A Case Study of Women Maquiladora Workers in Mexico.

This paper is a case study of mobilization by a group of maquiladora workers in Mexico’s northern border region, the Comité Fronterizo de Obrer@s (CFO) (Border Committee of Women Workers). Although sometimes characterized as a community-based organization, the CFO is also seen as an NGO that is part of a larger women’s movement and one that has found alternative ways to help workers claim their rights, through the use of transnational networking. In fact, as we will see in this paper, the CFO has a complex history that has much to do with patriarchal relations and North/South dichotomies and can only be fully understood through a gendered analysis. As one of the first efforts of organizing Mexican workers in the maquiladoras located along the northern border, the CFO is fairly well known in both academic and social activist circles who concentrate on Mexico-US cross-border activism and has been characterized as a great example of empowerment of women from the ground up. The irony is that it is only through a gendered analysis of the context in which the CFO was created that we can realize that the CFO cannot be defined as a purely feminist organization that developed from consciousness-raising efforts such as those espoused by the second wave of feminism. The focus of this paper is to delve into the specific history of the formation of the CFO in order to understand how the CFO developed into an autonomous Mexican women’s worker organization with transnational ties.

http://www.cfomaquiladoras.org/