Global issues in contemporary Hispanic women's writing

Carolyn Tuttle led a group that interviewed 620 women maquila workers in Nogales, Sonora, Mexico. The responses from this representative sample refute many of the hopeful predictions made by scholars before NAFTA and reveal instead that little has improved for maquila workers. The women's stories make it plain that free trade has created more low-paying jobs in sweatshops where workers are exploited. Families of maquila workers live in one- or two-room houses with no running water, no drainage, and no heat. The multinational companies who operate the maquilas consistently break Mexican labor laws by requiring women to work more than nine hours a day, six days a week, without medical benefits, while the minimum wage they pay workers is insufficient to feed their families. These findings will make a crucial contribution to debates over free trade, CAFTA-DR, and the impact of globalization. The book visits continuities and discontinuities among Spanish and Latin American women with regards to the ways in which they approach writing as a political weapon: to express ecological concerns; to denounce social injustice; to re-articulate existing paradigms, such as local versus global, violence versus pacifism, immigrant versus citizen; and to raise consciousness about racist, sexist, and other discriminatory practices. Such use of writing as an instrument of ethical and political exploration is underlined throughout the different articles in the volume as the authors emphasize pluralism, social justice, gender equality, tolerance, and political representation. This book offers readers a broad perspective on the multiple ways in which Hispanic women writers are explicitly exploring the social, political, and, economic realities of our era and integrating global perspectives and gender concerns into their writing, highlighting the unprecedented level of sociopolitical engagement practiced by 20th and 21st century Hispanic women writers.