ABSTRACT
In 1970, when Donald Baerresen published his plant location guide for investors curious about the Border Industry Program (BIP), it was widely presumed that Mexico’s maquiladora workers would be a reliable source of cheap, quiescent, productive, and apolitical labor. Instead, over the years, tens of thousands of workers have participated in organized struggles. They have done so in a manner wholly antagonistic to and autonomous from the logic of the global assembly line and the systems of labor control that perpetuate the terror of the machine (Peña 1983; 1984; 1987).
