Reading Day 4
DeterritorializationRM #essay, #deterritorialization, #onion
How deep could you peel an onion? Ciudad Juarez had been, until the last decade of the XXth century, a peaceful border-city rooted in traditional values, which were in nature very gendered. A commerce treaty among the United States, Canada, and Mexico (NAFTA), introduced in 1994, permitted the manufacture of Canadian and American goods in Mexican territory for a much cheaper price than in their homelands. When the production plants began to recruit workers it became evident that employing women—who traditionally were stay-at-home mothers and were in charge of domestic labor— would allow for much lower wages. Their smaller hands and attention to detail, they argued, were also more appropriate for the tasks in the manufacturing processes. The employment of women, although under very precarious and oppressive conditions, shifted the domestic power structures. The role of men became subconsciously threatened as they ceased to be the sole providers of their households. Together with a wave of crescent violence related to drug trafficking women became targets of sexist behaviors and crimes that range from threats, sexual abuse, and murder, which persist until present time. The flows of capital do not know any limitations to the territories it can transgress. We could think of, for example, an onion as a species of capital exploited by man, the capitalist, for his own benefit or greed. The prevalence and dissemination of the onion
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