History in the Making – Dormitories, Strikes and Beauty Pageants: Gendered Labor Regimes in Taiwan and Mexico’s Export Industries (Dr. Gabriel Antonio Solis, Fellow, The Chinese University of Hong Kong)

In the early 1970s, global manufacturers rushed to Taiwan and the U.S.-Mexico Border to take advantage of new export-industrial zones. Mexico’s maquiladora industry and Taiwan’s Export Processing Zones promised transnational firms “an investor’s paradise,” with duty-free manufacturing zones, cheap utilities, and most importantly, access to local “low-cost” women workers as a readily available labor source.  Yet while the promise of cheap labor lured in foreign investment, manufacturers struggled to discipline, recruit and mold local workers into the docile workforce that they had been promised.

This talk offers a comparative history of the gendered labor regimes that built Mexico and Taiwan’s export-industrial zones from the late 1960s to the early 1990s. Drawing from comparative historical research, I explore the spaces and practices that were created to manage workers’ reproductive needs, keep a lid on labor organizing, and tether working-class culture to the factory’s orbit. From worker dormitories, trade unions, and factory cafeterias, to volleyball tournaments, concerts, and beauty pageants, this talk will examine managerial strategies to discipline and engender workers as the feminized workforce that transnational firms coveted, as well as workers’ history of rejecting the global factory’s gendered labor regime.

Gabriel Antonio Solis is a postdoctoral fellow at the Chinese University of Hong Kong’s Centre for Cultural Studies. He received his PhD in History at Columbia University in 2025 and his research focuses on entangled histories of labor and capitalism in East Asia and the U.S.-Mexico Border. Originally from El Paso, Texas, Gabriel frequently writes about border culture and politics for a general audience, appearing in outlets such as Wired, Spectre, and the Drift.

Register here.