The document discusses the maquiladora industry in Mexico, where factories are established near the US border to take advantage of low wages. It notes that maquiladora workers earn very low wages, around $1/hour, which is barely enough to survive but allows companies to lower production costs. This has led to the growth of poor suburbs near factories that lack basic services. While the industry has benefited local economies through retail spending, it has also been criticized for unfair labor practices and environmental and health issues stemming from low-wage, exploitative conditions.

1. Fear of Feminism
Why Young Women Get the Willies
Lisa Marie Hogelan (1994)
Jennica Giesbrecht

2. Hogeland believes that the Reagan and Bush
administrations created a new reality for young
women. During this time, many changes were made,
cutting back almost completely on funding and support
for social programs. Hogeland states that during the 12
years of the Reagan and Bush administration feminism
was demonized, created a political and social culture in
which feminism is seen primarily as rebellious and as a
political risk.
“Twelve years of the rhetoric of "special interests versus
family values" have created a climate in which passionate
political commitments seem crazy.”

3. “Fear of feminism, then, is not a fear of
gender, but rather a fear of politics. Fear of
politics can be understood as a fear of living
in consequences, a fear of reprisals.”

4. Homophobia and Dating
Hogeland believes that women fear feminism
because of the constant need to confront
homophobia and the potential that feminism may
limit potential partners.

5. Do you feel that women are still afraid to be labelled as
a lesbian? Or that this fear of limiting the dating pool
is as applicable?

6. Many young women in the process of defining
themselves have yet to decide about things such as
careers, community involvement, or political or public
opinions. Therefore, their romantic explorations and
relationships often become their basis for development.
“Intimate relationships become the testing ground for
identity, a reality that has enormously damaging
consequences for teenage girls in particular.”

7. Feminism provides systematic analysis of oppression,
which is empowering rather than threatening.
However, it requires the full understanding that assault
is a large possibility that all women face.
“Young women who have not been victims of men's
violence hate being asked to identify with it; they see
the threat to their emergent sense of autonomy and
freedom not in the fact of men's violence”

8. Identifying as a feminist requires that
you acknowledge inequality

9. The main point that Hogeland delivers is that feminism
has consequences. Feminism requires you to consider
the consequences to all of your actions, and the
reasoning behind them. It calls you to commit to
something larger than yourself. She believes these are
things that women are afraid to do.
“Women fear anger, and change, and challenge--who
doesn't? Women fear taking a public stand, entering
public discourse, demandingand perhaps getting
attention.”

10. Do you agree that women “fear anger,
and change, and challenge”?

11. Hogeland expresses the common belief that in terms of
feminism, the private is the public. The personal issues
that face women need to be addressed at a public and
political level. She believes this is very threatening to
young women who would prefer to be “left alone”.
Women ignore feminist issues by choosing to not be a
feminist.
“It is far easier to rest in silence, as if silence were
neutrality, and as if neutrality were safety. Neither
wholly cynical nor wholly apathetic, women who fear
feminism fear living in consequences.”

12. “Fear of feminism is also fear of complexity, fear of
thinking, fear of ideas--we live, after all, in a
profoundly anti-intellectual culture.”

13. Hogeland says that feminism is not safe. It is difficult
work that goes against current culture and more often
than not is met with resistance. She is careful to
include that there are many positive aspects to
feminism: it is gratifying and empowering.
“It (feminism) offers--and requires--courage,
intelligence, boldness, sensitivity, relationality,
complexity, a sense of purpose, and, lest we forget, a
sense of humor as well. Of course young women are
afraid of feminism--shouldn't they be?”

14. Are you, or do you believe women should
be, afraid of feminism?
Does feminism require complex thinking?

15. Welcome to the Border
Augusta Dwyers
Michael Buck and Jordan Swait

16. The word Maquiladora comes from the share of
grain a miller would keep in payment for milling
grain during colonial times in Mexico, and refers to
the idea of a single step in a larger process going on
elsewhere

17. Mexico’s Trade Secretariat defines a maquiladora as
any plant where the machinery and raw materials
and temporarily imported only to assembled and
shipped back out again.

18. Collectively these plants are part of an industrial
process known as globalization, whereby
manufacturing has been broken down into a
thousand tiny steps, each worker at times spending
no more than a few minutes on each part of the
production process , and those workers are spread
all across the world.

19. Colonial Roma is typical of living conditions of
maquiladora workers and the low wages that
characterize the industry. The wages are a fraction
of what Canada and US make which is the bottom
line advantage of setting up maquiladora on the
Mexican border.

20. The average wage for maquiladora throughout
Mexico barely exceeds 1 dollar an hour yet the price
of things in Mexico are higher and pushes money
from the Mexican economy over into the US.
According to the chamber of commerce in El Paso
retail sales from Mexican shoppers now add 1
Billion, with smaller American cities gaining in the
10s of millions.

21. In 1982 when the Mexican currency was devalued a
larger number of shops in America went out of
business as Mexican shoppers found the prices too
high.

22. One woman maquiladora worker in Tijuana put it
when asked about coping with such low wages
"Well, you don't really. It barely gives you enough
for food. I just say thank God that even though
they're secondhand from the States, you can still buy
clothes"
in regards to American second hand clothing stores
selling by the pound rather than dollar all along the
border.

23. A consequence to the maquiladora popularity is the
emergence of their under developed suburb. Few
homes have running water, sanitary drainage, or
electricity. The winter is freezing and the summer
boiling. Mothers who work often have to leave their
children alone which often leads to a future of drug
use and gang violence.

24. Conditions are dreadful and municipal authorities
refuse to help because the foreign companies pay no
local taxes, they have no money to provide the
people services.

25. Mexican law absolves foreign companies from legal
suits for work related accidents, this relieves
corporations from hefty payments that they would
be liable for in the US or Canada.

26. Unfair Labour Practices:
●
●
-firing workers for trying to organize
-firing those with enough seniority to earn a
severance package
●
-sexual harassment
●
-hiring minors
●
-closing and leaving town with paying wage or
severance

27. According to the country's natural institute of
geography and statistic:
●
●
83 percent of maquiladora are spread along Mexico
2000 mile long border, employing almost
86 percent of the total workforce

28. 68 according to the American chamber of commerce
are wholly owned by US firms, with another 25
percent coming form Mexican entrepreneurs, most
whom have exclusive contracts to supply
Americans.

29. Are you willing to pay more for goods
that are made in Canada?

30. When shopping for goods do you ever
check where they are made or how ?