The Sweatshop Workers of Nicaragua: Subjectivity, Labor, and Domination

Abstract

This essay is based on an approach that addresses the relationship between work-related domination and the subjects who are submitted to it. This reflection arises from research undertaken in Nicaragua, among workers from the international textile factories known as maquiladoras (or maquilas). Men, but mostly young women, work and live here under particularly difficult conditions. The constraints of work and domination invade the recesses of their existence, and their power is such that it seems to annul any proper subjectivity. Although it may seem easy to locate the effects of work-related domination in the very intimacy of the subjects’ lives, it also appears as if part of themselves remains unsubdued. Dominated subjectivities can only rebel for failing to do it would be to condemn their beings to inexistence. What sense can be given to this gap in domination? Does it preserve the domination by preserving the subjects from the invasion in their own beings by this very domination? Is it only a resource of the submission? Those are, between domination and subjectivity, some of the aroused interrogations.