<i> Maquiladora </i> Women Finding Freedom

When Belen Luevano de Ortega, 59, came to the border 12 years ago to support her dying husband, people told her that only women of dubious reputations worked at the maquiladora assembly plants. She settled for a miserable $3 a week as a live-in maid.

But when her daughter, Alicia Ortega, 36, joined her two years later, the younger woman couldn’t care less what people said. Ortega jumped at a manufacturing job--in spite of a husband who wanted her home with the children.

Ortega’s firstborn, Elvira Gutierrez Ortega, 20, is also a factory worker, but she dreams of becoming a lawyer. Though the women struggle to support five young children, Gutierrez refused to marry her abusive fiance--even when she discovered she was pregnant.

Today, great-grandmother Luevano realizes that her hard-working, church-going daughter and granddaughter have become the unconventional factory women people warned her about.

And she’s glad.

“Women are more liberated here,” Luevano said. “I envy them.”

These women are the foot soldiers of a quiet blue-collar revolution in Tijuana that is slowly spreading from the border into Mexico.

Prompted by economic crisis, the immigration to the United States of male heads of household and the demand for female employees at border factories, these women, like Rosie the Riveter of World War II America, were the first to break en masse into Mexico’s male-dominated industrial workplace.

Their relative autonomy, accelerated by liberal U.S. social attitudes and economic benefits that drift across the border, has fueled a grass-roots shift that has rippled throughout border society, granting working-class women an unusual degree of domestic clout and social freedom, experts say.

“The forces of progress are stirring themselves up much more along the border,” said Susan Tiano, a University of New Mexico sociology professor and author of “Patriarchy on the Line,” a book on the impact of the maquiladoras on border gender roles. “Some amazing changes happened.”

Gender Barriers, Low Pay Criticized

Some experts take a dim view of the border workplace revolution. They say low pay--the average wage is around 80 cents an hour--compulsory pregnancy testing, sexual harassment and gender barriers to higher-paying jobs prevent factory women from raising their status.

But all agree that three generations of blue-collar women are creating a new female archetype in Mexico. In his latest novel, “The Crystal Frontier,” Carlos Fuentes casts the maquiladora women of the border, in a struggle for equal footing at home and at work, with aspirations that defy the self-sacrificing feminine ideals with which they were raised.

“The maquiladoras did sort of liberate women,” Tiano said. “They offered women a wedge into the work force which they could use to bid for autonomy in the home and the community. Husbands decided their wives and daughters could work without defaming the family or challenging their masculinity.”

Most of Mexico’s 1 million maquiladora workers--60% of whom are women--work along the border, boosting the female employment of key border states to the highest rates in Mexico, about 40%. In the southern states from which workers migrate, female employment is much lower, between 26% and 30%.

One in three Baja working women have jobs in manufacturing, many side-by-side with men.

Some occupations and even factories are still segregated by gender, and women are generally relegated to the lowest-paying tasks, even if they share them with men, U.S. experts say. Still, many women now perform typically “male” tasks, such as welding.

Since female-supported families are on the rise in Mexico, experts say the fate of these women may determine whether the maquiladoras are a trampoline for upward mobility or the creator of a border underclass whose only hope is to immigrate to the United States.

“There is a paradox when it comes to maquiladoras and women,” said Harley Shaiken, a UC Berkeley professor who is an expert on Mexican labor issues and the global economy.

“A young woman who goes to work at a maquiladora experiences an unusual liberation. She’s playing a different role, often as principal breadwinner,” Shaiken said. “The maquiladoras free women from the social constraints of the village but introduce new obstacles in the factories.”

It was something of an accident that the border became a vanguard of female employment in Mexico. In 1970, only 17% of Mexican women worked--the lowest percentage of any comparable Latin American country. Many were maids.

Mexican officials were not planning to hire women when the manufacturing program began, according to Tiano. The maquiladoras were intended to employ men left jobless in 1965 by the end of the 20-year U.S. temporary work, or bracero, program.

But foreign factory owners had employed women in Asia and the Caribbean, and found them a meticulous, responsible work force likely to remain in low-wage jobs and not agitate for unions.

When the factory owners insisted, Mexican officials relented, and by the early 1980s, 90% of Tijuana factory workers were women.

The expanding employment is a magnet for migrant women, and today, for the first time, slightly more Mexican women than men migrate to Baja California.

Just a few years ago, experts say, Latina immigrants followed men. But now many, like Belen Luevano, a deceptively frail-looking great-grandmother, come alone.

Luevano began the family exodus in 1985. Jobs were scarce in her central Mexican hometown, Aguascalientes. Luevano’s husband was bedridden with an “ulcer”--a common misdiagnosis of cancer among Latin Americans too poor for proper medical attention.

Broke and alone in Tijuana, Luevano became a live-in maid.

“People told me the factories were very dangerous for women. They said the women fell prey to vices, and went around with one man after another,” Luevano said.

That negative stereotype was once so common that Mexican officials mounted a campaign to reassure the public that factory work would not defame “decent” women.

But then her daughter, Alicia Ortega, arrived, fleeing a substance-abusing first husband. Factory work seemed the best option.

At first, the devoutly Catholic Ortega was shocked by Tijuana, where freewheeling social mores are reinforced by liberal Southern California. Over the years the city has provided a refuge for Prohibition-era drinking, abortion, quickie divorces, philandering by U.S. Navy sailors and interracial marriages banned in California--earning it a reputation for tolerance or depravity, depending on the point of view.

The big city lives of Ortega’s factory girlfriends stunned her.

They came and went as they pleased, working night shifts and shopping at 24-hour supermarkets. Women hit the discos on weekends, with or without male escorts. Some wore tight pants and miniskirts. Those who had flings with men were discreet but unashamed. Unmarried mothers were not pariahs.

To Ortega, they seemed unrepentant heretics of the machista gospel that men flaunt their virility whenever possible while women are judged harshly for their perceived lack of chastity.

“There are many things women do here that if they did them back home, people would say ‘Oh my God! What has she done?’ ” Ortega said. “Here, some people might talk, but it doesn’t brand you. In the south, when people start gossiping, doors close on you, and you change your ways.”

Manuel Valenzuela Arce, a Baja think-tank researcher, says the factories have expanded the “spatial freedom” of Tijuana women. After three decades of round-the-clock shifts, the sight of unaccompanied women on the streets late at night is hardly unusual enough to raise eyebrows.

“The purity and reputation of a woman is very carefully guarded in provincial cities,” said Evangelina Mijares, a gender researcher at the United Nations office in Mexico City. “Women who come and go late are not decent women. People say, what is she asking for? It reflects on the family honor.”

Changes in Patriarchal System

Experts say the easily available employment has diminished the authority of working-class patriarchs accustomed to ruling the home. Some fear this sparks domestic tensions that flare into abuse.

When Ortega remarried, she continued to work--while her mother watched her four young children--against her husband’s wishes. He began to disappear for weeks, turning up to make jealous scenes at the factory. He stopped supporting the family. If Ortega quit work, he told her, he would be a “good husband” again. Ortega sadly asked him to move out.

“Many women in the south fear leaving their husbands,” Ortega said. “They say, ‘How will I survive alone?’ Here, there are more opportunities, so the idea is not so remote. If you can’t take it anymore, you get a divorce.”

Elsewhere in Mexico, experts say, Ortega would pay a social penalty.

“Working-class Mexican women are never supposed to leave their husbands--no matter what they do,” said Mijares of the U.N. “Provincial society rejects them. Their families and society build a wall around them.

“The women on the border have absorbed North American values. They are beginning to demand equality,” Mijares said. “Their economic independence plays a role, but I think the weakening of family and societal pressures plays an even greater role.”

Although the maquiladoras are cited as crucial to weakening cultural barriers to female employment, they are less proven as a means of upward mobility.

Plants pay little. Peso devaluations have reduced average factory salaries from $1.70 to 80 cents an hour--the 1970 wage.

High schools are far from worker shantytowns. So if workers cannot afford to pay for the buses, their children must leave school after sixth grade.

Tuberculosis is common in shantytowns. This winter, nearly 40 people have died of cold-related illnesses in Tijuana. At least one froze to death.

Even the World Bank recently warned that Latin America will not prosper if the increasingly urbanized working poor--particularly women and children--are paid below the poverty level and denied health care and education.

Discrimination against women is rampant in the assembly plants.

In one academic study, women factory workers listed “machismo” second only to economic difficulties as their most pressing problem.

Foreign factory managers often tacitly encourage discrimination by treating female workers in a manner that would be illegal in the United States or Canada, whose free trade treaty with Mexico facilitates the maquiladora industry.

Requiring women to test negative for pregnancy as a condition for employment is a standard practice at many of the 2,700 maquiladoras along the 2,000-mile border, according to the New York-based Human Rights Watch. Women who become pregnant are sometimes fired. Examiners often question women on how often they have sex or what birth control they use.

Mexican human rights groups say such testing, designed to avoid maternity benefits, is unconstitutional, and the U.S. Labor Department recently told Mexico it deplores the practice.

But in Tijuana, the tests are reportedly common at Japanese, American, Korean and Mexican factories, according to U.S. labor officials and Human Rights Watch.

Guadalupe Santana, 36, said she was tested nine months ago at a Sanyo plant even though she told officials there she had been surgically sterilized.

“It didn’t bother me,” shrugged Santana, who later quit because cleaning chemicals were peeling off her skin. “You want the job, and you do what you have to to get it.” Sanyo executives did not return requests for comment.

Widespread Harassment

Sexual harassment is reportedly endemic.

Dr. Adela Moreno, a physician at an assembly plant for Japan’s Matsushita, another company criticized by Human Rights Watch, said she watched a manager at Matsushita caress the buttocks of each woman he passed on a welding assembly line. A married mother of six was told to sleep with her boss or lose her job, Moreno said. When she complained, he accused her of stealing. The woman got severance pay only after Moreno made her the cause celebre of a radio campaign, she said.

A Matsushita representative in Tijuana said she had never heard of the incident.

“It’s a vicious cycle of poverty and exploitation,” Moreno said. “They promised the maquiladoras would provide skills, education and day care. Instead, they hold beauty contests and the kids grow up on the streets. The fact that people are willing to work at border plants doesn’t mean they benefit society.”

Some factories are better than others. Ortega makes $1.50 an hour at an American electronics plant and is treated with respect. The on-site benefits--a school with grades 1-12 and English classes--are so tempting that Gutierrez just quit her 80-cents-an-hour job at another factory so she can work with her mother and finish high school there.

Still, Ortega couldn’t afford Christmas presents for the children this year because she needed the money to fix the leaky roof. The family’s tap water stopped abruptly because her husband had never paid the bills.

Sometimes she wonders if they should move back home.

Last April, the family returned for the Aguascalientes fair. One teenager insisted on wearing a miniskirt and midriff top, an outfit--like many things in their new lives--common on the border but rare in the heartland.

“Everyone stared at her,” Ortega said with a sigh. “In Aguascalientes, they say only loose women dress that way.”

And in Aguascalientes, the children’s future seems dimmer. Gutierrez’s cousin got married two years ago--at 13. She is already a mother.

But Ortega no longer compares herself with the women back home. Now she measures herself against a friend in Los Angeles, who married a different kind of man, started a Tijuana business with him and emigrated.

Ortega, a fourth-grade graduate, wants a better life for her daughter. But how can she go to the university if the family is barely surviving?

“The maquiladoras have given [women] both an extraordinary new promise and a grim reality,” said expert Harley Shaiken. “It has opened up vistas that were unimaginable back home. They see the dream, but it disappears when they try to grab it.”

But some women have made it. And Ortega wants her daughter to be among them.

“These women have accomplished something historic,” said Mijares, of the U.N. office. “This has broadened their world tremendously. In many cases, it is the daughters that go beyond.”