Gay Young – författare

As the issue of immigration between Mexico and the United States becomes more critical, it is increasingly important that we understand the process of development in Mexico's northern border region. This collection of essays offers an empirical analysis of development in Ciudad Juárez, with an emphasis on the social and spatial contexts in which economic relations occur. The analyses are framed by a general discussion of urbanization, migration, and industrialization, considered in light of the history of Mexico's northern frontier. Contributors recount the city's pattern of urban growth in response to the natural environment and the changing national culture and examine current patterns of land use, especially as compared to similar development in other Latin American cities. Other issues considered are the impact on household activities of the structure of women's participation in the maquiladora work force; the city's use of its human resources, especially in off-shore assembly activities; and the foreign orientation of the Juárez economy.

As the issue of immigration between Mexico and the United States becomes more critical, it is increasingly important that we understand the process of development in Mexico's northern border region. This collection of essays offers an empirical analysis of development in Ciudad Juárez, with an emphasis on the social and spatial contexts in which economic relations occur. The analyses are framed by a general discussion of urbanization, migration, and industrialization, considered in light of the history of Mexico's northern frontier. Contributors recount the city's pattern of urban growth in response to the natural environment and the changing national culture and examine current patterns of land use, especially as compared to similar development in other Latin American cities. Other issues considered are the impact on household activities of the structure of women's participation in the maquiladora work force; the city's use of its human resources, especially in off-shore assembly activities; and the foreign orientation of the Juárez economy.

How has globalization worked for women working on the frontlines of neoliberalism on the Mexico-US border? This border divides "US" from "Others," and produces social inequalities that form a site where marginalized border women encounter the othering power of neoliberalism and confront inequalities of gender and class. Within this context, a critical comparison of socially similar women, working either in export production industries or in small-scale commerce and low-level services in Ciudad Juárez, reveals how export factory work constrains women’s empowerment at home – as well as the wages they earn and the well-being of their households. This volume challenges the neoliberal rationale of "empowering" women to support market growth, and argues instead for understanding women’s empowerment as a process of transformation from disempowerment by gender power relations to challenging masculinist domination in households and, ultimately, the economy and society. Because structures of gender and globalization are mutually constituted, women’s empowerment as gender democracy is integral to producing alternative, democratic globalization. Using a feminist methodology that gives attention to the standpoint of women located on the downside of social hierarchies and takes into account strategically diverse points of view, this study develops analysis to counter neoliberal globalization as it touches down in the lives of ordinary women and men on the border and beyond.