©2005 by Julia Keister

“In order to craft more just and humane labor relations, workers will need to establish new forms of ‘deterritorialized’ community and overcome legacies of gender. And in fact they are doing so.”1 With these words, feminist Jane Collins speaks to women workers worldwide, announcing that their human agency and collectivity is critical to achieving international equality. This realization warrants a study of Chicana and Latina workers in the United States, due to their historical presence within this nation’s base of international women workers. Included in this collective insurgency are those mexicanas and Latinas who remain undocumented immigrants. Not only must these women form a collective base in order to arrive and remain in the United States, but they often face the additional challenge of uniting in order to battle the exploitative nature of the workforce they encounter. For this research, I utilize Ken Loach’s film Bread and Roses as a central primary source. This film depicts both how undocumented mexicana workers in Los Angeles utilize their families to network across borders, and how these Latinas unite with other multicultural immigrants to form a solid and collective mobilization effort.2 I use this particular documentation because it provides unique insight and perspective into the agency of undocumented Latina workers in the United States, and thus serves not only as a point of reference but also as a base for comparison. Hopefully, at the very least, this study will strengthen the voice and help redefine the “illegal alien” status of the undocumented women laborers that comprise the backbone of our nation’s workforce. A larger ambition remains, however, as this project illuminates and strengthens the presence of the global community of women by offering the perspective and undeniable agency of Latina and Chicana initiators.

The international migration of undocumented mexicanas, Latinas, and other women workers to the U.S. is not a novel phenomenon, yet their rising and lasting presence is unique to the past few decades. Of course, this migration cannot be completely generalized because it is contingent upon the historic, social, economic, geographic and political dynamics of specific countries. Mexico, for example, has an unusually extensive history of contributing to the workforce in the U.S., a relationship that should be traced back to the U.S. appropriation of much of Mexico’s land (the present-day U.S. Southwest).3 Since this occupation, millions of mexicanos/as have crossed the 2,000 mile border to the north in search of labor and eventual remittances.4 Compared to their mexicana predecessors, the immigration of other Latinas is a fairly recent occurrence, with a visible upsurge beginning in the 1960s due to the similar “push and pull factors” induced by the birth of neo-liberalism and its relationship to both gender and oppression.5 Thus, economic transformations led to U.S. intervention, over-population, and deprivation in many Latin American countries and influenced many Latinas to immigrate. The 1965 amendments to the racist Immigration and Nationality Act’s quota system in the U.S. loosened regulations on immigration and attracted migrants to cross the border.6 The legal status of immigrants is in constant flux and is determined by the laws, politics and economics that govern their entry and instigate their exodus. Therefore, like immigration itself, documentation crises escalated with the implementation of neo-liberal politics and have persisted due to changing legislature, such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), as well as the pervasiveness of globalization. As of 2000, there are an estimated 8.5 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S., 77 percent of whom identify as Mexican or Latino.7

Although historical accounts often ignore them, women have been a major presence in this migratory labor force. These neo-liberal pressures were and still are undeniably directed at “ Third World” women, as they “constitute the majority of migrants seeking jobs as maids, vendors, maquila operatives, and service industry workers.”8 This majority is confirmed by growth in the number of female immigrants as a percentage of total immigration to developed countries, from 48 percent in 1960 to 51 percent in 2000.9 Many of these immigrating women undoubtedly achieve a level of economic mobilization and professional employment, yet racialized and gendered inequalities continue to persist. Thus while almost half of the doctors in the United States are foreign-born, “Latinas continue to have the highest concentration of workers in ‘blue collar’ operative jobs and the lowest in management and professions among all races of women.”10 The history of mexicana and Latina immigration is mirrored by ongoing hegemonic political and economic projects that often function to exploit the world’s labor force in terms of race and gender. These policies and exploitations are in part what prompt undocumented workers to form networks of support and resistance.

Through first-hand accounts and various portrayals, it becomes evident that the necessity and stratagem of this coalescing commences well before these traversing workers even set foot on U.S. soil. Thus as a growing number of women are independently deciding or pressured to cross the border into the U.S., they take a courageous risk, which they often attempt to mitigate through the aid of family, friends, or simply other crossers. Nowhere in the U.S. are the dynamics and dilemmas entwined with prohibited immigration more prevalent than at the border with Mexico. In the opening scenes of Bread and Roses, Loach portrays the circumstances and support systems that surround crossing this terrain. Here the main character, Maya, is shown in a desert amongst other exhausted migrants led across the U.S./Mexico border by a guide who constantly screams hurrying demands. The importance of networking is demonstrated in the subsequent scene as the guide collects money from various friends and family awaiting the new arrivals.11 Maya’s experience is mirrored by real-life accounts that similarly mention the chaperonage of a previously arranged guide or “coyote.”

These true stories differ, however, as they depict the various levels of networking that are involved. Lucrecia Tamayo, for example, seeking to flee her abusive husband, explains how she hitchhiked from Acapulco to Tijuana, where she “relied on a female relative, the well-developed migrant ‘underground railroad,’ and a waiting job market,” and successfully “came by el cerro (through the mountains), with a coyote.”12 The Mexico/U.S. border is not a point of entry exclusive to Mexican emigrants. Instead, this boundary has often been the final frontier for millions of Latinas voyaging from all over Central and South America, whose experiences accentuate the complexity of these social systems. Through a series of interviews, Dianne Walta Hart traces the life of Yamileth, an undocumented immigrant, from her departure in Nicaragua to her eventual reunion with her sister in Los Angeles. Yamileth narrates her journey across the borders of Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico and finally the U.S. with four of her young nieces, during which they had to hitchhike, sneak onto “shopping excursion” buses, pay off la migra (immigration officials) and cross treacherous rivers in order to cross the varying frontiers.13 Her account further reveals how Yamileth and her family networked with various women along the way who were either her friends or her sisters’, or even “a humble woman who had an equally humble apartment, and invited (them) to sleep with her because they had few people at her place.”14 Once they reached Mexico, “Uncle Mundo,” Yamileth’s distant relative, aided Yamileth and her nieces and acted as their “coyote” and eventual ticket to the U.S.15 These portrayals and testaments reveal that, although undocumented women are crossing into the U.S. everyday, their entrance often involves great personal strength and the social or familial ties of other Latinas.

Many of these courageous women reach the U.S. expecting to achieve a level of economic freedom or at least gain, yet these visions are often blurred as numerous undocumented Latinas confront exploitative and even abusive job environments. Bread and Roses depicts undocumented women being taken advantage of in various ways, conveying the pervasiveness of this injustice and how it traces lines of economics and gender. Issues of wages and benefits are often addressed, especially when union organizer Sam is attempting to convince Maya and her sister Rosa to join his association and exclaims, “Don’t you think you deserve health care, dental care and overtime pay like every other janitorial company on your block?” In this same scene, Sam pulls out a pay stub from December 22, 1982, attesting that a worker at their same company had earned $8.50 per hour with full health coverage, a wage that eighteen years later had fallen to $5.75 without benefits of any kind. The film also includes instances where undocumented Latinas are abused in terms of pay and job security. For example, Maya’s boss only agrees to provide her with the paperwork necessary to cover her illegal status if she sacrifices her first two months of wages, and one Salvadoran employee of thirteen years named Teresa is fired for not bringing her glasses to work. Not only do employers exploit the illegal status of these workers, but the film also illustrates the sexualized nature of coercion on the job. This issue is most poignantly brought to light through Rosa’s character, who expresses to Maya that she was only able to get her a job at Angel Cleaning Company by fulfilling sexual favors for their boss, and further, that ever since she left Mexico to support their family, she has had “to suck and fuck so many white men.” As disturbing as these portrayals might be, they bring the realities of racism, sexism, and classism to the public eye. Unfortunately, the inequalities that Loach depicts are real-life injustices that plague the lives of the millions of undocumented Latina workers across the U.S.16

In fact, while the number of employed undocumented workers has continued to rise in the past ten years, their wages have continued to fall. This contradiction is gender-contingent, for “women undocumented workers get paid the lowest of the low, averaging a scant $5,300 a year.”17 The experience of Lucrecia Tamayo, an undocumented worker from Mexico, relates to this inequity. Tamayo explains that while working in an apparel manufacturing center in Los Angeles, she “worked over 12 hours a day, from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m. at night, without Sundays off, siempre, siempre trabajando (always, always working)” and only walked away with a weekly pay of $100.18 These pay manipulations are not exclusive to any one industry, but instead, various service sectors that prevalently hire undocumented workers engage in this unscrupulous process. In her study of undocumented Latinas in domestic work, Grace Chang found that child care agencies specifically sought out “the illegal girls” because they are able to demand services for low wages and then offer low prices to their customers.19 According to Cheng’s study of several New York businesses, “‘illegal’ workers earned as little as $175 a week and ‘legal’ workers as much as $600.”20 While these numbers clearly depict distressing disparities in terms of pay, Chang’s study also uncovers the extremely disturbing treatment that these undocumented Latinas often endure. One mexicana, María de Jesús Ramos Hernández, disclosed that while working as a housekeeper in California, “her employer repeatedly raped her, telling her that he had paid her way here and would have her jailed if she did not submit to him.”21 Unfortunately, Hernández’s case was not atypical, for Chang found that numerous domestic workers reported horrid working conditions often “approaching slavery or indentured servitude.”22

In response to these rampant workplace inequalities, some of these workers joined and helped form unions, which have had a significant role in Latina and Chicana laborers’ lives for many years. Arising in the 1930s with the onset of the Great Depression and the organizing efforts of strong mobilizing figures such as Emma Tenayuca, unions have historically been an important tool for Latina/mexicana immigrant workers to obtain their rights and induce social change.23 Tenayuca helped form chapters of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU) in 1934. She also led the largest labor strike in San Antonio’s history in 1938, a time when “Tejanas made up 79 percent of the city’s low-waged garment, cigar and pecan-shelling workers.”24 Today, unions continue to play a pivotal role in the lives of Latina/Chicana workers, including those who are undocumented. Thus, Latina and Chicana garment workers followed Tenayuca’s legacy with the ILGWU, now UNITE-HERE, by creating and running its Justice Center where workers congregate on a regular basis as support groups, job networks, and legal advisors.25 Through the creation of this center, Latinas give other laborers strength, both by uniting them in a collective force and by allowing them the autonomy they are often denied in the workplace .26

In Bread and Roses, Maya and her janitorial co-workers battle their discriminatory working conditions by joining Sam, a representative of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU). SEIU is a workers’ union based out of Washington, D.C.27 Sam and the SEIU organize the mobilization of the Angel Cleaning Company employees, who use various methods of resistance, such as blocking off intersections and crashing the social gatherings of executives in the office building where they work. By holding a non-violent sit-in in the lobby of the office building, the workers eventually achieve their goal and obtain higher wages with benefits.28 Including the SEIU in the film was not a random decision, for producer Esther Cohen is also the Cultural Arts Director for the union and feels that visual representation is crucial to achieving equality, for “most people in this society of workers feel invisible.”29 Her current project with SEIU, entitled “Unseen America,” has for the past three years given migrant workers video cameras and asked them to document their lives with the goal of giving them a voice and forum for expression with which Cohen plans to create the “only working people’s art gallery in the country.”30

Although unions have played a major part in the resistance strategies of undocumented Latinas and mexicanas, the majority of these women are not unionized. Instead, a growing number of the estimated 86 percent of U.S. non-unionized workers are becoming a part of and constructing independent worker centers.31 This modern phenomenon relates to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, prior to unionization, when economic shifts coincided with new “ethnic and gender-based organizing techniques” amongst immigrant workers.32 For mexicanas and Chicanas, this connection seems legitimate due to the presence and importance of mutualistas (mutual aid societies) that they established in the southwestern United States in the late nineteenth century. According to Chicana historian Vicki Ruiz, these societies “were often the only means immigrants had to defend themselves and to acquire help.”33 Based on this pattern, historian Miriam Louie projects that the current wave of worker centers in the twenty-first century is part of a new cycle in which “ethnic-based organizing among immigrant sweatshop workers is a signal both of the deleterious effects of global economic restructuring on the most vulnerable workers and of the means through which these workers can organize to defend themselves.”34 Thus, Latinas and Chicanas are forming these worker centers in response to undeniable exploitation, and also as an innovative mobilizing model.

Loach’s film deserves some criticism, since it fails to represent the development of worker centers. Although he represents a collective effort on the part of immigrant workers, he does so only by including the central leadership of a Caucasian male union figure, ignoring the sentiment of many third-world workers who “have often been hostile to unions that they recognize as clearly modeled in the image of the white, male, working-class American worker.”35 Many of the most successful self-organizing immigrant groups echo this sentiment, such as La Mujer Obrera, whose leader María Antonia Flores claims started when immigrant workers envisioned “an independent organization, where they could not only defend themselves against the bosses, but also defend their right to be organized, a right which the ‘union’ continued to deny them.”36 Since its establishment in 1981, La Mujer Obrera has empowered numerous immigrant workers from primarily Latina, Chicana, and Asian backgrounds to institute programs and gain basic rights.37 One remarkable example occurred in 1990 when the organization’s members chained themselves to their sewing machines and led a hunger strike that successfully dismantled the underground sweatshop for which they had gruelingly worked.38 UNITY, another worker cooperative center, based in New York City, is a unique case, for not only does it act as a labor rights organization, but it is also an agency that provides employment for domestic workers.39 Founder Jennifer Gordon explains that she was motivated to create UNITY when she noticed that New York City was flooded by Latinas in low-wage service employment and then realized that “many immigrant women of color who lack legal status are unable to claim their basic rights and to organize into unions.”40 UNITY empowers these Latinas, who are now able to collectively make decisions as well as stipulate their own working conditions. One worker states, “Once you are in UNITY, you will never again be forced to work on your knees.”41

Many recent examples of these immigrant-initiated organizations also reflect the globalized shift of the world economy due to their cross-cultural composition and leadership. In fact, mexicana garment worker Lucrecia Tamayo is currently a leader in the Thai and Latino Workers Organizing Committee of the Retailers Accountability Campaign, which seeks “economic, racial, and gender justice” within the garment industry of Los Angeles, California.42 These worker-run centers not only are culturally connected through their members but also work to form coalitions across the country and around the world. Petra Mata, a leader of the garment workers’ group Fuerza Unida, sees the organizations’ efforts in a collective light and explains, “We work with Asian, Filipino, African American, Mexican, white. We are part of the same vision, the same movement.”43 She further claims that, through the experience that members attain by participating in Fuerza Unida and fighting their own local battles, they can offer a hand to other disenfranchised workers and have “built working friendships with Asian immigrant women and other low-waged workers across the globe, and won victories.”44

Miriam Louie argues, “Listening to women means returning to the source, to the heart of what today’s struggles for justice and dignity are all about.”45 It was by simply listening to my best friend Paola Nazati, a first generation colombiana, that I realized the importance of recognizing as well as documenting the mobilizing efforts of these Latina and Chicana equality warriors. Paola would not be here today if it had not been for her mother, Esperanza, who single-handedly fought to get her wrongfully accused husband freed from jail in Colombia. Through the help of her Colombian friends already in the U.S., she hid in the freight area of a cargo jet that landed safely in Miami. Although the stories revealed through Esperanza and this research are shocking, they must not be heard with consumer ears. Instead, it is our duty as fellow human beings, regardless of race, gender, sexual orientation, or economic standing, to consciously join these women, and thereby work together towards building a global community where no person is considered “alien.”

1. Jane Collins, Threads ( Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 16.
2. Bread and Roses, dir. Ken Loach, 110 min. ( Vancouver, B.C.: Lion’s Gate Home Entertainment, 2001), videocassette.
3. Miriam Ching Yoon Louie, Sweatshop Warriors ( Cambridge: South End Press, 2001), 64.
4. Louie, Sweatshop Warriors, 64.
5. Ibid.
6. Dianne Walta Hart, Undocumented in L.A.: An Immigrant’s Story (Wilmington: Scholarly Resources Inc., 1997), x.
7. Jeffrey Passel, “New Estimates of the Undocumented Population in the United States,” Migration Information Source, 22 May 2002, www.migrationinformation.org/feature/display.cfm?ID=19.
8. Louie, Sweatshop Warriors, 68.
9. Hania Zlotnik, “The Global Dimensions of Female Migration,” Migration Information Source, 1 March 2003, http://www.migrationinformation.org/feature/display.cfm?ID=109.
10. Louie, Sweatshop Warriors, 65.
11. Bread and Roses, Loach, 2001.
12. Louie, Sweatshop Warriors, 78.
13. Hart, Undocumented in L.A., 9-18.
14. Ibid., 19.
15. Ibid., 9.
16. Bread and Roses, Loach, 2001.
17. Louie, Sweatshop Warriors, 75.
18. Ibid., 87.
19. Grace Chang, “Undocumented Latinas: Welfare Burdens or Beasts of Burden?,” Socialist Review 23, no. 3 (1994): 1.
20. Ibid.
21. Ibid., 2.
22. Ibid., 3.
23. “La Pasionaria de Texas,” La Voz De Aztlán 1, 6 (2000): http://www.aztlan.net/default6.htm .
24. Louie, Sweatshop Warriors, 198.
25. Maria De Soldatenko Gutierrez, “ ILGWU Labor Organizers: Chicana and Latina Leadership in the Los Angeles Garment Industry,” Frontiers 23, 1 (2002): 46.
26. Ibid.
27. Bread and Roses, Loach, 2001.
28. Ibid.
29. Daniel H. Pink, “Making unseen America visible,” Fast Company 68 (2003): 36.
30. Ibid.
31. Louie, Sweatshop Warriors, 200.
32. Ibid., 95.
33. Vicki Ruiz, From Out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in Twentieth-Century America(New York & Oxford: Oxford Press, 1998), 86.
34. Louie, Sweatshop Warriors, 200.
35. Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity ( Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2003), 263.
36. Louie, Sweatshop Warriors, 202.
37. Ibid.
38. Ibid, 203.
39. Drucilla Cornell, “Achieving Dignity by Taking Power Through Unity,” Social Policy (Spring 2003): 1.
40. Ibid.
41. Ibid.
42. Louie, Sweatshop Warriors, 78.
43. Ibid., 95.
44. Ibid., 99.
45. Ibid., 253.

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