Fires on the Border: The Passionate Politics of Labor Organizing on the Mexican Frontera
Rosemary Hennessy
Abstract
The history of the maquiladoras has been punctuated by workers’ organized resistance to abysmal working and living conditions. Over years of involvement in such movements, this book’s author was struck by an elusive but significant feature of these struggles: the extent to which organizing is driven by attachments of affection and antagonism, belief, betrayal, and identification. What precisely is the “affective” dimension of organizing for justice? Are affects and emotions the same? And how can their value be calculated? This book takes up these questions of labor and community organizing—its ... More
The history of the maquiladoras has been punctuated by workers’ organized resistance to abysmal working and living conditions. Over years of involvement in such movements, this book’s author was struck by an elusive but significant feature of these struggles: the extent to which organizing is driven by attachments of affection and antagonism, belief, betrayal, and identification. What precisely is the “affective” dimension of organizing for justice? Are affects and emotions the same? And how can their value be calculated? This book takes up these questions of labor and community organizing—its “affect-culture”—on Mexico’s northern border from the early 1970s to the present day. Through these campaigns, the text illuminates the attachments and identifications that motivate people to act on behalf of one another and that bind them to a common cause. The book’s unsettling, even jarring, narratives bring together empirical and ethnographic accounts—of specific campaigns, the untold stories of gay and lesbian organizers, love and utopian longing—in concert with materialist theories of affect and the critical good sense of Mexican organizers.
Keywords:
maquiladoras,
affection,
emotions,
community organizing,
affect-culture,
Mexico,
labor organizing
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2013 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780816647583 |
| Published to Minnesota Scholarship Online: August 2015 |
DOI:10.5749/minnesota/9780816647583.001.0001 |
Authors
Affiliations are at time of print publication.
Rosemary Hennessy, author
Professor of English and Director of the Center for the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Rice University
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