Core Response 1: Silenced Labor

Lisa Nakamura eloquently outlines the ways in which existing discursive frameworks surrounding race and gender are siphoned into capitalist agendas through a case study of Navajo women and the exploitation of their labor in the manufacturing of semiconductors during the sixties and seventies. While I very much appreciate the thoroughness with which she unpacks her argument, which is primarily rooted in the notion of race and gender as “forms of flexible capital” (p. 933) that are conveniently appropriated according to corporate interests, I am left wondering of the actual Navajos’ sentiments and positions towards the entire enterprise.

To begin, Nakamura’s method of data collection appears to be primarily archival. As such, we are provided with an extensive but somewhat removed reading of the racialized and gendered discourses, gathered via artifacts like brochures and news releases, that Fairchild mobilized to justify their exploitation of Navajo women labor. What is lacking, however, is an adequate look into what the experience of Fairchild’s Shiprock plant meant to the actual Navajo laborers, something that potentially might have been gathered through ethnographic research. There is brief mention of Raymond Nakai, chairman of the Navajo Nation from 1963 to 1971, and his enthusiasm to rebrand the Navajo as a “modern” tribe through their participation in making chips. But what about the actual Navajo women making the chips? Amidst the larger racialized and gendered narratives that repackaged their labor as cultural work part of a “natural” succession of ‘inherently Native skills’, what did the Navajo women see themselves as? Did they imagine themselves as alienated from their labor and victims of an oppressive regime? Or were they perhaps even convinced of the uncanny similarity between the semi-conductor chips and the patterns on their traditional rugs? Or was work just work and did none of it matter? Did it make a difference to the women whether they were making chips or rugs? How did they feel? The text peculiarly gives all of the relevant players a voice, except the very Navajo women whose invisible labor it strives to make visible. This lack of minority and individual perspective is perhaps indicative of the limitation of archives as repositories of power – who and what gets to be archived? Again, if ethnographic research were possible, I think this may have been an opportunity to give a voice to those women who were silenced, and largely still remain silenced today, in the racialized development of semiconductor chips that Nakamura so otherwise thoroughly outlines.

To be clear, I very much support Nakamura’s critical take on the racialization of Fairchild’s early chip manufacturing practices in Shiprock, and I appreciate the deftness with which she executes her argument. It is perhaps my appreciation for the piece that leaves me wanting more…

Note: For those interested in creative labor / industries, Angela McRobbie's Be Creative: Making a Living in the New Culture Industries is a good read.