trabajando en las maquilas de la frontera

The following interview is fictitional testimony loosely based on the lives of several women who have provided information relevant to this subject, the name is fictitional.....

Mi nombre es Rosario Cepeda y soy de Matamoros, Tamaulipas. I began working when I was eleven years old.

--Did you quit school so you could work?

--mmm, no. I still attended secundaria, during the afternoon shift, and i worked for a lady with a bigger house, mostly cleaning and washing clothes.

--you said you went to the school during the afternoon shift, are there night classes for elementary children?

--yes, there are a lot of schools that have shifts in the morning and shifts in the afternoon, I don't think very many are at night--most are in the afternoon--there are usually more classes for secundaria instead of primaria. (pause)

--adelante.

--y pues sí. I did both, and after I graduated from secundaria I could not afford to go to prep school, and I quit cleaning houses, too.

--do you have brothers or sisters?

--yes, I have four brothers and 3 sisters. So that makes four and four... (laughs) I am the second oldest. I have one brother who is older than me, there's-

--so what did you do when you left school?

--well, I just worked somewhere else. In Matamoros jobs are not so easy to find--well, in all of Mexico for that matter, it is pretty difficult to find a job, so we mexicanas just have to make do with what we can and be more...creative with what kind of jobs we can find.

--like what, for example?

--mmm... a lot of women buy little trinkets or dulces and sell them on the markets or in street intersections and sell them to passing cars. But really that is mostly the older women who come from the sierras. They really do not have much of anything, and a lot of them do not speak Spanish, but they still need to eat or they need to make something....the easiest thing to find, I think, is a house to clean if it is nice and la señora is nice enough to give people work. Sometimes when I needed more work when I used to clean houses, I would walk a few blocks away to a different colonia and go up to the houses. It would be easier if la señora was out in the patio or tending to something outside so I could approach.

--did you do that often?

--no. no not really. but, lady's do not usually pay too much for cleaning a house.

--how much did you make?

--mmm. Depends. (pause) it was not a specific hourly wage. (pause) maybe forty pesos one week. usually around fifty. maybe seventy pesos if I went out to another house one day.
editors note (this is the equivalent of between 4-7 dollars a week)
--It was not very much, I know, but it is the easiest thing to do. and if the señora was nice, maybe every once in a while she would give me some fabric she did not need or a little fruit. That way I could make a shirt or maybe an apron.

--how long did you do that?

--I was off and on with those kinds of jobs. Other times I would wash clothes at home for someone else or things like that. when I was maybe seventeen is when I started working at a maquila.

what kind of factory was it?

--it was textile. a lot of times the fabric was already prepared with the design and we had to sew the pieces together. It was assembly...in a way. and it was a lot of work.

--how were the working conditions?

--y'know? Now that I live in the United States I can look back and see that the conditions were very horrible. Even then, before I started working here a este lado, I always felt uncomfortable at the maquila. I knew that there was something wrong about the situation then.

--and how were those conditions?

--A lot of yelling and swearing by the men who were the supervisors. (pause) basically, it was like being in a big warehouse with a lot of other women. There were tables that we all had the sewing machines on. They were bolted to the tables (pause) well, some of them were, others were chained down and others had locks on it to keep it from being stolen, but they shook a lot.--I don't know who could steal a sewing machine like that and get away with it anyway.-- And we all had to stand. There were no chairs and the tables were higher than normal so we all had to stand. mmm, the lighting was not so good. It was not too bad either, but the walls were dark and ugly, and only a single lightbulb hung down over every table...

--how did you come about that job?

--mmmm... (pause) what do you mean?

--i mean, how did you get the job--how did you start working there?

--oh, OK. well, mmm, a friend of mine told me about it. She said that the maquila was hiring at the time and that they were looking for younger girls. I more or less knew how to sew, because I made my own clothes, and they paid sixty pesos a day.
editors note (the pay is roughly equivalent to US $6)

--so you went and applied?

--yes. yes I did. When I went there, I asked them if they had openings and they told me they did. So I waited for a chance to apply. After I sat around for about two hours waiting for an interview or for them to call my name--because they still had not given me any information about applying--they told me and all the other girls there to move into the shop of the factory. They did not even bother to begin an interview or anything like that! One of the lady's working waved down three of us and began to tell us what the job was.

It seemed easy enough, just to put two pieces of fabric together that only needed to be sewed and to make one hundred fifty pieces by the end of the day. It was a lot harder than I thought because sewing all of those pieces together and being precise was very hard at first, and all the girls were struggling, even those who had been there for a while. I stayed there for maybe ten hours doing this kind of work that day. After, I went home tired, my arms could hardly move
and I only wanted to lie down. The next day I went again, and the next day I went again. After about three or four days, one of the foremen who walked around the plant, and a lady who was management of some kind came to me and to other girls who were new to begin asking us questions.

End of PART 1