Day 2: Setting Up Interviews

Day 2 in El Salvador and I am up and running.  I spent the first half of the day setting up interviews with maquila workers.  For the most part, maquila workers work Monday-Saturday, with most of them arriving home after 6pm so most of my interviews will take place after a long work day.  My first interview will be with a young woman in her late teens and it is scheduled for Monday evening.  A second interviewee will be my grandmother's neighbor in her late 40s who worked in the maquila and attended school on Sundays eventually gaining her bachillerato, the U.S. equivalent of a high school diploma.  I might also be interviewing her son, who is in his 30s, and was terminated from the maquila after talking back to his supervisor.  My fourth interviewee is my childhood friend who works in a kitchen of a maquila.  My fifth interview will be with my uncle's sister-in-law who is a supervisor at a maquila. These are the five interviews I lined up thus far and can't wait to get started.  I was also informed that my mother's friend teaches Sunday school to maquila workers.  I hope that she allows me to observe one of her classes.  

The focus of my thesis is on men and masculinity in the maquilas of El Salvador.  From most of books I've read on maquilas the focus has been on women and the trope of femininity that maquilas allegedly function around.  Over the years, men have entered the maquilas in growing numbers and I want to look at how their experiences are different/similar to women.  Matthew Gutmann, a leading scholar in masculinity studies in Latin America, in his book Changing Men and Masculinities in Latin America identifies  four concepts scholars use to study masculinity.  The four concepts are: 1) masculinity is anything that men think, say or do, 2) masculinity is what men think, say, and do to distinguish themselves as men, 3) masculinity is a quality that certain men have more than other men, and 4) scholars emphasis on the significance of women to the negotiations of masculinities (Gutmann 3).  Therefore, for my thesis, I will interview both men and women to gain insight on how men view themselves as men within the maquila and how they view other men as well as how women view the men that they work with.  Most of my questions focus on their work in the maquilas, but some of the questions also focus on how they view themselves as partners, fathers, and male members of the Salvadoran working class.

On a side note, I've spent the second half of the day eating real "organic" vegetables.  Tomatoes sure taste better in this part of the world.  For a class last year, I wrote a paper on red beans, a staple crop in a Salvadoran diet, and the growing dependency on imported beans from China.  Here is a picture the red beans I bought this morning to cook for lunch which are grown and sold by a local family for a dollar a bag.  

Tomorrow I'm traveling to Perquin to visit El Museo de la Revolucion (The Museum of the Revolution).  I'll be sure to post some pictures.  Salud!