The Terror of the Machine

Born of more than ten years of field research, this wide-ranging, interdisciplinary work explores the complex intersections of technology, class, gender, and ecology in the transnational milieu of Mexico's maquiladoras, foreign-owned assembly plants located along the U.S. border. Using a full palette including survey research, oral history, discourse analysis, and site ethnography, the author delineates the "dialectics of domination and resistance in the maquilas," and develops a telling critique of labor-process theory - a critique grounded on his extensive study of actual workplace politics in the maquiladoras. Writing with grace, passion, and scholarly rigor, Devon Pena first locates the maquila industry within the history of workplace organizations. He then examines border workplace and community struggles from the perspectives of the women who work in the maquiladoras - devoting ample space to the workers' own narratives. He describes the workers' struggles for democracy and social justice in the workplace, and for sustainable development. He also observes the circulation of struggle from factory to community, highlighting the efforts to establish worker-owned cooperatives in the border region during the 1970s and 1980s. The Terror of the Machine is a trenchant, vivid analysis of the political, cultural, and environmental effects of maquila industrialization, and an eloquent and persuasive call for alternative modes of development that are ecologically sustainable and culturally appropriate.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.