María Guillermina Valdes Villalva
Born
Maria Guillermina Valdes

15 December 1939
El Paso, Texas
Died11 September 1991
CitizenshipUnited States
EducationUniversity of Texas at El Paso, University of Michigan
Occupation(s)Scholar and activist
Known forEstablishing organizations for workers in maquiladoras and for her pioneering scholarship in border studies.
SpouseAntonio Villalva Sosa 1963
Children3

María Guillermina (Guille) Valdes Villalva (also known as Guillermina Valdez de Villalva or Villalba, December 15, 1939 – September 11, 1991) was a Chicana scholar and activist born in El Paso, Texas.[1] She was considered an "authority"[1] and "pioneer"[2] on researching United States-Mexico border issues and had a "lifelong commitment to social justice."[3]

Biography

Villalva was the daughter of a physician, Luis Valdes, and her mother was Ninfa Teobald.[1] She attended Loretto Academy, graduating in 1958.[4] In 1969, she received a B.A. in sociology from the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP).[1] Later, she earned a master's degree in psychology from UTEP. Her PhD in social psychology was from the University of Michigan.[1] At the University of Michigan, she was influenced by the works of Paolo Freire and Erich Fromm.[5] She was married to Antonio Villalva Sosa in 1963 in the Sacred Heart Church in Ciudad Juárez.[6] After her marriage, they honeymooned in Mexico City and Acapulco and then settled in Juárez.[6] Together they had three children, a son and two daughters.[1] Villalva became very religious after a serious illness led to her being hospitalized in Houston, Texas.[3] A former atheist, she had a religious conversion after her recovery.[3] She became involved with the Catholic charismatic renewal.[1]

Villava's research focused on "the maquiladoras industry on the United States-Mexico border" and its impact on the working class.[1] Villalva taught at UTEP and also at the University of Ciudad Juárez.[7] Over the years, Villava mentored many other scholars in her area of study.[8] In 1968, Villalva saw that with a growing population of working women in Mexico (around 53 percent of women working in Juarez were the sole supporters of their families) that there was a need for places for them to meet and learn additional skills.[7] She mentions that at first, when the maquiladoras came to Juárez, there was an expectation that only men would be hired; instead mostly young women were given jobs.[9] Villalva's research discovered that many of the women who were coming to work in maquiladoras or twin plants in El Paso and Juárez were from rural areas and learning to live in what was essentially a new culture was not easy.[7] Villava and others began to work towards creating an organization that would help young women adjust to a new life. She and others conducted the research necessary to lay the foundation for the creation of women's worker groups in Ciudad Juárez.[7]

Villava helped organize and co-found several organizations, the first of which was the non-profit Centro de Orientacion para la Mujer Obrera (COMO and also known as Woman Worker Orientation Center).[1] The first COMO was located in a public building in Colonia Exhipódromo in Ciudad Juárez.[3] Villalva had obtained the building by petitioning President Luis Echeverría on his visit to Juárez.[10] Villalva helped initiate social change through COMO, including developing union-like worker cooperatives.[3] COMO also helped support workers in their efforts to strike for better working conditions.[11] Other times, COMO took complaints of hazardous working conditions to the press or even to court.[12] The first COMO was considered a pilot program and was run by Villalva, an assistant director, Maria Elena Alvarado, a nurse, Maria Elena Villegas, and Rosario Rosales and Delia Puga, both social workers.[7] In addition to these employees, COMO also had a volunteer staff of about 27 people.[7] Within the first two years, about 300 women attended classes at the COMO each year.[7] The COMO's classes were designed to raise "working women's consciousness" which had been discontinued by maquiladora management because those who attended became "too critical of health and safety conditions."[10] Many of the classes taught at COMO focused on self-improvement, such as learning English, dance, and sewing and also on community improvement, such as nutrition, psychology, family relations and responsible parenthood.[7] In exchange for the free classes, the women committed themselves to volunteering in the community and using the knowledge they'd learned to teach others.[7] Villalva was "exceptionally charismatic" and was able to act as a bridge between working women and corporate and official forms of power.[13] She was also able to obtain half a million dollars between 1978 and 1980 for COMO through the Inter-American Foundation (IAF).[5] For Villalva, it was important that working in a factory not become a "dehumanizing" experience for the workers.[7]

This first COMO also became a center for coordinating various co-op programs for the unemployed, both men and women.[7] She also helped create jobs for the men in the area by helping to create a recycling cooperative in 1972.[14][15] Villalva and others had witnessed people living in shanty towns outside of the dump with no way to support themselves.[16] The recycling co-op had scavengers in the dump turning in items that could be recycled for money.[16] Items of need were provided for free outside the dump a small store called "The Lord's Store."[17] In addition, Villalva also educated the scavengers at the dump.[15]

By 1980, COMO centers were set to be established in Puerto Rico and San Jose, California.[12] COMO became a center not just for workers in Juárez, but also around the world.[14] COMO's impact can also be measured in the effect it had on the lives of many of the participants in the program, who were women with an average age of twenty-two.[11] Women who participated in the improving classes had a measurable and greater sense of personal empowerment that differed greatly from the "stereotype of the ideal Mexican female" in the 1980s.[11] Many of the women involved in COMO became leaders in their communities and at work.[18]

In 1985, Villalva was involved with bringing attention to the press about a dangerous contamination affecting workers in a metal foundry.[19] Over 193 workers suffered from various symptoms ranging from neurological disorders to sterility because they had been exposed to radioactive cobalt 60.[19] In 1985 she also spoke as an expert in border studies in Washington, D.C. at a congressional hearing involving immigration changes, where she stated that the new immigration bill would cause many Mexicans to lose their jobs.[20]

In 1988, Villalva was the general director of external affairs for the Colegio de la Frontera Norte (Colef).[21] Colef and Villava were supportive of the civil movement surrounding violence against women in Northern Mexico, especially in Juárez.[22]

In 1975, Villalva was awarded the Loretto Academy's Alumnae award for outstanding service.[4] In 1983, Villalva received the Mary Rhodes Award for her accomplishments in working towards social justice.[14]

She was a keynote speaker at the 1988 National Association for Chicano Studies (NACS) conference where she spoke on the maturation of Chicana/o studies as an academic field.[23]

Villalva died in an airplane explosion on September 11, 1991.[1] She was flying to Houston from Laredo on a commuter plane, Flight 2574,[24] to attend the graduation of her daughter.[14]

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Solorzano, Rosalia (June 15, 2010). "Valdes Villalva, Maria Guillermina". Handbook of Texas Online. Texas State Historical Association.
  2. ↑ Lugo, Alejandro (2008). "Four Maquiladoras, Gender, and Culture Change". Fragmented Lives, Assembled Parts: Culture, Capitalism, and Conquest at the U.S.-Mexico Border (PDF). Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press. pp. 69–90. ISBN 9780292794207.
  3. 1 2 3 4 5 Pena, Devon G. (1997). The Terror of the Machine: Technology, Work, Gender and Ecology on the U.S.-Mexico Border. Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press. ISBN 978-0292765610.
  4. 1 2 "Loretto Alumnae Name 1975 Award Recipient". El Paso Times. November 21, 1975.
  5. 1 2 La Botz, Dan (August 20, 2002). "Mexican Labor Bibliography". Miami University. Retrieved May 18, 2015.
  6. 1 2 "Miss Valdes Engagement to Dr. Villalva Announced". El Paso Herald-Post. March 20, 1963.
  7. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 Viescas, Carol (September 30, 1975). "Juarez Women Work to Better Mexico". El Paso Times.
  8. ↑ Acosta, Teresa Palomo; Winegarten, Ruthe (2003). Las Tejanas: 300 Years of History. Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press. pp. 222–223. ISBN 9780292784482.
  9. ↑ "Capitalism and Anti-Woman Terror - Reprinted and Translated from the original in Workers Vanguard, No 812, 24". International Communist League. October 24, 2003. Retrieved May 18, 2015.
  10. 1 2 Kopinak, Kathryn (1994). "The Double-edged Role of Religious Politics in Empowering Wome Maquiladora Workers in Juarez, Mexico, from 1968 to 1988". In Dagenais, Huguette; Piche, Denise (eds.). Women, Feminism and Development/Femmes, Feminisme Et Developpement. Quebec: Canadian Research Institute for the Advancement of Women. pp. 332. ISBN 9780773511859.
  11. 1 2 3 Cowie, Jefferson (1999). Capital Moves: RCA's Seventy-Year Quest for Cheap Labor. Cornell University Press. pp. 158–159. ISBN 9780801435256.
  12. 1 2 Edwards, John (February 25, 1980). "Juarez Women Workers Counseling Center Taking Concept to California, Puerto Rico". El Paso Herald-Post.
  13. ↑ Young, Gay (2014). Gendering Globalization on the Ground: The Limits of Feminized Work for Mexican Women's Empowerment. Routledge. ISBN 978-1138809826.
  14. 1 2 3 4 "History of the Mary Rhodes Award, 1981-2007" (PDF). Loretto Community. Archived from the original (PDF) on March 4, 2016. Retrieved May 16, 2015.
  15. 1 2 Walsh, Casey; Ferry, Elizabeth Emma; Laveaga, Gabriela Sota; Sesia, Paola; Hill, Sarah (2003). "The Social Relations of Mexican Commodities: Power, Production, and Place" (PDF). U.S.-Mexico Contemporary Perspectives Series. 21. Retrieved May 16, 2015.
  16. 1 2 Varela, Sergio Conde (2004). "More than Enough" (PDF). The 101 Times. 16 (4): 6–7. Retrieved May 18, 2015.
  17. ↑ Newhouse, Ron (March 3, 2002). "Daily Devotions". Devotions.net. Retrieved May 18, 2015.
  18. ↑ Kelly, Maria Patricia Fernandez; Wilson, Pamela (August 1983). "Down on the Border". The Multinational Monitor. 4 (8). Retrieved May 18, 2015.
  19. 1 2 "Mexico Locates Low-Level Nuclear Dump". The Courier. May 28, 1985. Retrieved May 18, 2015 – via Google News.
  20. ↑ "Immigration Bill Won't Be of Much Relief to Mexico". Lodi News-Sentinel. October 1, 1985. Retrieved May 18, 2015 – via Google News.
  21. ↑ "Noticias de NACS" (PDF). National Association for Chicano and Chicana Studies. February 1988. Retrieved May 16, 2015.
  22. ↑ Jusidman, Clara (2014). "Reflections on Antiviolence Civil Society Organizations in Ciudad Juarez". In Simmons, William Paul; Mueller, Carol (eds.). Binational Human Rights: The U.S.-Mexico Experience. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press. pp. 149–150. ISBN 9780812209983.
  23. ↑ "Noticias de NACS" (PDF). National Association for Chicano and Chicana Studies. July 1988. Retrieved May 16, 2015.
  24. ↑ "Eagle Lake, TX Commuter Plane Crashes, Sep 1991". Galveston Daily News Texas. September 12, 1991. Retrieved May 16, 2015 – via GenDisasters.com.
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