Critical Participatory Action Research

Abstract

A small group of women factory workers in Tijuana, Mexico, have been collaborating with a filmmaker, an artist, a human rights group, a women’s group, and a transborder environmental health coalition in a dynamic testimonial practice. These community activists, promotoras, are members of Grupo Factor X, a women’s group that helps women factory workers learn about improving working conditions and human rights. The promotoras began an innovative form of autoethnography, a portrayal and exploration of their experience in order to understand their situation better. They are trying to improve factory working conditions and environmentally toxic conditions in their neighborhood that have worsened as the greed of transnational corporations has strengthened its hold on this region. Over 4000 giant industrial factories that produce the goods Americans enjoy plague the Mexico border with the United States. Around Tijuana a million workers, primarily young women, work long hours, often amid environmental toxins and without adequate workplace safety precautions, barely making subsistence wages. They live in neighborhoods, colonias, that have little infrastructure, such as reliable provision of electricity, clean water, sewage, passable roads, and adequate health care and education. Factor X sought to expose the devastating health effects of factories that allow manufacturing toxins, including heavy metals, to run freely into communities, and, ultimately, into the ground water.

… speaking nearby or together with certainly differs from speaking for and about.

(Trinh Minh-ha, 1989, p. 101)