2025 Theses Doctoral

Entangled Assembly: A History of the Global Factory in Taiwan and the U.S.-Mexico Border, 1960-1993

Solis, Gabriel Antonio

Entangled Assembly: A History of the Global Factory in Taiwan and the U.S.-Mexico Border, 1960-1994 offers the first transpacific and comparative history of the Kaohsiung Export Processing Zone and Mexico’s Border Industrialization Program from 1960 to the early 1990s. Drawing from multi-lingual archival research conducted in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, El Paso, Texas and Kaohsiung, Taiwan from 2021 to 2023, this dissertation traces the history of export-manufacturing in Taiwan and Mexico by examining the simultaneous creation of the first Export Processing Zone in Kaohsiung and the first maquiladoras in Ciudad Juárez. In my study, I prioritize the study of labor regimes—as encompassing labor controls on the factory floor and capitalists’ interventions into workers reproductive lives outside the factory—as a primary site of analysis. This study also attends to the global factory’s transformation of everyday life in its host cities.

This dissertation has three key arguments. Firstly, I argue that the history of the maquiladora and the EPZ ought to be understood as entangled history of the global reconfiguration of capitalist manufacturing in the twentieth century. In the 1960s, Taiwan and Mexico’s governments pioneered new spatial forms of organizing global manufacturing through the creation of “bonded manufacturing zones” or what I refer to as export-industrial zones. Secondly, I argue that the comparative analysis of labor regimes in both export-industrial zones demonstrates a history of gendered labor abuse, economic dependency, and long-term contamination. In this second argument, I draw heavily from Fronteriza/o (border people) radicals’ engagement with Marxism and Marxist Dependency Theory to analyze how the export-industrial zone created uneven and dependent relationships between foreign firms and local workers. Workers’ labor was pivotal to the valorization of global capital, but that process of labor exploitation contributed to the long-term devaluation of workers’ lives and the ecological devastation of the communities they lived in.

Finally, I disentangle the origins of the global factory in the 1960s from the rise of neoliberalism in the 1980s. In this dissertation I resituate the rise of global export-manufacturing within the context of the global Cold War and argue that the export-industrial zone emerged as a key component of a broader counter-revolution of property in the twentieth century. Borrowing from W.E.B. DuBois, I argue that we conceptualize export-industrial zones as one of many manifestations of a global counter-revolution of property in the 1960s and 1970s, which sought to outmaneuver domestic and international challenges from organized labor and revolutionary socialist movements. This dissertation attends to the long-term historical and political implications of the rise of the global factory and its role in that counter-revolutionary reconfiguration of capitalist production.