Women's Work and Chicano Families: Cannery Workers of the Santa Clara Valley

by Patricia Zavella

At the time Women’s Work and Chicano Cannery Workers of the Santa Clara Valley was published, little research had been done on the relationship between the wage labor and household labor of Mexican American women. Drawing on revisionist social theories relating to Chicano family structure as well as on feminist theory, Patricia Zavella paints a compelling picture of the Chicano women who worked in northern California’s fruit and vegetable canneries. Her book combines social history, shop floor ethnography, and in-depth interviews to explore the links between Chicano family life and gender inequality in the labor market.

Genres: History

214 pages, Paperback

Published July 23, 1987

Reviews

[Magally Miranda · Rating 5 out of 5]

Pat Zavella's Women's Work and Chicano Families does the important work of bridging two bodies of scholarship- socialist feminism and studies of Chicano families. Socialist feminist theory tells us that the worlds of gender and work are intertwined in important ways, but Zavella’s incursion into the territory of racial hierarchies and cultural ideology adds further nuance. Zavella sets up what she calls the “two-way relationship between women’s work and family” (2). She elaborates on the concept of capitalist patriarchy whereby in the workplace and the home women are subordinated by men in collusion with capitalists, unions, the state and culture or what she calls “ideology.” Furthermore, Zavella does not simply rehearse the position of unmarked (read: white) socialist feminists, but adds to our understanding of the specificity of capitalist patriarchy as it plays out in Chicano culture. This is significant because she draws from scholarship that is critical of work that would refer to Chicano or Mexican culture as more machista than Anglo patriarchy (13). Throughout the quarter we have been discussing how the working class is divided or bifurcated in various ways and particularly through occupational segregation and Zavella’s work here gives even more nuance to that.

Moreover, her contribution to our understanding of California's canning industry is also significant, bridging political economy with a lens of gender relations. I was especially interested in her discussion of technological innovation and mechanization in the industry throughout the 20th century and its interplay with changes in gender roles among the workers. Chapter 2 on “Occupational Segregation” outlines some of these dynamics in more detail. Reading this section I couldn’t help but recall how it mirrored some of the same mechanisms in Silvia Federici’s work on early modern capitalist history. Things like the family wage, for instance, can be found in both places as a mechanism that perpetuates the subordination of women in the workplace. But here what is interesting is that Zavella focuses on one specific industry. The cannery industry is interesting because there were both male and female workers on the same shop floor. However, they were bifurcated in multiple ways. One way this took place in the book had to do with the division of labor and the participation of men vis a vis women in certain positions within the same workplace. There were also Mexican or Chicano workers and workers of other races like Chinese and Italian at different points in time. Zavella (quoting Vicki Ruiz) writes that “employers usually did not promote Mexican women to higher paid supervisory positions” (36). There was no ladder to upward mobility. Women were kept in what are (anachronistically) called unskilled tasks (95%) while a much smaller minority (4%) worked semiskilled jobs and a meager 1% worked in supervisor positions (35). Side note: Can we complicate the term “unskilled” in 2020 and expose it for the sexist term that it is? While these general trends illustrate occupational segmentation by race and gender in the industry, I found it interesting how mechanization of work worked in tandem with gender ideology. So, while we might understand the laws of mechanization using classical Marxist political economic laws of capital (automation being introduced to increase production by relative surplus value) but it does little to help us explain the mechanisms by which women become associated as more adept at something like small scale hand movement or why the price of their labor is low compared to their male and differentially racialized counterparts. This is the genius of Zavella’s work, I think. Another example of this is how with the introduction of mechanization also introduced different work structures where men were paid hourly and had promotional prospects while women were passed up for promotions and worked more informal piece-meal arrangements (35).