By Adrienne Pine

When hurricane Mitch ripped through Honduras in October 1998, claims that the country had fallen 20, 30, and even 50 years behind were reported in local and international media. This was also a topic which came up in conversation with Hondurans during my three field trips there last year. Despite repeated attempts on my part to find out exactly what they had fallen behind, I was given only the rather unsatisfactory response, "development". The concrete examples of this retreat were in physical structures and infrastructure: homes, roads, commercial and governmental buildings, parks, bridges, and farmland had been wiped out across the country.

1: In the background of this image are the remnants of houses on a Tegucigalpa hillside. This picture was taken in January 1999.

2: This image shows a road on the north coast leading to a free trade zone in background which houses maquiladoras, - the foreign-owned textile export processing plants which are a focus of my ethnographic work in Honduras.

3: This picture is of the municipal building in the maquiladora town of Lima, also taken in January 1999 when it was still flooded and inaccessible three months after the hurricane.

I was told "We had just barely recovered from Fifi and now we're right back to the same." Fifi was the last big hurricane to hit Honduras in 1974. Hurricane Mitch has become a key Honduran marker of time as well as a marker of time lost. The time theme can be seen in the following images:

4: Here, Coca-Cola proclaims there is always a tomorrow and extols Hondurans to get up and recover

5: This image shows a painting done by middle school students in the town of Choloma, where my fieldwork this summer was based. Choloma is a dustbin industrial mecca for maquiladoras. The painting depicts another distinct time theme in which mud in the shape of Honduras is lifted from the tragedy of Mitch unto a new day by the hand of God.

6: The third image in this series is a government advertisement to the people of Honduras and by far the most unsubtle in the rendering of Mitch as time-marker. The first movie frame at the top left depicts the time before Mitch, shown at the right with a clock marking it A.M., or Antes de Mitch, when citizens were not ecologically conscientious and threw trash in the streets. The middle frame shows Mitch, the high noon of this timeline, in which the garbage accumulated in the drains, supposedly causing the flooding suffered subsequently. In the third and final frame, the people of Post-Mitch, P.M., have learned their lesson, the advertisement declares, and no longer throw their trash out in the streets; they respect the environment and teach their children to love and care for their country. This advertisement ignores the lack of garbage collection services in the city and the fact that by far the worst polluters are maquiladoras and other industries which enjoy tax-free status in Honduras and are not required to clean up their messes, placing the moral onus for Mitch’s destruction on unmodern, unsanitary individuals.

In order to decipher just what time it is in Honduras, we must examine the intersection of the abstract developmental timeline with a Honduran event-driven timeline, punctuated by Colonial and other intrusions, military and civilian dictatorships, and as in the cases of Fifi and Mitch, natural disasters. The development timeline describes the imaginary steps which any given nation or otherwise bounded region must go through in order to go from being "undeveloped" to "developed". This timeline is one which as an abstract is removed from historical time, although the assumptions which underlie it are largely drawn from the development narratives of early industrialized countries. The typical development narrative encompasses three separate yet parallel segments: economic development, political development, and social development. The economy "progresses" to conform to a open, free market industrial model, politics "progress" towards democracy, and society as well "progresses" by reaping the benefits of modernization in the form of a higher standard of living and better opportunities for self-improvement through work and education. The first aspect, that of economic modernization, is understood by development theorists (who continue to theorize the dominant paradigm in Honduras) to be painful, especially for the working classes, but these labor pains are seen as a necessary pain for the completion of the other two branches. Regardless, workers across nations have historically had little say in the matter of whether their country should undergo economic modernization. An additional corollary to economic modernization is that society undergoes the demographic transition, a transition from high mortality and high fertility to low mortality and low fertility patterns. Social scientists in fields other than Anthropology have derived a number of ways in which to quantify development, for example with the U.N. Human Development Index which includes statistics on the three primary branches of development with a demographic emphasis, and tells us where on its version of the development timeline any given country lies.

Women’s status -closely linked to lowered fertility- is heavily weighted in such measurements of progress. It is assumed that lowered fertility is a result of women taking advantage of improved options available to them through modernization. Babies, as does Hurricane Mitch, mark developmental time.

In 1998, Honduras had a Total Fertility Rate of around 4.4. Official U.N. predictions held that Honduras would not reach a TFR of 2.1- replacement level- until approximately July 2032, placing Honduras (at the time of this writing) 32 years and just over four months behind this measure of demographic modernity, and behind most of their Latin American neighbors. In the absence of a viable, marketable ethnic identity, and under international pressure to do so, presenting an image of demographic and economic modernity to the world is of consummate importance to the Honduran national project. The maquiladora industry represents the renewed, moralized efforts of the Honduran government and various international development agencies (most notably AID), over the past decade and especially since Mitch, to bolster its development indices. Women’s bodies, phenomenologically experienced in the individual rather than in the aggregate, are the loci of this undertaking in terms of both production and reproduction.

7. The propaganda surrounding maquiladoras is blatant in Honduras and leaves no doubts as to what they offer the country. In this photo, taken of the water tanks above ZIP Choloma, an industrial park in that town, we see the slogan "To Export is to Progress".

Unlike the agricultural industry maquiladoras suffered extremely minor physical damage and only slight production delays with the passing of Mitch. Nonetheless, a wage freeze was put into effect in December 1998 to help the owners of maquiladoras recover their imagined losses and in addition President Carlos Flores declared the entire national territory a free trade zone, ensuring underemployment and golondrina capitalism (golondrina is the swallow, here today gone tomorrow) for years to come.

8. In a second picture taken of the principal’s office in the previously visited Choloma school, Choloma is said to be everyone’s task: bolts fly above an incredibly sanitized depiction of an industrial park much as bluebirds might fly out of a Walt Disney landscape.

The maquiladora industry is different from the previous two large export industries in Honduras- silver mining and bananas- in that it is the first industry to employ women on a large scale to work as wage-laborers. These women have been inducted into a modern system of repetitive assembly-work, under a modern work schedule ruled by the time-clock.

9. In this image maquiladora workers enter their industrial park at 7:00 sharp.

10. This image depicts time-cards in a factory into which I was invited by the manager, a Korean gentleman I met at the local golf course bar, a place I found to be the best bet for hooking up with managerial informants. These timecards represent a new way of understanding time itself to workers, for most of whom maquiladora work is a first job. Bathroom, water, and meal breaks are brief and tightly controlled.

11. Skill development is minimal in these jobs- this worker could spend years just sorting shirts- and chances for advancement are nil.

The pay rarely exceeds $130 for a month of ten-hour days with six day weeks, an amount which covers little more than food and housing needs. Nonetheless women from all over the country are migrating in numbers so large as to significantly offset the gender balance between ages 15 and 35 for the entire San Pedro Sula region. In some maquila towns like Choloma, migration has contributed to a tripling of the population in a decade, leading to a serious decline in per capita living standards, as basic services have not grown with the population. Patterns of labor abuses and health problems in these factories have been documented extensively worldwide.

12. American retailers, anxious to separate themselves from possible future KathiLee-esque scandals, shield themselves with codes of conduct such as this one, which hung harmlessly overhead in the executive section of a maquiladora where floor workers were banned entrance.

Why is the move to this kind of life categorized as an improvement in women’s status for the purposes of measuring developmental progress? For demographers, if women are having fewer children and working for money, they are assumed to have better control over their fertility options than in the inverse scenario. However, most women working in maquiladoras are subject to tight and direct control of their fertility. Many are obligated to take birth control at the factory, and if they do become pregnant are faced with the choice between keeping their baby or keeping their job. In some extreme cases, as informants have recounted and one doctor who has worked in these maquiladoras himself informed me, abortions are performed in clinics inside the factories. Other abuses of maternity rights afforded to women under Honduran law are pervasive throughout the industry. Both factory owners and government officials are complicit in this exercise, the former directly and the latter for refusing to enforce labor laws. Rather than exercise increasing control over their fertility it seems that women have traded one set of lacking options for another.

The emphasis on cleanliness and timeliness in these factories and in Honduran development rhetoric has replaced previous notions of reproductive woman with a sanitized productive woman who has happily chosen a modern worker/consumer lifestyle over motherhood.

In a taxi on the way home from San Pedro Sula to Choloma last summer my taxi driver asked me what I was doing in the country. When I told him I was studying the effects of maquilas in the region he declared "Ahhh, the maquila- the maquila has come here to liberate (liberar) woman".

"How’s that?" I asked.

"Before, a woman couldn’t do anything. Now she is libre (free/liberated), libre to go to McDonald’s in San Pedro, libre to go to the movies, libre to buy clothes if she wants to."

Women’s progress in this view is measured not in a broadening range of fertility options nor in standard of living improvements but rather in the perfection of consumerism. The latter understanding of the experience of "progress" is pervasive throughout Honduras, not coincidentally being the only version of the above three over which women and other workers have some slight degree of control. The importance of the consumer identity is visually inescapable in urban Honduras:

13. Marketing to women has successfully expanded since the introduction of the maquiladora industry.

14, 15. The importance of modern corporate symbols underscores the strength of consumerism despite a lack of buying power. Although most Hondurans cannot afford Nike products, they are anything but blind to the power of the corporate symbol.

No matter how many times anthropologists throw development theory out the window, it is still assumed in Honduras that maquiladoras will bring prosperity to the country. The fallout of this, highlighted by the development discourse surrounding Mitch, is a corporate and government control of worker time and fertility, and the creation of a new class of consumers without the kind of economic power to effect any real large-scale changes in standard-of-living. Many women share my taxi driver’s and the government’s view that what they are achieving is progress and increased choice by working in maquiladoras, despite the contradiction inherent; that they are bartering their reproductive and other choices for a consumer lifestyle. The process leading to this understanding (false consciousness?) of progress, will be a focus for my future studies in this area.