In the 21st-century era of flexible-production models carried out in ever-more-mobile assembly plants known as maquiladoras in Spanish, the new forms of labor organizing by women who assemble clothes, appliances, and computers are a significant and worthy object of study. In this creatively theorized and well-grounded ethnography of a workers’ movement in post-Sandinista Nicaragua, Jennifer Bickham Mendez masterfully articulates the history, political context, strategies, and information politics undertaken by the Working and Unemployed Women’s Movement María Elena Cuadra (MEC), which emerged as an autonomous women’s organization in 1994. (Visit the movement’s website at http://www.mec.org.ni/.) What is particularly important about the MEC as a case study and in Bickham Mendez’s theoretical positioning of the organization is its hybrid structure and demands, which incorporate aspects of both a nongovernmental organization (NGO) and a labor union. MEC focuses simultaneously on improving working conditions for women laboring in the maquiladoras in Nicaragua’s free-trade zone and on empowering women in their homes through education and training about domestic violence and reproductive health. In addition, the women of MEC have become distinctive and important political subjects in neoliberal Nicaragua through their successful introduction of a code of ethics to be followed in free-trade zone factories.

The founders and many of the regional leaders of MEC came out of the Sandinista labor movement, particularly the Sandinista Workers Central (CST) of the 1980s. After the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) lost control of the Nicaraguan state in 1990 elections, the country elected two consecutive presidents who proceeded to privatize much of national industry in a move to a neoliberal economic model that included the dismissal of 10,000 textile workers from state-owned enterprises in the early 1990s. The development of free-trade zones saw some of these workers and others—primarily women—employed in ever-increasing numbers of assembly plants. MEC grew out of a complex political soup that involved continued Sandinista labor networks and organizations, the launching of an autonomous feminist movement, the creation of pan-Central American networks of NGOs, and continued reliance on Canadian, U.S., and European foundations and NGOs as funding sources. As a new kind of flexible organization or movement dedicated to both workers’ rights and women’s rights, MEC provides a wide range of services, education, and types of advocacy to women workers, including workshops on discrimination and gender roles, gender and reproductive health, self-esteem, and domestic violence; technical training in nontraditional trades such as auto mechanics, masonry, and electrical work; and access to rotating credit funds.

What is perhaps culturally most unique about MEC (in addition to its insistence on always putting women front and center) and similar organizations that have sprung up around the world, often as “workers’ centers,” is a new type of organizing strategy that emphasizes negotiation, lobbying, indirect pressure, and bridge building with corporations and their managers instead of direct confrontation. MEC organizers believe that the gendered interests of women workers are not served by engaging in actions, such as boycotts and strikes, that are likely to drive the largely U.S.- and Chinese-owned assembly plants to move elsewhere. Bickham Mendez echoes their perspective. “Even if a boycott causes a transnational corporation to change its behavior, should it be considered a success if this change involves propelling women workers and their dependent families into even more dire poverty?” (pp. 218–219). Bickham Mendez argues that a more nuanced analysis of workers includes broadening definitions to look at racial, gender, and ethnic dimensions of workers’ identities as well as their structural and class position. Such an analysis, she maintains, will illuminate the logic of MEC’s focus on working with women as integrated individuals with many different dimensions to their lives who need to keep their jobs and cannot afford the tactics of antisweatshop groups, such as the Campaign for Labor Rights. Positioned at the intersection of local, national, and transnational politics and informational cultures and practices, MEC models an innovative but challenging path for feminist and labor organizing. Bickham Mendez captures the political, theoretical, and strategic importance of what MEC and similar social movement organizations are doing and, in the process, has written a must-read text for anyone interested in contemporary women’s movements, labor organizing, and issues of transnationalism and globalization in Latin America and elsewhere.