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THREADS THAT BIND
A Testimonio to Puerto Rican Working Mothers
Maura I. Toro-Morn
Feminist scholars have written eloquent accounts describing and analyzing the dehumanizing and exploitative conditions found in the global assembly line (Fernandez-Kelly 1983; Bose and Acosta-Belen 1995; Safa 1995; Chang 2000; Parreñas 2001; Salzinger 2003; Nash 2005; Colón et al. 2008). In the past twenty years, a voluminous body of scholarship has helped map out the conditions of working mothers and daughters across Asia, Latin America, and Africa. We know that “women have become the new industrial proletariat in export-based industries” (Jaggar 2001, 305) and that gender stereotypes of Third World women workers as submissive, passive, and secondary earners continue to lure investors to the global South. Women workers across the global South have been subject to low wages, long working days, sexual harassment, horrid working conditions, and few prospects for advancement. Women across the world take these jobs out of sheer necessity, but also because it provides some meaning to their lives as women and mothers. The task of making visible the experiences of women workers in the global assembly line has sharpen the analysis engendered by earlier feminist work on the productive/reproductive continuum. Sociologist Joan Acker captures the issue best when she states that “women have been subordinated in both domains, held responsible for unpaid reproductive labor and consigned to positions with less power and lower pay than men within the sphere of production” (2004, 23).
At the other end of the global assembly line, feminist scholars have also called attention to the political economy of higher education and its connections to globalization practices. Chandra Talpade Mohanty writes, “We have witnessed a profound shift in the vision and mission of the nineteenth-century public university to the model of an entrepreneurial, corporate university in the business of naturalizing capitalist, privatized citizenship” (2003, 173). In the corporate university, race, nationality, and gender figure prominently as tropes of the new ideology of difference and multiculturalism and as systems of exploitation and subordination. As in the global assembly line, women—in particular women of color—play an important role in the corporate university. The contours of these processes cut through my own life in profound ways: I am part of the Latina/o “brain drain”—the movement of educated Puerto Ricans to continue our education in the United States, many of whom, like myself, have become incorporated as part of the immigrant professional social classes (e.g., college professors, engineers, and accountants, among others) (Toro-Morn 2010). In that context, motherhood for me has meant trying to balance the corporate university’s growing demands with the challenges of raising a bicultural, bilingual son and the struggles of maintaining a transnational family. At the broadest level, my essay for this volume contributes in a very personal way to documenting how social class, race/ethnicity, and gender have shaped my experiences as an academic working mother in a transnational context. Here, I draw upon the feminist tool of testimonio. The Latina Feminist Group defines a testimonio as a “tool for Latinas to theorize oppression, resistance, and subjectivity,” a way to capture “Latinas’ complex, layered lives” (2001, 19). According to this group, “We all carry within us the memory of homelands, communities, families, and cultural traditions that situate us in our life trajectories as writers and teachers. Not merely celebratory or nostalgic, these ‘stories’ also capture the ironies and difficulties of becoming successful, accomplished women” (21). Made up of feminists and privileged academic women, the Latina Feminist Group introduced a new “praxis within testimonio traditions” as we Latinas make ourselves the subjects and objects of our own inquiry and voice, a practice I attempt in this account.
In keeping with this definition, my testimonio as a professional working mother in a midwestern university is connected to my mother, Rita Julia Segarra Ramos, a retired factory worker from the export-processing zone of Mayaguez, Puerto Rico, and to my “other mother,” Chispa (her real name is Heremita Martinez, but everyone calls her “Chispa” as a nickname). Thus, it is an attempt to reveal and capture what connects us as workingwomen and mothers. It is a testimonio to their lives of struggle and sacrifice and to who I am today because of them. It is an attempt to capture this herencia (legacy), but, more important, it is also an attempt to recognize el hilo que nos une (the thread that binds us).
In the first part of this essay, I describe my mother’s experiences as a working mother. My mother belonged to the generation of Puerto Rican women who became incorporated as a source of cheap labor in the modernization program Operation Bootstrap (Operación Manos a la Obra) that transformed the island from an agricultural to an industrial economy. Here, I claim my herencia as a “daughter of Operation Bootstrap,” a name coined by Luz Acevedo (2001) to describe the experiences of many of us who came of age under the auspices of this modernization experiment that took place in Puerto Rico from the 1940s to the 1980s. In that sociohistorical context, gender and social class became salient characteristics of our lives. Next I describe and analyze my experiences as a working professional mother in the U.S. academy, arguably a different type of assembly line where race, gender, and social class intersect in significant ways. In the conclusion, I attempt to capture the threads that connect my mother’s life and my own and the significance of this story at this historical moment.
THE MOTHERS AND DAUGHTERS OF OPERATION BOOTSTRAP
U.S. colonization of and imperialism in the Americas helps contextualize the role that Puerto Rican women across social classes have played in the global assembly. As Alice Colón-Warren and Idsa Alegria-Ortega (1998) point out, what we know presently as the maquiladoras in export-processing zones across the Americas were first adopted and tried in Puerto Rico under Operation Bootstrap. Puerto Rican women encountered different social and economic conditions that shaped their incorporation as workers throughout history. In the 1950s, they became an identifiable source of cheap labor for the industrialization model, Operation Bootstrap, the program that transformed Puerto Rico from an agricultural to an industrial economy (Ríos 1990). A gendered and racialized ideology underpinned much of the development model in that “the basis of these policies was the regulation of women’s reproductive behavior, not the redefinition of gender relations” (Colón-Warren and Alegria-Ortega 1998, 105). Migration, a process connected to the development of export-processing zones, has also marked the experiences of Puerto Rican women and men across social classes.
My mother was part of the massive labor force of working-class and poor women and men who became the backbone of the industrialization model. My vivid memories of her life and struggles as a factory worker for Proper International, a manufacturing company making uniforms for the U.S. military, overlap with the ever-growing body of scholarship produced in the past twenty years that reveals the experiences of Puerto Rican working mothers (see, e.g., Ortiz 1996). But these memories—far too numerous to capture fully in this essay—are punctuated by pain, hers and my own. Daily and weekly struggles to meet production, frequent complaints and frustrations about management, and fears of being laid off impacted our lives in profound ways. Through her actions and dedication to being a mother and a worker, she modeled for me a way to reconcile these identities. Today I affirm my commitment to my work as a professor–intellectual worker with the same passion that I affirm my desire to be a good mother; for me it is not one or the other, it is both!
Yet in spite of a life of struggle and hardship, my mother’s identity and affirmation as a working woman shaped my own awareness of Puerto Rican women’s struggles and my evolving commitment to feminism. Work was oppressive, though she would not have used such a word. She “gave her life” to the factory (as she would put it, “Le di mi vida a la fábrica”). As a single mother, she didn’t have many options. She supplemented her wages by selling merchandise in the factory, an income-earning strategy that has come to characterize working women throughout the Caribbean (Freeman 2001). Among the happy moments at work was when los Americanos came to visit the plant, and she had an opportunity to interact with them. For a fleeting moment, their praise erased years of back-breaking labor, harassment, accidents on the shop floor, meager salaries, and the ever-present threat of closing—a prevalent tactic that continues to be used to keep the workers from organizing collectively.
A single working parent, my mother struggled to balance work and family demands, just as many women of her generation did in Puerto Rico and Puerto Rican communities in New York and Chicago. One strategy Puerto Rican working women have used to secure care for the children is to hire other family members or neighbors as help (Toro-Morn 2001). It is not clear to me how she became friends with Chispa, “my other mother,” but I know that beginning when I was three years old, Chispa cared for me. Her family became my non-blood-related extended family, a term I coined to explain to friends my complex family arrangements. She began to care for my brother, Jose, when he was only days old because my mother had to return to work shortly after his birth. To this day, my brother calls both Chispa and our mom “Mami.”
Chispa and her husband, Pablo, a police officer, lived down the street from our house and represented the model of the “traditional family” that is frequently praised and celebrated as the backbone of Puerto Rican society. Chispa and Pablo had three kids, Marlyn, Miriam, and Pablo, whom today I consider my siblings and their children my nieces and nephews. My mom waited for her ride to work every morning in front of Chispa’s home, which added some security to the dangers of waiting by the side of a country road where cars frequently exceeded posted speed limits. Chispa was a devoted wife and stay-at-home mom. She did not learn to read and write until she was an adult, in contrast to my mom, who had an eighth-grade education. As far I can remember, Chispa never left the house or went to town alone during my formative years. After her husband died, she started walking to town and enjoying more freedom. She represents what has been depicted in much of the social science and popular literature by and about Puerto Ricans as “the traditional Puerto Rican mother” (Safa 1995). I know that my mother gave Chispa a little bit of money from her paycheck every week, offering evidence that challenges cherished notions that mothering equals being a non–income earner. Puerto Rican feminists and scholars have worked very hard to demystify gendered tropes of “traditionality” that defy the lived realities of Puerto Rican women (Toro-Morn 2008). Chispa and Pablo provided for us the safety of a nurturing home and siblings who became college educated and served as role models. All of them went to college and became part of the growing professional class of Puerto Ricans on the island, a celebrated outcome of the Bootstrap model.
As I write these notes, more details about this part of my life continue to surface, too many and too complex given the space limitations of this essay, but a few words about my father are necessary here. The story is far too painful to “birth in writing,” but suffice it to say that my mother could not marry my father because he was already married when they became involved, revealing yet another untold dimension of many Puerto Rican families—the “other woman” phenomenon. My father was not completely absent. We visited him and my loving paternal grandparents frequently, but he was not willingly involved in our care and well-being. Although my mom initially resisted the idea of taking him to court to force him to own up to his financial responsibility as a father, she eventually relented. His financial support, even when enforced by the court, was inconsistent and uneven, though.
I struggled through the formative years of my life with the gendered tropes of motherhood (re)constructed against the backdrop of a modernizing Puerto Rican landscape. I know that part of my own awakening as a woman and as a feminist was a complete rejection of the gender socialization I received in Puerto Rico from my mom, my other mother, my extended family, school, and larger community. I don’t know if my mother understood what getting an education meant and how that came into conflict with the tropes of being a good wife and mother that seemed to be so cherished historically.
I also know that my mother wanted something better for me. She did not want me working in the factory. In many ways, she had internalized a new paradigm for Puerto Rican women: “Estudia por si acaso tu esposo te sale malo” (Educate yourself in case your husband turns out to be a bum) (Acevedo 2001, 144, translation added). Women of my generation coming of age in the late 1970s were told to perceive education as a fallback in the event that their marriage falls apart (Acevedo 2001). It is ironic that I didn’t feel ready to be a mom until I was supposedly “medically” passed my “reproductive childbearing age”—that is, forty years old. Although getting pregnant was not easy, once I became pregnant, I turned to the task of motherhood with the same discipline and dedication that I turned to my doctoral dissertation and academic career.
EDUCATION, MIGRATION, AND WORKING IN ACADEMIA
Education became a modernization trope that was hard to escape. “Tienes que estudiar y hacerte una mujer profesional” (You must study and become a professional woman) was the constant cry from everyone in the barrio, my family, and public-school teachers. I began my educational journey as a political science major in a small liberal arts college, Interamerican University, on the western coast of Puerto Rico. I wanted to go to college in Ponce, forty-five minutes away from my home, but in keeping with my mother’s deeply gendered notions, it would have been unthinkable for me to live away from home. I could go to college, but I had live at home under her watchful eye. Education fueled my budding feminist consciousness in ways that my mother had not anticipated, however, creating many conflicts and tensions between us. By the time I had finished my undergraduate degree, the pressure to fulfill traditional gender expectations had become unbearable for me. My ticket out was doing exactly what they wanted me to do: “hacerme una mujer profesional” (become a professional working woman).
I added a chapter to the family’s (and the country’s) history of migration when the opportunity to pursue graduate studies in the U.S. Midwest presented itself. My migration, however, was part of what I have come to identify as part of the “Puerto Rican brain drain,” the movement of educated Puerto Ricans to continue our education in U.S. universities (Toro-Morn 1995, 2005). In fact, the migration of educated and professional Puerto Ricans became even more pronounced in the 1980s and 1990s (Aranda 2007). According to anthropologist Jorge Duany (2010), this migration has intensified in the past five years and has shifted to a new site of settlement, Orlando, Florida. The movement of working-class and educated Puerto Ricans and their incorporation in the U.S. labor market have been connected to the failures of the modernization program in Puerto Rico, the ongoing colonial situation, and current globalization processes.
From 1983 to 1993, I pursued graduate studies at Illinois State University, the University of Connecticut, and Loyola University. As a graduate student, I entered an ethnoracial landscape shaped by social class and racial dimensions that were foreign to me at the time. I have devoted my academic career to studying migrations, people in movement, crossing borders real and imagined. I, too, have crossed many borders in an attempt to find an intellectual home in sociology, ethnic studies, feminist studies, and more recently Latino studies. Each space has been complicated for me as a Puerto Rican/Latina woman for different reasons. Sociology was a complicated space for me because I selected to study topics that at the time did not seem mainstream (gender, migration, intersectionality), and I sought to deploy principles and assumptions drawn from my engagement with feminist theory and methods. I became adept at crossing intellectual borders, at speaking different languages, and at recognizing potential dangers.
As a Latina/Puerto Rican woman, an immigrant, a Spanish-speaking daughter of a factory worker in an export-processing zone, I became part of a corporate assembly line at a time when “diversity talk” became a significant ideological trope in universities across the nation (Dominguez 1994a, 1994b). Diversity talk has become an institutional way to organize strategic planning, hiring documents, curricular offerings, and vision statements. With diversity talk comes the celebratory perspective that erases the socio-historical experiences of the many groups that have been part of the U.S. experience, and in the process a new form of marginalization has developed. This ideological trope of the corporate university contributes to what Alyssa García has labeled the “commoditization of race and gender” and “cultural taxation” processes encountered by faculty of color across academia (2005, 261). More broadly, faculty of color are recruited to address problems of absence and underrepresentation in academic institutions and—though frequently not overtly—to serve as tokens. A vast number of studies shows that once recruited, faculty of color frequently find themselves isolated, ghettoized, and overburdened with committee and service assignments (Segura 2003; García 2005), problems I myself have faced in the twenty years I have been part of academia.
In the United States, universities are highly stratified institutions subject to change under the auspices of local, national, and global privatization strategies. In the global assembly line of the professoriate class, the pressures of quality control and productivity come in the form of yearly academic evaluations, publish-or-perish imperatives, student evaluations, and demands made on one’s time on the basis of diversity initiatives. These issues for women, in particular working mothers, become a source of a great deal of tension, anxiety, frustration, and institutional discrimination. Throughout my career, I have faced my share of problems and difficulties that stem from my position as a woman of color in the university assembly line. One difference between my own situation and my single working mother’s is that I have a husband’s economic and emotional support, which allows us a comfortable and modest middle-class existence.
EL HILO QUE NOS UNE … THE THREAD THAT BINDS US
The thread that binds working women is that, whether we are aware of it or not, we are (have been) actors in the global assembly line. By working in an export-processing zone, my mother played an important role in the industrialization model that “modernized” the island. She occupied a space in the global assembly line shaped by social class and gender exploitation. Her working experiences shaped her own social class awareness of struggle and sacrifice, values that also came to characterize her mothering practices. She knew she was exploited and mistreated, and she sought refuge from that in her identity as a working mother. To her death, she was proud of her work en la fábrica, in the factory. She was also keenly aware of the struggles and problems she faced as a single mom and tried to balance work and family roles. My other mother, Chispa, supported her family and ours with her reproductive labor, which included not only cooking and caring for us, but, more important, emotionally dedicating herself to us, even though my brother and I were not her biological children. I, too, have ironically come to occupy a peculiar space in the corporate assembly line that characterizes U.S. universities today. As a Latina/Puerto Rican academic, my experiences are shaped by race, social class, and gender differentiation as well as by the microaggressions that characterize life in academia for so many women of color (Toro-Morn 2010). But I love what I do! Although there have been much pain and confusion and many emotional scars, I return to the classroom every year renewed by the conviction that our society requires an educated population, critical thinkers and citizens capable of speaking truth to power.
I have recently come to discover that my life is connected to the women of my mother’s generation in even more profound ways. On Father’s Day 2008, my mother suffered a debilitating stroke that left her bed ridden and paralyzed. A fiercely independent and physically active woman now faced the fourth stage of her life with a fortitude that is admirable and at times defies explanation. A few days after her stroke, I flew to Puerto Rico to care for her, unaware of what this meant for us and my families, the one I left in the United States and the one I was returning to on the island. In the most recent chapter of our lives, a transformation in our roles as mothers and daughters unfolded. I have become part of a large group of Latina women, transnational mothers, caring for families on both sides of the ocean, in my case my aging mother (Alicea 1997; Aranda 2007). For a Puerto Rican woman living and working in Illinois, this physical and emotional work is done in a transnational space, an added dimension to my evolving responsibilities as a working mother.
At my mother’s hospital bedside, I rediscovered her friends from la fábrica, women whom I knew by name from my childhood, but whose faces I did not recognize. They collectively belong to a generation of Puerto Rican women who found themselves as historical agents in the development of export industrialization in Puerto Rico. As women workers, they were subject to hard working conditions, humiliation, and exploitation—problems that have been well documented by feminist scholars both in Puerto Rico and the United States. A quality that has always impressed me about these women workers is their strong sense of identity as working mothers, their solidarity as workers, and their long-lasting friendships and sense of obligation to each other. Their resiliency, commitment to and pride in their work, and sense of justice are values that connect them to women workers across the hemispheres.
In the past two years, there were many close calls, many moments in which it is clear that my mother was saying good-bye and coming to terms with the inevitability of death. It is in those moments that she and I were able to speak openly and honestly to each other and recognize how much we mean for each other and how in spite of a life of struggle, conflict, and pain, it was our deep sense of love via our mother–daughter bond that continued to sustain us.
My mother died shortly after midnight on September 23, 2011. I wish I could tell you that her passing was peaceful and quiet. It was not! As a working-class woman, my mother labored through her death like she did through most of her life. But I do know that she faced it with valor and strength, qualities that characterized her. My mother was a very strong, resolute, fiercely independent, generous woman who loved deeply and passionately. More than two hundred people came to the funeral and paid their respects. The mayors of Cabo Rojo (our hometown) and San German (my brother’s place of residence) came, as did our islandwide senator and many of her coworkers at Proper International, the factory where she worked for more than thirty years.
I spent night and day at the hospital with her during the last week of her life. I bathed her everyday and fussed to make her comfortable. During most of that week, she was in and out of consciousness. The parallels between birthing and dying are striking. I became a different woman the day my son was born. The day my mother died, I also became a different person. The world is not the same without her. Meghan O’Rourke’s account of her mother’s passing in the book The Long Goodbye captures the experience best for me: “Nothing prepared me for the loss of my mother. Even knowing that she would die did not prepare me. A mother after all, is your entry into the world. She is the shell in which you divide and become a life. Waking up in a world without her is like waking up in a world without sky: unimaginable” (2011, 10).
I cared for my mother in a transnational space; now I must learn to grieve her entre mundos (between worlds). There is so much missing here that I feel lost. Where do I put my grief? What do I do with myself? Where can I go to see her, to remember her? The cultural differences in how people grieve are also striking. Here in the United States, grief is private, personal, contained. There in Puerto Rico, grief is open, public, ritualized, and communal. As an intellectual who has devoted a significant part of my academic life to exposing the intersections of social class, race, and gender in the Puerto Rican experience, I wrestle with scholarly notions that continue to portray women as stripped of agency because of culture. I know that my mother did not have many options—such are the hidden injuries of social class—but she made the best of her situation. Today my brother and I are evidence of her life of struggle and her agency as a woman and a worker. It is an agency that I affirm today as a professorial worker and claim as mi herencia como mujer y madre (the heritage passed on to me as a woman and a mother).