Formas de inserción de las mujeres en el trabajo del tejido de paja toquilla en la parroquia Sidcay. 1990-2000

Abstract

The following research represents an effort to analyze the situation in which countryside and suburban women, within the framework of their insertion to the manufacturing of toquilla straw hats. The center of this analysis is the Sidcay parish, where this activity takes place under the home delivery modality. The time period used for this study, 1999-2000, covers all the processes that influenced the continuity of this form of labor, such as international migration and dollarization, which happened as a consequence of the decade´s economic crisis. When it comes to the nature of the relations of production, it is agreed that the weavers have remained excluded from the value-making process of the toquilla straw hats, situation that cannot only be explained by the material conditions in which the weaving is made, but also by the way in which the export houses were built, with the sponsorship of the Ecuadorian State, a system of accumulation that has conveyed the exploitation of the female labour power within itself, expressed in the continuation and intensification of the workday. The precarious conditions and subordination of women, who reproduce this system of “detail operation” (weaving), become explicit also in the practices that define the inequity in the relations of power and gender that have inscribed and maintained themselves inside the collective memory. Keeping these considerations in mind, it was also possible to set out an interpretation of the organization process of the weavers, which came to be from 2013 and, despite not having an autonomous character, represents its struggle interests to reach social recognition and fair wages for their labor.