Women and Change Pg. 19-35

This chapter of Women and Change titled “The Unsettling, Gendered Consequences of Migration for Mexican Indigenous Women” by Elizabeth Maier speaks about how the traditionally gendered roles have been dramatically changed thanks to women entering the workforce/who have been working. In recent years since more and more women have been going to work, more and more families are moving away from patriarchal control, and through these changes women are finding empowerment, entitlement, and citizenship.
Migration which is often times hard creates a new type of network of these migrant workers who move to communities along the U.S.-Mexico Boarder. It is said that “migrant networks ease adaptation in unknown socioeconomic and cultural environments. They are cultural support systems wrapped around gender-based social diversions that orient recent arrivals as to how to satisfy basic needs, administer natural resources, and find employment, or contact coyotes for crossing the boarder” (23). This sounds like a self-serving kind of network where people who do migrate to different areas and would not otherwise know anyone or anything, it is set up for people to acquire what they may need without having to go to the government for it, or worse, starve. This kind of networking is not only just amongst migrant workers, but it is gendered.
The gendered networking helps the “new” and “progressive” women who are working with a different set of necessities than those created for migrant workers. These women not only have to worry about basic needs, or finding jobs, but they have their families to worry about. These women have created networks where solidarity is created first. Other women understand and sympathize with each other and understand although they may work and feel like “modern” women, they still have to care of their families, the home, etc.
For these women this gendered work can be helped in some ways and hindered in others. One woman recounted how she always asks her sons to help her out with house work by cleaning their rooms or making their beds, however they don’t which adds to the work that she has to do in the home after putting a full day outside of the home. I quickly scribbled as a side note asking the question if machismo will ever change as new generations come in that have been used to home where gendered roles are much more progressive? Really I want to know will these sons ever get off their lazy behinds and help their mothers.
Secondly, for the women who are doing gendered roles, it is lucky for those who can get their hands on modern convinces like cars or dishwashers, refrigerators, etc. because the workload is cut into half. I could see that possibly happening because it is said that gender is ever changing thanks to relocation, generation differences, but it takes time. It is said that
“…gender is particularly prone to readjustments and rearrangement. Newfound niches of female socioeconomic activity, together with the evolving demise of arranged marriages, second-generation access to sexual education and family planning, bilingual and trilingual proficiency, increased schooling for girls, and the emergence of some women professionals all suggest an ongoing blurring of the strict sexual divisions of hometown community life” (27).
In these women is an increased sense of entitlement. What kind of entitlement is the first question that came to my head. These younger women who work as maquiladoras are a new generation and “they have a better understanding of mestiza culture, exhibit greater participation in intercultural institutions, and display more complexity and determination in the formulation of chains” (30). These women understand where they still need to respect their culture and cultural expectations however, they have found that place where they are able to negotiate what they want, who they want to be and still have that respect for culture. These women are educated, they decide when they marry, but still be able to honor traditional values as much as possible without conflicting too much with their new set of traditions and values.