the mass production of clothing (Hum 2003). And it is their low-paid wages that enables consumers in the world to have multiple choices in the market place, to purchase clothes at cheaper prices. Mohanty also reminds us that the organization of the consumer-citizen on one hand and the worker on the hand is accompanied by gendered and racialized ideologies. The citizen as a consumer and the representative of the American dream is white, male, and middle-to-upper class. This discourse requires the material and ideological subordination of the other; the woman, the person of color, and those who are working-class (Mohanty 2003; hooks 1989; Davis 1994; Spivak 1988; Anzaldua 1987; Joseph, 2002). This links gender, race, and class experiences (produced identities) to the fabric of capitalist accumulation itself. Mohanty and Bannerji both speak to the necessity of witnessing race, gender, and class as part of and necessary to the capitalist organization of social life. This approach is similar to Gimenezs reminder of the initial methodological insights of Marx that have been hidden and distorted by common misconceptions of Marxism and Marxist methodology as simply a theory of political economya conception which distorts Marxs method of looking at the dialectical relationship of social relations mediated through human consciousness (activity) and the social construction of these social relations:
One of Marxs methodological inductions is that we must differentiate between conflictual, 15

objective macro-level processes of structural change, and the ideological ways in which people become conscious of those conflicts and fight them out. At the level of analysis of the mode of production as such, it is possible to theoretically identify the capitalist macro-level processes of surplus extraction which operate both in the world as well within nation-states. At the level of analysis of social formations, however, the political, social, cultural, and ideological contexts within which these processes unfold are extremely complex and diverse. (Gimenez 2010, p. 91)

This interplay or dialectic between structures, the social organization that women live in, and the ideological (race, gender, class, culture) formations they are equally embedded in is muted in intersectionality theory. Drawing on the work of Patricia Hill Collins (2000) and Kimberl Crenshaw (1999), intersectionality is understood as those particular and independent social categories and practice-informed ideologies of class, race, and gender in separate spheres that at times interlock into a particular social experienced for individuals based on their position within those relations. While both Collins and Crenshaw witness race, gender, and class as part of an arch of domination or a matrix of domination that exists at the institutional level, they fail to witness that race, gender, and class conceptually cannot be articulated outside of one another. More importantly, the notion that race, gender, and class are categories of experience which interlock dismisses the dialectical relationship that exists between race, gender, and class. Race, gender, and class are not categories but social relations; they are expressed and experienced in the practical activity of human beings, in the particular ways humans relate to one another (Bannerji 2010; Marx 2011; Carpenter 2012; Carpenter and Mojab 2011). While the functions of race, gender, and class can be abstracted, the particular textures and mediations of each cannot be explained without an understanding of other relations of production. For example, class is often thought of as a social group based on ones relationship to the means of economic production, or as a group defined as such based on a stratified system
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of unequal distribution of things like income, healthcare, and education. This definition entices social scientists and leftists to think of class as genderless and colorless, and ignores how class is not simply based on material distribution, but is a particular way humans relate to one another in the social production of society. I agree with Bannerji that the missing link here is a theory of the social, which she, drawing on Marx, defines as understanding the complex socioeconomic and cultural formations, brought to life through myriad finite and specific social and historical relations, organization, and institutions. It involves living and conscious human agents and what Marx called their sensuous, practical human activity. (Bannerji 2010, p. 145). Bannerjis reconceptualization is drawn from Marxs method of viewing society not solely as structure or activity but as social reality which is composed of mutually determining forces; not necessarily in conflict per se but relationships which cannot be determined outside their relation to one another (Carpenter 2012; Allman 2001). From this perspective, race, gender, and class are dialectically related social phenomenon and cannot be disarticulated outside of one another but continually shape and influence how our behavior and consciousness of each develops and changes (Carpenter 2012, P. 21). These social relations come to form and articulate identity and consciousness. Race, gender, and class, therefore, are not just cultural discourses; they are logics we use to organize human labor and daily activity (Carpenter 2012). In the United States, and in many societies, class discourses are heavily raced and gendered. Hill Collins even acknowledges this when she discusses the association of middle-class norms with whiteness and poverty with people of color, in particular Black women as welfare mothers, and Black men as violent, promiscuous criminals (Hill Collins 2000). These discourses are articulated through specific acts. We can think of the way that Black and Latinos in the U.S. are subject to police brutality, and the

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far too common occurrence of Black and Brown children that go missing and fail to be seen as newsworthy. These silences are acts of ideological and material reproduction (Skelton 2013). They ideologically and materially reproduce notions of colored peoples as inferior and whites as worthy. Similarly, Latina women in the garment industry do not experience mobility; they rarely become factory owners or managers themselves. In the case studies I analyze later, Latina garment workers discuss how their labor at home (childcare and house care) are often not viewed as labor by their husbands. These are the ideological and material acts which reproduce the Latina as a poor, domesticated, working-class person to be exploited. The categorical understanding of class, race, and gender also ignores the complex historical productions of each. The construction of white-ness or white as a racial category is based on the material subordination of non-white peoples through colonialist and imperialist ideologies. It not only required a dialectic of white and nonwhite, but it also required the relegating of nonwhites people to that of a lower class status (Bannerji 2010; hooks 1981; Roediger 1971). Similarly, in the United States, notions of gender inferiority are constructed through acts which relegate women to occupations in which they are paid less than men. Black and Latina women, for example, are the least employed in academia and have the hardest finding stable employment within academia. In 2007, women of color only held 7.5 percent of full-time faculty positions (Gutierrez y Mush et al. 2012). It is clear that colonialist legacies continue to undermine women of color in the workplace. Drawing on these critiques and analyses, the following discussion on Latinas in the garment industry and their experiences is understood not as an intersection or interlocking of race, gender, and class experiences but rather experiences which demonstrate the dialectics of race, gender, and class reproduction situated within global capitalism. Latinas in the garment

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industry were historically situated through actions and acts that constructed the poor and working-class Latina as a gendered, racialized body who is naturally adapted and fitted to do garment work. It is also understood here that this construction and the targeting of Latina women (and people of color generally) for cheap labor would not have been possible without the history of colonialism that preceded industrial capitalist development, where indigenous and African populations (both in the U.S. and outside of the U.S.) were subject to racist and sexist oppression, displacement, and material degradation. These ideological constructions and actions contributed to the naturalization of Latina women in garment work, and also provided a material basis on which Latinas could organize and challenge these ideological constructions and the oppressive conditions that accompany them. History of Latina women in the Garment Industry

While recent literature has focused on the strong participation and employment of Latinas in the garment sweatshops after World War II, other research has shown Latinas were employed in garment factories at the beginning of the 20th century. Most of the research in this period records a considerable amount of Mexican women working in garment factories in the Southwest, particularly in Los Angeles and Texas, the two areas where the first garment factories were constructed and recruited women of color (Vargas 1997; Garca 1980). Scholarship on the history of Latina women in the garment industry has often discussed how Latina women were targeted as a cheap source of labor and how factory owners and managers hired immigrant women, not because they wanted to welcome diversity, but because they quickly found that they were a vulnerable and exploitable group of people. However, I want to stress here that in addition to being workers, Latina women were active leaders and organizers at one of the critical
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moments in history where labor found itself confronting the abuses of capital (Ruiz and Korrol 2006; Pea 2007; Vargas 1997). Noting this here is crucial to the overall project of decolonizing images and versions of Latina women in the garment industry solely as victims and as not having any history of agency or mobilization. During the Great Depression of the 1930s, Mexican women in the Southwest and their families lived in harsh conditions and witnessed the plight of others in a society increasingly inducting its members into an exploitative industrial labor force. Those who did find work only could find employment within factories that treated them as third-class citizens because of their status as women of color (Glenn 1985; Ruiz 2004). Because a great many of Latina womens husbands could not find work or were not paid adequately because of racial discrimination, the majority of Latina women were forced to seek employment outside of the home to support their families. The garment industry, at this time, was perhaps the industry most open to the hiring and employment of Latina women. The other options available to Mexican women during this period were working as cigar rollers, pecan shellers, and domestic servants. In nearly all of the trades and industries that Mexican women could find work, they were paid substantially less than white women. One manager of a garment factory operating in 1902 in El Paso, Texas reported in a newspaper that while he paid American workers about $10 to $14 a week, Mexican workers received no more than $9 a week (Garca 1980). The evidence is clear, however, that Latinas were not ignorant of or shun from the wave of radical ideologies and political discussion which enflamed and influenced the numerous labor strikes that took place from 1900-1930s. Latina women, along with white and black women, participated in strikes and sit-ins against the exploitative conditions of the garment workplace (Garca 1980; Ruiz and Korrol, 2006; Pea 2007; Vargas 2008). Mexican women were

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prominent in a dressmakers strike that took place in Los Angeles in 1933, lasting four week and affecting 2,000 women in 80 factories (Durn 1984). This is perhaps the earliest account of Latina garment workers collectively participating in an action that exposed the contradictions between labor and capital. This also contradicts the commonly-held assumption in the literature that Chicanas hardly participated in the U.S. labor movement in the earlier wave. Mexican women during this period joined and mobilized within the newly-formed International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU), the American Federation of Labor (AFL), the Confederation of Industrial Organization (CIO), and were also active participants of the Communist Party of USA, whose role and reputation of fighting for workers rights and democracy attracted them (Ruiz and Korrol 2006; Vargas 1997). The accounts on Latina labor leaders, who organized women in the garment industry, also tells us that Latina women made up a considerable number of garment workers and were seen as a potent force that needed to be mobilized. Luisa Moreno (1907-1992), a U.S.-born Guatemalan organizer, was instrumental in organizing Latinas working in garment factories in Spanish Harlem, an experience that would lead to her diverse organizing efforts across the country (Ruiz 2004). Emma Tenayuca was a key Mexican-American activist and organizer in the San Antonio labor movement in the 1930san event of great significance in Mexican-American labor history (Vargas 1997). As a High School student and native Tejana, Tenayuca helped to organize garment workers who worked in Dorothy Frocks, an infant and childrens wear company, who went on strike. Her leadership abilities impressed these women, encouraging them to become more militant and organize other Latina workers. The emergence of the garment industry in the Southwest coincided with its rise in the Northeast, particularly in New York. By 1925, 17% of Puerto Rican women were employed in

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factory work more than anything other occupation. Between 1930 and 1936, Puerto Ricos Department of Labor placed about 600 Puerto Rican women in response to U.S. advertisements that called for skilled and unskilled workers in the garment industry (Ruiz and Korrol 2006). After World War II, Latinas were increasingly hired by garment industries in New York and in the Southwest. Puerto Rican women became the majority of the Latina women that were hired in the Northeast. By the 1950s, Puerto Rico had become a major export-processing zone for the garment industry in the U.S. Because the U.S. had gained control of Puerto Rico in 1918 and began to significantly shape its labor policies in the 1940s, encouraging Puerto Rican policymakers to push for policies that shifted development strategies based on imports to strategies based on export-oriented industrialization, both Puerto Rican men and women would be pushed into a labor market that encouraged migration to the urban centers of the United States. The garment industry, thus, became central to Puerto Ricos industrialization and in 1948, the Office of Puerto Rico issued a pamphlet which urged for workers in the needlework industry, both men and women, but mostly the latter, are many and are noted for their dexterity and their industry (Whalen 2002). Such actions became part of the ideological construction and discourse of Latina women as women who were naturally suited to perform such a work, a process that Mohanty would call the naturalization of capitalist processes, ideologies, and values through the way womens work is constitutively defined (Mohanty 2003). In other words, this is an example of the many ways that capitalist logic seeks to construct, blend, and reproduce ethnic identities with labor. It is important to not erase the activities which also led to Puerto Rican women positioning themselves in the garment industry. Through social networks, Puerto Rican women helped each other migrate and find garment industry work (Ruiz and Korrol 2006). Many of the

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shops that Puerto-Rican women worked in were shops already unionized by the International Ladies Garment Workers Union and thus, many Puerto Rican women became members of the union. However, a shifting industry would quickly put Puerto Rican women out of work and at loss at finding jobs in the garment industry within a decade. Increase in imports from abroad in the 1940-50s intensified competition amongst garment manufacturers, subcontractors, and smalltime shops that relied on piece-meal homework (i.e. women who were given sewing jobs to do at home). This led to many manufacturers seeking cheap labor across seas or cheap labor in the Southwest in areas where Latina women were non-unionized. Many manufacturers as a result began to subcontract different aspects of garment work to small-time shops and medium-sized factories. The garment industry quickly shifted from a higher paying to a lower paying industry. Between 1946 and 1940, wages in the dress trade decreased from $1.44 to $1.37. Wages in 1950s would only continue to see a downward trend and garment work within factories became increasingly rare for Latina women. Manufacturers became increasingly obsolescent in New York while the number of subcontracting shops increased as garment production was broken down into particular tasks. Between 1953 and 1961, shops operated by manufacturers decreased by twenty-two percent while those operated by contractors only saw a decrease by less than one percent (Whalen 2002). The abundant supply of Puerto-Rican and Black women labor led shops to relocate to areas that were non-unionized. Shops in the core garment area of New York decreased by thirty-three percent between 1953 and 1961. Wages increased slightly in areas where the garment industry was not as concentrated such as in Harlem, Brooklyn, and the Bronx, where Puerto Rican women and Black women worked in large numbers and were paid an average of $62.54 a week in contrast to $88.72 a week in Manhattan in 1961 (Whalen 2002).

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Although 1940-1950 was a key period in which Puerto-Rican women could readily find garment work in the U.S. that paid substantially better than at home in Puerto-Rico, the rapidity to which the garment industry shifted and declined illustrates the hyper-aggressive nature to which garment shop owners and managers sought profit. Constant relocation, both domestically and abroad, saw to the plummeting of New Yorks apparel industry. Between 1947 and 1988, employment in the apparel industry decreased by 54,000 jobs and decreased by another 72,000 jobs within the next decade (Whalen 2002). Less than 150,000 people worked in apparel by 1975. Puerto-Rican women found themselves displaced, in poverty, and increasingly turned towards the state for financial assistance. This era also saw the increase in non-union shops and in illegal homework. In addition to the decrease in wages that women experienced, they also experienced an increase in subhuman conditions as shops went underground. It is important to note here that the globalization of the garment industry, its shift from the Northeast to the Southwest, would see the rise of garment maquiladoras (garment manufacturing in free trade zones) in which Mexican and Chicana women would become the targeted labor force for such work (Guendelman and Silberg 1993; Louie 2001). Once again, note the continued reliance of Latina labor in garment/apparel work in the U.S. To put it in an international perspective, the 1990s would also become an era of the rise of the garment industry in Bangladesh and the Philippines. Dominican women encountered the declining garment industry in the 1970s and 1980s that had put thousands of Puerto-Rican women out of work. Like Puerto Rico, the facilitation of Dominican women migrating to the U.S. for garment work was accomplished through exportprocessing zones and policies that focused on an export-oriented industrial labor with foreign investment in the Dominican Republic (Whalen 2002; Pessar 1991). Establishing free trade

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zones with the permission of the Industrial Incentive act of 1968, Dominican policymakers exempted garment industries from local taxes, custom duties on imported capital and semifinished goods, and from duties on exported capital and goods. U.S. garment manufacturers and subcontractors were practically given free territory and access to cheap labor in the Dominican Republic. Wages in the Dominican Republic were significantly lower than wages in the United States and were declining (Whalen 2002). In the 1980s, U.S. Apparel workers earned an average of 7.00 per hour. Between this period and the 1990s, Dominican womens wages decreased from $1.33 to $.56 per hour. Industrial exports grew to $850 million by 1991. Similar to Puerto-Rican women, Dominican womens participation in the labor force grew steadily while those of men declined. The increase in economic expansion and industrial exploitation would promote the waves of Dominican immigration to the U.S. post the Dominican Revolution. By 1990s, immigration to the U.S. averaged over 26,000 people per year and by 1997, 832,000 Dominicans lived in New York with 60% percent being concentrated in New York (Whalen 2002). Despite the economic downtowns of the 1970s, the garment industry was open and welcome to the hiring of Dominican women. Dominican women were largely undocumented in this period. Dominican women largely found work in either domestic service or the garment industry. By 1980s, Dominican women were participating more in the labor force than all women city wide, averaging fifty percent of the labor force compared to forty-percent of all women. Similar to Puerto-Rican women, Dominican women helped each other find jobs in the garment industry through social networks. Most Dominican women whom migrated to New York and found garment industry jobs where either from villages that were quickly experiencing industrialization or from urban areas in which free trade zones were established, such as was done in the capital,

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Santiago. While Dominican women, like Puerto-Rican women in the late 1960s, were paid poorly in the U.S. the wages in the U.S. allowed them to live better than they did at home. Most Dominican women found work within nonunion shops. In a study of Dominican women in the apparel industry conducted by Grasmuck and Pessar (1991), many Dominican women voiced that the garment industry was virtually the only avenue open for female immigrants with little to no proficiency in English. Many informants also cited that the reason for leaving Dominican Republic was that wages in the Dominican Republic made it virtually impossible to support themselves and families back at home.

Latina Woman Organizers in Los Angeles: Daughters, Mothers, and Leaders

Maria A. Gutierrez de Soldatenkos study of Latinas who organized garment workers with the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) is an illustration of how Latina labor leaders bring a gendered and ethnic politics to their organizing (2002). This study shows how Latina leaders own experiences with exploitation, racism, sexism, and the ideological construction of women as housewives, informs their organizing practices and their consciousness about their location and history in the world. They have used their own experiences to challenge and resist the multiple and complex forms of oppression that they experience at work, in organizing other Latina garment workers, and at home. The interviews she conducts dispels the myth and notions that Latina leaders had no political consciousness, no reading of power, no understanding of the racialized, genderized aspects of their work, and the construction of Latina

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leaders as organizationally nave. At the time of Soldatenkos study, the ILGWU was still operating independently and organizing garment workers in Los Angeles, Texas, and New York. In 1995, the ILGWU merged with the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Workers Union (UNITE). Soldatenkos study takes places in Los Angeles during the 1990s where Latina organizers and leaders of the ILGWU had set up and ran The Justice Center, a center that publicized and transmitted knowledge to garment workers, and a site where workers mobilized and discussed strategies of organizing and improving conditions in their workplaces. The Justice Center was consistently run and headed by Latinas, whom maintained and strengthened relationships amongst the immigrant community in Los Angeles. Immigrant women overwhelmingly made up the membership of the ILGWU in Los Angeles. Despite the evidence that Mexican and Chicana women played a significant role in organizing garment workers, in building solidarity and consciousness amongst garment workers, the leaders of the Justice Center and their efforts were largely ignored and curtailed by the management and supervision of the union, whom were largely white and male. Latinas did not exercise direct power as a result of this racial and gendered hierarchy, but their organizing work in the Justice Center was a space where this union hierarchy was challenged. The majority of the women that Soldatenko interviewed came from families who faced financial hardship: children in these families had to work and struggle from an early age.(Soldatenko, p. 49). From these experiences, these women learned early on in life to develop a strong sense of obligation and connection to families. Their direct contact with poverty, their class background, and their status as immigrants reinforced their awareness of their location as women of color within society. While the cultural norms and logics of the family life

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dictated that a woman should stay at home and that a womans work was at home, it was through this close relationship with the family that women realized their leadership abilities. Soldatenko argues that many of these women were capable of good leadership and responsibility because of their role as mothers and caretakers of the family. Laboring for the family instilled in these women a sense of agency, community obligation, meeting human needs, and communal justice. While the family was the site where notions of housewife and mother were reproduced, ideologies that Mohanty refers to as domestic ideologies which naturalize the role of women and labor in the household, the family also served as a site of consciousness transformation and a space where liberation could be articulated. Many of the women from the Justice Center came from large families who provided an atmosphere of political consciousness and education. These women came from families who were politically active, families where grandmothers, grandfathers, aunts, and uncles enticed the younger generation to become aware about social issues. Many women had also learned about organizing, political participation, and radical ideas through their spouses. At the same time, families and family life deeply instituted notions of gender inequality, notions embedded in the division of labor between womens and mens work at home. Womens obligation to housework and taking care of their children restricted the time they could devote to organizing. In many instances, many of the Latinas were expected to fulfill the obligations of organizing and still maintain the household. They were expected to engage in political work without any modification to their labor in the household, an expectation which normalized and reproduced their role as a housewife and ignored their critical role as political leaders. Husbands could spend as much time organizing without worrying about maintaining children. This ideology of womens work at the home as invisible or as not qualifying as real labor is a common experience for Third World women and women of color

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who balance a life of taking care of the family and working in factories (Mohanty 2003; Louie 2009). Notions of what constitutes wage-labor work and what does not work to reproduce and strengthen the naturalization of housework as gendered, as outside of the larger capitalist production process. These notions have historically construct men as workers and women as non-workers. According to Mohanty, this is one of the ways that capitalist processes exploit gendered and racialized ideologies; exploit the work of Third World women, whose work in the household socially reproduces the family, the husband, and the community as bodies and locations of consumption. Latina garment workers, however, were not passive to this gendered division of labor. Many became vocal about this unfair arrangement in the household and experienced tensions with their husbands as a result. Therefore, even though the family was the central unit and a social responsibility that reinforced Latinas women sense of gender and domesticity, the family was also a site of contestation, resistance, and growth. The family was a site where Latinas contested and negotiated their political identities. Many of the younger Latinas whom participated in the Justice Center had to confront the disapproval of their family members, whom insisted that union work was not work for a seorita. One of the Latina leaders recounts her difficulty of working for the union without the support of her mother: I would get home at eleven in the night, and my mom was furious. Sometimes my mother slap me for getting home so late. She never understands what type of work I was doing. (Soldatenko p. 51) This kind of resistance to family expectations, to gender expectations, was a resistance repeated in organizing work, where Latinas resisted the expectations of union staff, whose distance from the membership and immigrant community led to a series of counterproductive acts. This kind of resistance also became necessary to demystify notions and ideologies of Latinas as passive, uneducated, and unskilled in political activity

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notions which the union management used to undercut Latinas from any central decisionmaking. Many of the Latina leaders and organizers had a strong background in garment work. They reported that working in the garment industry as children, or watching their mother work in garment factories allowed them to immediately understand the gendered, sexualized, and classed nature of the work, the domestic and sexual ideology inherent in the idea of women reproducing clothing in the factory or doing piecework at home. At the same time, many of these women had confronted racism and sexism with garment managers and owners when they worked in the garment industry. Because of this, many of the leaders and organizers could relate to other garment workers and emphasized the importance of ethnicity and gender in their politics. Many of the Latina organizers also felt that the best strategy of organizing women in garment industry was through direct participation as a garment worker. Organizing campaigns had huge success rates when workers organized other workers. This organizing strategy was one of constant debate between the leaders at the Center and the union management. While Latina garment workers had commonly experienced racism and sexism, this did not result in garment workers getting along harmoniously. Organizing Latina garment workers of different ethnicities sometimes posed a challenge because of racial and cultural assumptions that workers made about other garment workers. At the same time, there was tension between Latinas who had received more education than other Latinas in the Justice Center, a tension created because education was a symbol of class mobility. For this reason, Latina organizers found it even more crucial to discuss and debate race and class, and synthesize a view that would unify all the garment workers of all ethnic and educational backgrounds.

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In addition to having been exposed to conditions in garment sweatshops, many of the Latina women from the Center expressed having been involved in grassroots political work prior to their work for the union. Some of the women had organized and participated in Cesar Chavez campaigns, others worked directly with Marxist organizations that introduced them to radical politics and grassroots organizing. These activities gave these women the experience and confidence necessary to speak in public, to build relationships with diverse communities, and to bring their awareness of cultural nuances to their organizing and political philosophy. This earlier introduction that many garment workers had which radicalized them would become a source of fear for the union management. The Center risked systematic purges and removal of workers whom demonstrated too much independence, or whose thinking evidenced any signs of communist or socialist ideology. Being purged from the center meant that a garment worker could not take part in discussions, events, and meetings, was publicly humiliated, and barred from returning to the Center again. Despite this consistent repression, many of the organizers and garment workers confronted the racist, sexist, and classist practices of management and risked being removed from union membership. Stephanie Herreras account (2010) of her mother and Maria Pieda, a laborer in the Garment Worker Center of Los Angeles, highlights similar experiences of injustices within race, gender, and class dynamics in organizing. Herreras mother arrived in Los Angeles, California in 1979 and decided to work straight away in underground factories to support her husband and children. Organizing in the factories she was employed in was a strong taboo; employers prohibited workers from even talking about it. By the 1980s, however, union organizing and labor politics became more prevalent and accepted in the factories where she worked. As workers became more interested in the idea of organizing, and flyers and cards started to be

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passed out, managers and owners began a campaign of repression against workers who were caught organizing (Herrera, p. 34). Workers that participated in organizing efforts were systematically fired. Similar to the Latina women from the ILGWU Justice Center, Herreras mother felt that her role was restricted to taking care of her family and making sure that she could keep her job. Even when workers began to get involved in strikes, Herreras mother was too afraid of losing her job: She wanted to remain a good wife and mother, and expressing her loyalty to her cowokers and devoting time to a labor cause took time away from her house hold responsibilities(Herrera, p. 34). Here we see how concerns for the family and the social construction of families as a primary responsibility can restrict women from developing themselves as political leaders and serve as a blockade for organizing. But we also see how the very class background and the status of women as immigrants also puts them in a highly vulnerable position. Researchers have endlessly documented how garment factories and the global assembly line targets such women for these reasons; women who have a heavy responsibility to provide for their families, women whose financial situations are desperate, women who are embedded in cultures that reproduce unequal gender norms, and whose status as undocumented makes it easy to bargain cheap wages and relocate (Mohanty 2003; Louie 2001; Gimenez 2010;Sudbury 2004) . The end result of the organizing and striking campaigns that took place was garment factories closing down and relocating. Maria Piedas story sheds more light on what it is like for a Latina to participate in a labor movement. Her experience is well-documented in the documentary titled, Made in L.A. (2007), a documentary which follows the lives of three women in the garment industry of Los Angeles, California. Pieda is a Mexican mother of three, a wife, and a leader in the garment

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movement in Los Angeles. She discusses her struggles in attempting to juggle the tasks and activities that each role and identity requires. Each role prescribes her with a racialized, genderized identity, as well as an identity that has to contest with the economic exploitation she faces as a garment worker. She recounts being married to a man who enforced strict traditional gender roles and was also abusive. When she begins to become active in the labor movement, she is confronted with making very difficult decisions about being a traditional housewife, being a good mother to her children, and her commitment to see the working conditions and lives of her co-workers improve. In the end, Pieda realizes that she was born a leader and she makes the decision to leave her husband and join the labor movement. It is interesting to witness in this case study the different outcomes for two Latinas who were grounded in a similar situation and faced with having to negotiate between a political lifestyle, which meant challenging traditional cultural scripts of gender and engaging in a critique of capitalism, and the role of a mother and wife, where the expectation is to conform to gender norms and confine herself to taking care of her family. Nonetheless, we witness in these case studies how race, gender, and class dynamics constitute both the experiences and the identities of Latina women, and that the degree to which these experiences and identities are used to organize and raise consciousness heavily impact the outcome of organizing and mobilizing garment workers. The contradictions that these Latinas confront in the emphasis of their identity as a housewife/mother and as a political leader who must also confront discourses of race, gender, and class is a tension that labor movements that wish to successfully organize women of color will have to deeply understand and analyze. Furthermore, this understanding and analysis cannot happen without an analysis of how capitalist processes, logics, discourses and its mode of

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production altogether benefit from this artificial dichotomy of women of color who do housework they are not paid for, and also must find wage-labor to support and reproduce their families. The following case study shows more specifically how capitalist markets have an impact on the organizing work of Latinas in the labor movement, and its impacts on the race, gender, and class dynamics of the workers.

Organizing Women and Challenging the Capitalist Market: La Mujer Obrera

Benjamin Marquezs study (1995) of the organization, La Mujer Obrera (LMO), an organization based in El Paso, Texas and well-renowned for organizing garment workers and fighting to eliminate workplace abuses, is crucial in understanding how the same market forces that drive garment sweatshops to abuse and exploit workers can also adversely affect organizing efforts. I agree with Mohanty that we are currently living in times where organizing is becoming harder as a result of the saturation of globalization, neoliberalism, and the complete naturalization and apathy towards the processes of production. Marquezs study does not just shed light on this phenomenon, but also discusses the very organizing practices and the racial, gender, and class ideologies that garment workers are embedded in and have to overcome. More importantly, the organizing efforts and the successes and failures they result in also determine the extent to which racial and gender subordination is reproduced. This speaks to the points raised by Bannerji, Carpenter, and Mojab that race, gender, and class are part of and reproduced in human activity. Labor movements, and the collective actions they result in, will impact the actions that employers, corporations, factory shop owners take and the extent to which they will reproduce the very race, gender, and class dynamics that labor movements are

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critical of (i.e. who they will hire and not hire as a result, which group they will target, whether or not they will address discrimination). Marquez argues that international competition and the labor intensive nature has raised insurmountable barriers to LMOs mobilization efforts. At the turn of the 1990s, garment industries in El Paso, Texas moved their factories out of the country, depressing both wages and the rate of employment in El Paso. This free-market strategy of running factories, closing them up, and moving along is extremely profitable. This has left most garment workers with the threat of losing their jobs, few resources to organize, and the pressure to also leave El Paso in search for work. The movement of manufacturers out of the country echoes the same result that occurred when manufacturers in New York quickly relocated in the 1940-1950s, while Puerto Rican women heavily relied on this industry for employment. The proliferation of small-time subcontracting shops that are competing with larger factories and manufacturers, as well as other subcontracting shops, prevails during periods of the intense search for cheaper labor. As machinery to produce clothing also becomes less expensive, small, marginal enterprises become quite easy to establish. These conditions make it extremely difficult for any labor-based organization to organize workers. The successes of LMOs campaigns in the past have relied on their ability to collectively organize garment workers and push for unionization. In a market where garment factories and shops can easily close up and move on, it is difficult to organize any set of workers consistently. For this reason, LMOs efforts have turned largely to winning individual cases of abuses. This approach and strategy however has undermined the broader goal to collectively organize a movement and transform the garment industry. LMOs own inception grew out of a successful unionization drive at Farah Manufacturing Company in 1974 which mobilized 4,000

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workers. More importantly, LMO was formed by a group of women who recognized the heavy overtones of race, gender, and class in garment workers. The Latina organizers that Marquez interviewed realized that one of the barriers to organizing women has been strong discrimination against Mexican-American women. MexicanAmerican women, both as organizers and workers, are discriminated by employers whom they try to bargain with, and unions that attempt to organize in the garment industry. LMO organizers also maintain that one of the greatest difficulties in organizing has stemmed from the roles they are assigned in traditional Mexican culture. LMO activists have been accused of neglecting their spouses and husbands while committing hours to the labor cause, an effort that is viewed as selfish: They argue that these roles not only predispose some women to be dependent on men, but also make them feel uneasy about engaging in political activities (Marquez, p. 68). The treatment of women as subordinate, dependent people is reinforced in the actions taken by management in the factories in which they work: racial slurs, personal insults, and arbitrary dismals are used by management in order to maintain high levels of productivity(Marquez, p. 70). Utilizing gender and racial stereotypes to speed up the production process is precisely how the capitalist mode of production benefits from such discourses and has historically maintained them. One of initiatives that LMO activists have taken in overcoming the deep socialization that Latinas are born into, and encouraging Latina women to also challenge traditional gender roles, has been investing money in political education classes. The intent of these classes has been to make women more aware of the processes that drive the garment industry, their own location within the garment industry, and to foster political identity and solidarity amongst women. A strong emphasis has also been placed on critical thinking that deconstructs notions and images of

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race, gender, and class stereotypes. Discrimination however is not only relegated to the household, as witnessed in the previous case studies. Another barrier to organizing Mexican-American garment workers is discrimination from unions, particularly from the ILGWU. For example, in 1991, a strike took place against four garment factories organized by LMO. Once the decision was made to organize and call a strike, the ILWGU all male strike team swept into the scene and dismissed the LMO organizers as a group who didnt know how to run a real strike (as quoted in Marquez, p. 69). Unions in the past have consistently utilized racialized and gendered stereotypes to maintain a management team of white males (Dickerson 2011). After similar experiences with other unions, LMO chose to disassociate itself with unions and refuses to work with them. Such fragmentation and injustices committed by labor organizations in the long-term only weaken the organizing capacities of small non-profits like LMO who are a unique position to organize Latina garment workers. In the course of Marquezs study, the competition between subcontractor shops and garment manufacturers has only intensified to the extent where even organizing efforts to pressure employers to pay wages and offer benefits has been futile because employers themselves have been unable to turn out a profit, let alone have the capacity to offer benefits to workers. The results of such a stagnant economy have led LMO to call for public investment in the garment industry on a national level. Realizing that LMO as a small group in the long-term cannot do much to actually change the infrastructure of the industry, a national economic development policy that focuses on high paying jobs and better technology has been on LMOs agenda. The current trends within the garment industry show that without an public intervention or investment on behalf of seriously unstable industries such as the garment industry, high

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unemployment and the deterioration of low-income communities will continue and deepen. Benjamins study while conducted in the 1990s bodes crucial insights for the current status of the labor movement in the U.S. The garment industry has declined severely in areas like New York, Los Angeles, and Southwest and its presence has increased in other areas such as the maquiladoras in the U.S.-Mexican border, factories in Bangladesh and the Philippines, free trade zones in Haiti. The proliferation and intensification of the free trade zone has been caused by the relentless demand for profit and cheaper labor in not just the garment industry, but in the electronics, textiles, and toy-making industry (Louie 2007; Mohanty 2001; Milkman and Terriquez 2012; Sudbury 2004). The racial, gender, and class dynamics only continue to become more evident as these industries shift around looking for women of color who face a hostile globalized world and future. The impact that these dynamics have on organizing women, reproducing identities, and challenging their material and ideological foundations cannot be ignored for much longer in a serious discussion of organizing for liberation.

Conclusion

As I was writing and finalizing this paper, one of the worst industrialist disasters in history has taken place, an event that I found both coincidental and horrifying. On Wednesday, April 24th, an eight-story commercial building, the Rana Plaza, which housed thousands of garment factories collapsed near Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh (Voice of America, 2013). At least 930 people were killed; half of the victims were women. Most of these garment factories are responsible for making clothing for Western retailors such as Joe Fresh and The Childrens Place. The death toll continues to rise as I write this. This deeply troubling and tumultuous event

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is currently sparking rage and despair against the globalized garment industry that relies on the exploitation of women of color, and is indifferent to the conditions in which they work in. It is my strong conviction that now is the time for feminists, academics, activists, working people, those of us who are motivated to struggle for a world liberated from the unnecessary oppressions that capitalism breeds, to organize and build solidarity amongst women in the Third World and women of color. While the garment factory movement has died within the last twenty years in the United States, the immigrant movement is growing in our century. This movement can be a strong basis for building international solidarity with women working in the extremely perilous conditions of garment factories in Bangladesh and women of color working in the global assembly line elsewhere. Further research on Latina women in the U.S. Labor movement and their lives is heavily needed in this critical moment of globalization and backlash against labor struggles. Latina women in the garment industry, in maquiladoras, in factories will share both similarities and differences with their comrades, their sisters, their co-strugglers, in Third World countries. But as Mohanty states, it is their status as women of color exploited by globalized capitalism and neoliberalism, as women of color whom the labor movement ignores, that will unify them and allow them to transcend these borders. It is this commonality that will allow them to envision and utilize what Audre Lorde called the creative use of difference. In other words, Lorde refers to using and thinking of differences, not as methods to sharpen and alienate peoples from one another, but using differences to challenge each other, to help each other grow, and to enrich and enliven solidarity. My interest in using a Marxist-feminist theoretical framework lies in my hope that we can use theories which can demystify borders and contradictions, as well as help us to build new bridges in our practices.

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