Labor, Life, and Leisure in the Global Factory: The Space–Times of Social Reproduction in Taiwan's Export‐Processing Zone and Mexico's Maquiladoras

ABSTRACT

The simultaneous creation of the first Economic Processing Zone in the Republic of China's Taiwan and the maquiladora in northern Mexico in the mid‐1960s were critical junctures in global capitalism's reorganization. Drawing on archival research and contemporary ethnographic fieldwork, this article traces the geographies and temporalities of social reproduction that powered these emergent export‐processing zones. Focused through the Kaohsiung Export Processing Zone and Ciudad Juárez, we look to state and factory‐mediated spaces and practices that managed workers' reproductive needs while simultaneously binding them ever tighter to the global factory's orbit. As we show, these “space‐times of reproduction” were key to Mexico and Taiwan's transformation into key nodes in global production networks in the 1960s and 70s. In turn, this South–South historical relational comparison demonstrates how social reproduction emerged as central to the global factory's restructuring more broadly, strengthening the labor control that is now emblematic of contemporary supply chain capitalism.