At Your Service:
Latin Women in the Global Information Network
By Coco Fusco

From The Bodies That Were Not Ours and Other Writings
(London and New York: Routledge/iNIVA, 2001)

Continued:

I began my own inquiry into the maquiladora by stumbling on a bit of history that has become for me a kind of parable, a tale about performance and technology, women, sex and death. While I was travelling over a year ago, I heard a story about an art event that took place in 1980 in which a male artist in Los Angeles underwent a vasectomy--as performance art--and videotaped it for public viewing. As a prelude to this technological intervention upon his own body, he confessed that he had deposited his last seed in the body of a dead woman. To obtain the body, he crossed the border into Mexico. According to his account, he paid $80 for one hour of access to a female cadaver and complied with his procurers' requirement that he make no visual record of his sex act, but he did make an audiotape. I later learned that his peers were reviled by his confession, and that some took measures to suppress its circulation in the media, which eventually led to his leaving the country claiming that he was a victim of rabid feminists. 

Nearly twenty years later, I discovered that I knew several of the witnesses. His critics sought to respect a collective pact of silence they hoped would kill the piece's power as a consensual hallucination about transgressing the "human" by crossing the boundary between life and death. His defenders sought to disassociate the performative gestures from their socio-political referents, thus positing the aesthetic dimension as transcendent. One art historian suggested, for example, that the fact that dead women could be made available posed disturbing ethical questions about Mexico, but had nothing to do with what was a purely aesthetic act on the part of the artist. Shortly after I began my inquiry, the records of the performance were unearthed for a major museum exhibition in Los Angeles, and the curator in charge took pains to dismiss the original controversy as irrelevant. In fact, a colleague of mine who worked in the education department of the museum at the time of the exhibition recalls that the chief curator specifically rejected staff questions about the ethics of the piece. When I finally had the opportunity to communicate with the artist, via Internet, and asked what he recalled about the woman, he refused to answer any specific questions, referring me instead to his web site.

This minor footnote of performance history became a harbinger of the contemporary scenarios of feminine sacrifice and effacement in the border zone. There was that artist, exhibiting a portrait of himself on the operating table willingly turning himself into an object of medical science to express his desire to detach himself from his body's procreative function, playing a tape of his transgressive rejection of his generative capacities, a gesture that required that an-other place and an-other person serve him in silence and then, disappear. Here am I, wondering, some twenty years later if the underlying act of transgression ever existed, if it has any cultural implications, what the investment is in suppressing them, and why the status of the performance as art demands a reluctance to consider the dead Mexican woman as significant. 

Not being able to determine who this woman was, or even know for certain if she ever existed, I found myself speculating about who she may have been. Several people suggested to me that she was probably a prostitute. At first I read this simply as their attempt to explain how her body could have been left unclaimed in a morgue, but as I heard it repeated over and over again, I started to wonder if this imputed identity as a socially outcast woman who in life chose to sell her body didn't serve to shut the lid on discussions of the ethics of the male artist buying time with her for sex after death. 

As I continued on my search, I learned that there were thousands of young women living alone in the border regions of Mexico, and that many of them shuttle back and forth between brothels and assembly lines depending on the vicissitudes of the job market and their health. Drawn to the border from rural villages by the possibility of employment in the maquiladoras, they come to these bloated border cities that lack support systems for such a rapidly growing workforce. The twilight zones of science fiction pale by comparison to this world of industrial parks filled with gigantic hangars bearing corporate logos and red light districts with half broken neon signs, gated fortresses perched on grand boulevards and mazes of cinder block and tin shanties along dirt roads, rows of tires wedged into hills of poor barrios to hold back mudslides and a corrugated steel wall stretching for miles along the border to hold back the immigrants; shopping malls and toxic waste dumps, truck depots packed with portable entertainment centers and forests of abandoned cars. The telephones, televisions, toys through which we channel our interaction with the virtual flow out of this world, shielding from view a parallel flow of illicit desirables, from commercial sex to narcotics to involuntarily donated organs to scores of undocumented human beings.

Some people say these are revenge killings against a new class of women with bigger paychecks than their male peers. A criminologist reported to the police years ago that they were probably victims of a serial killer, and a committee of family members protests publicly for an investigation on a regular basis, but little effort has been made by law enforcement to pursue this matter. Even less attention is paid to the environmental conditions that increase the possibility of such violence from taking place.

The fact that the maquiladora workforce is nearly three-fourths female could be said to put pressure on traditional notions of family and female status within it. But the extent to which this increase in industrial employment can be read as female underclass empowerment depends on how one accounts for other key factors. It was an overall drop in real value of wages, brought about by the monetary devaluations and deregulation that brought them into the maquiladora and catapulted their male counterparts across the border or into the underworld of subemployment and crime. A substantial proportion of them are single heads of households without access to childcare or other services that would traditionally be provided by extended family networks. Entry age is 14, which allows management to capitalize on their inexperience. 

With the exception of the garment industry, whose practices are less ageist, workers are usually forced out of the maquiladoras by 35, cutting off the possibility of more experienced workers assuming positions of leadership. Their pay--usually between 30-40 dollars a week--is higher than the country's minimum wage, but provides them with less than what is needed to feed a small family on a daily basis. Their presence in the industrial workforce may eventually compel organized labor in Mexico to acknowledge that this shift in the gender composition of its constituency should be reflected in the orientation and composition of leadership. 

These advantages also enable management to exercise excessive invasiveness toward workers with little fear of reprisal. These management actions range from unwarranted searches of personal belongings and sexual intimidation, to the gratuitous control of bathroom use in the name of productivity quotas. 

The need to discipline the biological functions of the female body so that workers serve more efficiently, results in somewhat paradoxical behavior from management. On the one hand, enormous pressure is often exerted to discourage and even prevent pregnancy (including dispensing contraceptives and making pregnancy tests a mandatory component of job applications, though this is a violation of international law). On the other hand, single mothers' sense of responsibility for their children's welfare is sometimes manipulated to justify extending work hours and demanding increased productivity. The women are brought in contact with hundreds of female peers on a daily basis which might suggest possibilities of association, but in some plants they are compelled to stand far enough apart not to be able to hear one another, or to wear earplugs, or to have their conversations monitored even during breaks. 

Their move out of the informal economies of domestic service and street vending onto the assembly line, in theory, entitles them to benefits such as social security, medical care, and maternity leave, but these benefits are easily withheld, and often require protracted and costly legal battles in order to be obtained. That they live in makeshift dwellings, segregated in cramped neighborhoods devoid of basic services encourages them to band together to steal electricity from wealthier areas to light their streets and homes, but telephones and computers are beyond their reach. I interviewed a woman worker who ran a small black and white television in her home off a car battery, but the majority can hardly afford to purchase one.

Now, if you think that I am painting a bleak picture because I cannot perceive any of the benefits wrought by the new technological revolution, let me concede that while these border zones filled with transients, traffickers and tourists pose more dangers, they also offer greater possibilities of association to women than one might have in a small village or in domestic service. While intellectuals debating the benefits of technology may be still caught up with the legacy of Luddites, I couldn't find any among the people I've spoken to or read about. No one I interviewed longed to return to a pre-technological environment. 

Every worker, labor lawyer, human rights activist and economist I questioned accepted economic integration and the expansion of free trade as the inevitable future. Though there are plenty of popular expressions that characterize the border as a twilight zone and foreign companies as malevolent, most people I interviewed had a much more nuanced perception of the maquiladora and their managers, differentiating between the degrees of repression and harassment and showing appreciation for and acceptance of authority they deemed fair. On the other hand, many workers choose to ignore health hazards and violation of privacy out of economic desperation and lack of information about their basic rights. What they seek is the means, both local and global, to reduce the violence of the process by improving labor and environmental conditions and forcing multinationals to adhere to laws they now transgress with impunity. 

Nothing has been more beneficial to achieving this end than the expanding networks of grassroots feminist, labor and environmental groups, international human rights organizations and other NGO's that form the transnational "public sphere activism" that counterbalances multinational corporations' global networks. They are veritable channels through which global citizenship is politically activated. 

The strategies of these entities reflect awareness that traditional, single-issue, nation-based forms of political subversion directed at the state and nation-based legal systems are inadequate means of fomenting change in the digital age. Instead, they apply ongoing pressure on an international level via countersurveillance and direct action at key points (which include commercial and state institutions). As I have already mentioned, electronic communication is a key component in the orchestration of these activities and dissemination of information. It is also a critical means of generating financial support for oppositional political movements that are strategically denied sustenance at the local level. The organizations play a leadership role in shaping direct action by politicizing consumption, advocating boycotts of particularly heinous multinationals as a means of altering their policies and practices. 

The most difficult question for me to address however, is what to do with these issues as an artist. In her excellent essay on the intersections and gaps between postcolonial and electronic media theory, Maria Fernández noted that while postcolonial work has made the question of history central to its inquiries, electronic media theory (and much art as well) rejects history as irrelevant or reduces it to recombinant visual data.⁷

I count myself among those who find these erasures profoundly disturbing, especially when I recall that it was in the wake of real technologically generated disasters in the 20th century that survivors have implored us never to forget. At this point, I only have questions, not answers. Is the centrality of corporate sponsorship for aesthetic development in the field of digital media encouraging self-censorship of historical subject matter? Is the role of "public art" in the age of simulation to provide doses of "reality," to politicize the "loss of the referent" by asking who suffers the greatest loss or gain when a cultural milieu finds a theoretical justification for jettisoning imaginative engagement with the social? How can technologies that are promoted as the means for dissecting the physical world, of extending our physical and mental capacities, and of creating an imaginative realm beyond the social be brought to bear imaginatively upon the social itself? Is there a creative halfway point between the investigative reporting of Internet activism, and the anarchic antics of irreverent hackers who create a momentary ruckus by tampering with official electronic records? Is there a way to intertwine reality and fiction that does something other than convey that life looks more like a movie or that we would prefer to live in one? 

Looking back at the vast bodies of literature, photography, cinema and video that provide us with an imaginative chronicle and critique of the impact of technologies on human societies up to now, can we remain open to the revelatory power of an image that bears a trace of the real without interpreting this as tyrannical or manipulative of realism or literalism? Does this mean, as I now suspect, that electronic artists who refuse to forget about history will have to tease out the possibilities of telepresence? Or has the limited success of earlier forms of media activism, coupled with the obvious financial incentive to support rather than critique new media made such questions uninteresting or irrelevant or impossible to answer?

One could argue that an industry in which women are so highly represented is thus more feminine, but this approach would confuse presence with power, and ignore the strategic elimination of opportunities for their subjective intervention in the production process and of external support systems. One could assume that the maquiladora will do for them what the factory, the secretarial pool and the early telecommunications industry did for European and American working class women, that is: get them out of the house and make them financially independent. However, the industrial revolution's working class and the digital revolution's service sector cannot be collapsed into each other that easily. 

Digital technology has restructured work so as to perfect the extraction of profit by decentralizing production and minimizing the intervention of and remuneration to the laborer; and there are plenty of sociological studies that indicate that what is offered by the export processing and service sectors are dead end jobs. Since it reshaped the nature of education and leisure to serve the interests of business--aiming at the formation of an efficient and consolidated economic network complete with programmed leisure--there is no reason to expect that it will naturally broaden the possibilities for political engagement. 

If we embrace the idea that the digital revolution has altered our social and political lives and made us members of a global culture, then we are also compelled to acknowledge that we participate in a global economy with networks that connect us as consumers to these women as producers. The degree to which we perceive their exploitation as necessary, or as an evolutionary stage (both common arguments used by neoliberal economists and maquiladora management) depends largely on the degree to which we cast the digital revolution as politically neutral. To do so is to deny that economic leverage is its politics. The extent to which we affirm our link to their situation is contingent on whether we are prepared to contemplate an emerging politics of global citizenship. 

Following the methods that have been elaborated by other cyber-activist efforts, political engagement begins with assuming the role of witness, exercising pressure via oppositional surveillance tactics and refusing the role of passive consumer. What their lack of access represents for me as a cultural producer exploring the possibilities of new media, is a challenge to expand the imaginative and metaphorical dimensions of telepresence, collapsing cultural and geographical distance so as to broaden and strengthen a sense of connection to them.

© 2001, Coco Fusco - From The Bodies That Were Not Ours and Other Writings
(London and New York: Routledge/iNIVA, 2001)

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