Media Research Paper

An Analysis of the Integration of Indigenous Women in the Materiality of Technology

Lisa Nakamura’s article “Indigenous Circuits: Navajo Women and the Racialization of Early Electronic Manufacture” argues that in order to understand the configuration of digital labor in the United States today, it is necessary for us to study the women of color who were responsible for creating the material circuits in the early years of electronic manufacturing. Nakamura focuses her article on Fairchild Semiconductor, an electronic company that was hailed as a pioneer for their venture into more flexible capitalism by outsourcing to places with cheaper labor to reduce product costs. She analyzes the marketing tactics Fairchild used in the 1960s, which manipulated racial and gender ideologies of that time to exploit specifically women of color for cheap labor, in order to demonstrate how these ideologies, and the women themselves, become “integrated within the “circuit” of technoculture” (Nakamura, 922). She argues that framing indigenous women as flexible workers who possess an “untapped wealth of natural characteristics” necessary for successful circuitry whilst promoting that semiconductor assembly is an extension of indigenous culture solidifies these ideologies in the history of the technology, and can help explain the implications of digital labor configurations today (Nakamura, 926).

Fairchild’s decision to begin actively recruiting and hiring Native American women to build circuits was done in response to a drastic plummet in the sale prices of circuits. Majority of the circuits built before this price drop were sold to the military who could easily afford the product cost Fairchild needed to offset their labor costs and reach their target profit. Following the drop, however, Fairchild’s loss in profit caused them to realize that it was necessary to “reduce labor costs in order to break into the “vast consumer market out there” for electronic devices” (Nakamura, 922). Fairchild determined that hiring workers at a lower rate would allow them to make the product affordable for a larger consumer market without losing profit or having to allocate more money to labor costs. This desire for cheap, high-quality labor led them to building a plant in Shiprock, New Mexico on the Navajo reservation in 1965.

The Shiprock plant was represented by Fairchild as “a new and innovative model for cheap domestic electronics manufacture: insourcing rather than outsourcing” (Nakamura, 924). Since the Navajo reservation is technically not a part of the United States, the lack of geographic relocation overseas allowed Fairchild to frame the plant as insourcing while still simultaneously receiving the benefits of outsourcing. This meant that the “reservation provided spaces of exception to US laws on minimum wage” since it was a separate nation and Fairchild also received “liberal government loan and tax relief” benefits that come with outsourcing work (Nakamura, 923, 926). There was also the benefit of there being “an extremely high unemployment rate” for Native women on the reservation coupled with “an almost complete lack of other wage-based employment options” (Nakamura, 926). The biased belief that women are not as qualified as men in the workplace left indigenous women out of work and more vulnerable to exploitation from companies like Fairchild than their male counterparts. Not only did this bias put indigenous women in these vulnerable positions, but it also played a part in how Fairchild came to view and treat them. Nakamura finds that Fairchild possessed a belief that women of color were the ideal workforce because they were inherently flexible in multiple ways. Since Fairchild was aware of the position these women were in, they viewed them as mobile, easily replaceable workers who “could be laid off at any time and could not move to look for alternative forms of work” (Nakamura, 926). Fairchild framed this replaceability as workers exhibiting the “flexibility” Fairchild desired, however, Nakamura argues that this “flexibility” was forced unto indigenous women as a result of the gendered ideologies of that time that kept them out of other jobs on the reservation.

Fairchild also framed these women as inherently flexible due to their “natural dexterity” from being blanker weavers and jewelry makers for centuries. Nakamura finds that Fairchild’s manipulation of these ideologies was reflected directly in their advertisements in which circuitry was presented as “an extension of an existing, indigenous practice” (Nakamura, 931). Images of rug patterns and circuits were placed side by side to demonstrate the resemblance between the two and make the argument that “after years of rug weaving, Indians [could] visualize complicated patterns and could, therefore, memorize complex integrated circuit designs and make subjective decisions in sorting and quality control” (Nakamura, 926). Nakamura argues that these beliefs are using racialization to convince Navajo women that they are more qualified for circuitry based on their cultural skills. She states that prior to the plummet in sale prices, there were “beliefs about Indians as unreliable workers unsuited for modern form of labor” that then were “transformed into assertions of the positive value of “primitive” habits” (Nakamura, 933). This transformation in ideologies about Native involvement in modern work is representative of the ways gendered and racial ideologies can be manipulated to promote different attitudes when necessary. When Fairchild needed cheap, easily replaceable labor, they were able to manipulate preexisting gender and racial ideologies as a marketing tactic to change the attitude toward indigenous women and effectively recruit them for exploitation.

All in all, Lisa Nakamura’s article argues that it is essential to understand how ideologies become integrated within both the history of technology and the technology itself in order to begin to understand the configuration of digital labor today. By framing Navajo women as naturally equipped for circuitry and by reaping the benefits of preexisting gender bias within the Navajo reservation, Fairchild was able to manipulate gender and racial ideologies to exploit Navajo women for cheap labor. Nakamura concludes that Fairchild’s manipulation is indicative of the fluidity ideologies can possess when it is deemed necessary. Further, she concludes that the treatment of indigenous women in the early years of electronic manufacturing was integrated directly into the “circuit” of technoculture and can help explain the treatment of women of color in digital labor today.

Sources

Nakamura, Lisa. Indigenous Circuits: Navajo Women and the Racialization of Early Electronic

Manufacture. The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014.