Description
Book SynopsisReveals how management regimes and company policy on each side of the U.S.-Mexico border apply different strategies to exploit their respective workforces' vulnerabilities.
Trade ReviewTransnational Tortillas is a case study of two tortilla factories owned by the same company but located across the U.S.-Mexico border from each other. This transnational company organizes labor control differently in the two social and political contexts: The Mexican factory deploys a 'gender regime,' employing young women on the factory floor under the sexist supervision of men; while the U.S. factory uses an 'immigration regime,' employing undocumented Mexican men for the worst jobs and the night shift and Mexican American men (who are U.S. citizens) for the better jobs, some of which are unionized.
-- Christine L. Williams * Gender & Society *
Carolina Bank Munoz has written a passionate, polemical, but scrupulously objective volume on the intersection of race, gender, and class in two tortilla factories located on opposite sides of the United States–Mexico border in California.
-- Julio César Pino * Enterprise & Society *
The ethnographic data presented in Transnational Tortillas are impressive. The authorobserved workplace practices in both factory sites and interviewed managers and workers, giving us an insight not only into the mundanities of workplace practice on the production lines of a transnational tortilla firm, but also providing a look at the everyday lives of the workers themselves.
-- Juanita Elias * International Studies Review *
Ultimately, Bank Munoz has woven together admirably the macro, meso, and micro levels of state policies, labor markets, and workplace dynamics, producing a well-written, accessible, and fascinating account of exploitation and resistance among tortilla workers along the border. Transnational Tortillas should be of considerable value to scholars and students of labor, immigration, and global production.
-- Gretchen Purser * Contemporary Sociology *
Table of Contents1. The Tortilla Behemoth and Global Production
2. The Political Economy of Corn and Tortillas
3. A Tale of Two Countries: Immigration Policy and Globalization in the United States and Mexico
4. Hacienda CA: Immigration Regime
5. Hacienda BC: Gender Regime
6. Fighting Back? Resistance in the Age of Neoliberalism
7. Shop-Floor Politics in the Twenty-First Century
