Divinity School theologian wins national Hispanic book prize

Science of the Struggle

The maquila industry, or export factories operated by foreign companies, arrived in 1984 to Mexico’s southern state of Yucatán. Maquiladora activity in Mexico is rooted in a network of free trade agreements and initiatives dating to the mid 1960s and extending into the North American Free Trade Agreement of 1994 and its descendant agreement, the Canada-United States-Mexico Agreement or CUSMA in 2020. The deals eliminate trade tariffs and were intended to open up Mexico’s economy. As violence along the border with the U.S. increased and through the advocacy of former Yucatán Gov. Victor Manual Cervera Pacheco who served twice during the 1980s and 1990s, maquila manufacturers moved southward into the peninsula.

A North American-owned manufacturer of 23 clothing brands in 1997 began operating near the small town to which Ferreras would eventually travel to interview Maya mexicana seamstresses who worked at the plant. For little pay and on extensive work schedules, with little control over their environments or their treatment, the women subjugated indigenous, ancient weaving skills once used in their homes to craft traditional Mayan dress into repetitive, sterile, injury-prone, quota-based manufacturing tasks required to mass-produce clothing that would be sold in other countries to profit the maquiladora.

Ferreras describes how the arrival of the maquila devastated the area’s economy that was previously based on a simple exchange of goods, disrupted inhabitants’ sacred and ancient connections to the land, co-opted their spiritual ceremonies, and turned village women into competitors for maquila jobs from which they are commonly fired when they can no longer keep up.

“This research invited me to practice faith in a community of women who desired life.” -- Dr. Marlene Ferreras, author, assistant professor of practical theology

“The maquila has appropriated this cultural heritage and simultaneously exploits women and extracts resources from them,” Ferreras writes. It is a history, she notes, that dates to the arrival of the conquistadors during the 15th century.

When Ferreras interviewed the maquila seamstresses for her book, some of the stories she heard were so “jarring,” she said, that she lay awake some nights crying.  “This research invited me to practice faith in a community of women who desired life,” Ferreras writes.For the purposes of their interviews, the mexicanas gave their small, 456-member hometown the pseudonym of pueblo mágico. The village, once sustained through an indigenous agrarian lifestyle, continues to celebrate its ancient relationship to the earth and to revere communal life; where the women make their own tortillas by hand and grind their own spices.

The women Ferreras spoke with described their subjugation to the maquila’s rules and demands for irrational quota-based production speeds, of long hours, constant surveillance, abuses and numerous injuries, of the weakening of their communal life.

An 18-year-old under the pseudonym of Sofia who did not want to work at the factory, submitted to its life-altering pressures to earn money when her father refused to support her education; a worker named Paloma talks about the pain she suffers daily from the repetitive work with large machines in a noisy factory; Veronica described being intentionally struck with a cart by a factory supervisor when Veronica was six months pregnant. She also speaks of taking the risk to speak up to her supervisors and of using her employment at the maquila as a means to help her daughters achieve a better life beyond the factory. The latter exemplifies what Zapatista women refer to as la ciencia de la lucha, or the science of the struggle toward a desired future of lived dreams in the face of the destructive impacts of greed, dishonesty and threat to community.

The interviews with the factory seamstresses almost didn’t happen. Ferreras discovered their remote community by happenstance through a series of closed and open doorways after first being informed by a local church leader that such women would never speak to her about their experiences. Through the connections of a colleague, she traveled three hours by bus to reach the rural village where she discovered many women eager to tell their stories of working under the factory’s regime. She spent three months in pueblo mágico and over more than a year made several trips to Yucatan and Chiapas. Several years later, she keeps in contact with her host family and the lives of the mexicanas of pueblo mágico.

"There was something in my own body and soul that led me to this project.” -- Dr. Marlene Ferreras

Ferreras, who grew up in Redlands, California, acknowledges influences stemming from her own background. She weaves into her book her identity and experiences as the American-born eldest daughter of a struggling single mother whose family arrived as refugees from Cuba during the early 1970s. Her mother’s sisters all worked for multinational corporations following the suicide of their father, Ferreras’ grandfather, three months after arriving in the U.S.

In her book she writes, “As a pastoral theologian, I seek to understand the suffering of “the many” and my complicity in that suffering, not only so that I can provide better care but also in an attempt to recover my own humanity. There was something in my own body and soul that led me to this project.”

The willingness to explore new thought directions as a theology scholar Ferreras attributes to her undergraduate years in the honors program at La Sierra University directed by Paul Mallery, professor of psychology. She studied under the tutelage of noted theologians and faculty members Wonil Kim, Fritz Guy, Charles Teel, Ginger Hanks Harwood, Madelyn Haldeman and others before graduating in 2003 with two bachelor’s degrees. “They helped me to see how fun theology could be and how I could explore questions and read and think in careful ways,” Ferreras said.

The Divinity School offers four master’s degree programs, including one in archaeology, and three undergraduate programs in religious studies and archaeology. This year it created a new Bachelor of Arts in theology degree intended to address the needs of students interested in pursuing a career in pastoral leadership, missions, education, social services, and academic work in theology. Ferreras guides her own students at the Divinity School in classes on pastoral leadership and congregational care and draws from her book’s research methods to teach the use of ethnography as a tool that can equip ministers in achieving greater attentiveness to and perception of the layers of suffering that Latinx working-class women and others might experience.

“…the things that I’m stringing together – the transnational feminism, ethnography and Christian theology -- [are intended] to help students use those tools for a dynamic conversation so that they can critically analyze and assess what’s happening before they jump in with some solution,” she said.

In addition to her doctoral and undergraduate degrees, Ferreras also holds three master’s degrees -- two in theology and one in marital and family therapy respectively from the Claremont School of Theology, Fuller Theological Seminary, and Loma Linda University.

Ferreras notes that while the broader questions she pursues in her research and resulting book, such as the ways intergenerational trauma through colonialism has increased suffering, are not unique, there exists in scholarly literature a dearth of information on the lives of indigenous women and working-class Latinx women who do not fit into typical categories.

She writes, “This is a small beginning to a much larger project; I envision a growing body of literature in Latina practical theology informed by epistemologies of the south. While practical and pastoral theology have attended to issues of race, class, gender, and globalization, the voices and experience of Latinas in pastoral care and counseling are largely absent from the discipline’s literature.”