Indigenous Circuits: Navajo Women and the Racialization of Early Electronic Manufacture

Text Exploration

It can be difficult for people to know history, particularly if they never experienced it. It is time consuming to look beyond the way things are. It takes a level of and commitment to curiosity that requires the privilege of “free time” and a desire to spend that time on something other than family or entertainment or rest. Without knowing history, it is colloquially said that we are doomed to repeat it, doomed as if a history is bad, knowing as if history is an objective, static set of facts, and repeating it as though previous situations are simple enough to simply take another swing at them.

Researcher Nakamura knows a history of the relationship between Navajo women workers and what can successfully be argued as colonization of their cultures through Fairchild Semiconductor’s introduction of fabrication technology in the 1960s and 1970s, and knows the history of the attempts at rationalization for this top-down culture shift. Colonizers of the Navajo presented a nearly perfect form of racialization: “prior beliefs about Indians as unreliable workers unsuited for modern form of labor are transformed into assertions of the positive value of ‘primitive’ habits.” The author does not herself assert, but does strongly imply that knowing the history of this racialization might prevent us from repeating it in other cultures and in other periods of time.

But just as this history is known, there are other histories that may be better known by those who experienced the shift of Navajo women making textiles to Navajo women making semiconductors: the women themselves. This article includes no first-person accounts from the Navajo women who worked at the semiconductor plant, who likely have a less interpretative and more contemplative view of the history they participated in and, in many respects, have a stronger right of ownership over. A reader does not hear about how any one person’s life changed, and instead, all Navajo women are presented clinically and uniformly. The article provides many forms of academic interpretation, citing a wide set of critical perspectives from Richard Florida, Ian Bogost, Angela Haas, Wendy Chun, Alex Galloway, Kathryn Hayles, and even the requisite Jean Baudrillard. The article also develops a strong and convincing antagonist in the executives from Fairchild. But in the same way that Florida offers the naïve view that creative people work purely for the love of making things and will gladly sacrifice wealth for craft, the author indicates a same romanticized view of making over financial security. Somehow, casting Navajo women making blankets for little money is a better history than Navajo women making semiconductors for more money. It may be, but with a lack of first-person voice from the makers themselves, the reader will never know.

Perhaps the most confusing part of this missing voice is how the stated goal of the analysis becomes unintentionally ironic. The author describes that the essay “focuses on a group of women of color who are almost never associated with electronic manufacture,” and it does this. But, the author explains, the primary source for this is the documents provided by Fairchild, that describes the women’s participation, “albeit never in their own voices.” This is a gap Nakamura clearly views as fundamentally problematic to building a realistic understanding of the textile-to-semiconductor history. Unfortunately, this is exactly the same gap in Nakamura’s own argument as well.