PhD University of Missouri, Columbia, United States of America. Assistant Professor. Indiana University, Bloomington, United States of America.
Maestra en Dirección Estratégica de Empresas: Universidad Católica de El Salvador, Santa Ana, El Salvador. Profesora de Ingeniería Industrial. Universidad Católica de El Salvador, Santa Ana, El Salvador
The authors declare no conflict of interest.
This article examines the
professional trajectory of Patricia Betsabe Quintana Pacheco, a Salvadoran
industrial engineer, former maquila employee, and full-time faculty member at
the Universidad Católica de El Salvador. Using
Este artículo examina la trayectoria profesional de Patricia
Betsabé Quintana Pacheco, ingeniera industrial salvadoreña, extrabajadora de la
industria maquiladora y docente de tiempo completo en la Universidad Católica
de El Salvador. A partir del marco teórico de
Sulu'u tü ashajajkat pütchi yaa, waashajain sünain jukuwa'ipa
a'yatawaa mmaipaa nüka Patricia Betsabé Quintana Pacheco, wane ingeniera chayaa
El Salvador, a'yataashi mmaipaa sulu'u piia a'yatawaa maquila otta ekirajüshi
sulu'u ekirajiipalee Universidad Católica de El Salvador. Süka tü pütchikat
A Ghanaian proverb
states, “If you educate a man, you educate an individual. But if you educate a
woman, you educate a family, a nation” (
These
initiatives are necessary because communal growth and well-being are often
constrained by oppressive governments, exclusionary institutions, and
educational systems that reproduce inequality.
The Akan principle Sankofa, translated as "go back and fetch
it," or “it is never wrong to go back and claim what was lost” references
the practice of returning to lived and ancestral knowledge as the foundation
for moving communities forward (
Santa Ana, El
Salvador is the country's second-largest city, with a population of
approximately 270,000, of which roughly 53% identify as female, a pattern
partly attributed to significant male migration (
This study prioritizes gender and class as primary axes of
identity and inequality, as El Salvador is characterized by a dominant mestizo
national identity that renders race less analytically central than in North
American contexts.
Furthermore, women have been leading the practical and
theoretical charge on exploring and actualizing intersectionality and
interculturality within labor and education systems over the past few decades.
For example, Maria
In practice, Brasilian author and activist Lelia
While CAFTA-DR
made formal employment more accessible for many women in El Salvador, it did
not eliminate the structural inequalities that shape their labor conditions and
opportunities for advancement.
Existing research
on women's labor in export manufacturing shows that women's incorporation into
global apparel production has often depended on gendered assumptions about
labor, skill, and disposability. Elson and Pearson's foundational study of
women in Third World export manufacturing argues that employers often construct
women as naturally suited for repetitive, disciplined, and low-cost factory
labor through the “nimble fingers” myth (
Feminist political economy (FPE) analyzes the relationship between gender, economics, and social structures, establishing itself as an intersectional theory by design. At its core, FPE examines access to and the distribution of wealth and power, for whom and by whom, and how these structures directly impact women (
Three United Nations Sustainable Development Goals frame
this study's structural analysis.
According to the OECD (2025), women represent only 22% of ICT higher education graduates and 35% of engineering graduates across Latin America and the Caribbean. Quintana Pacheco's dual position as full-time UNICAES faculty and former full-time apparel factory employee is itself a form of inclusive educational intervention. She is a role model in a discipline where women's representation remains structurally obscure.
There are four key
principles of this approach toward popular education, two of which Hammond
agrees is possible and the remaining two are more challenging to actualize due
to ideological constraints:
Challenging: Integrating political content is an appropriate and essential component of education as the introduction to politics through popular education has the potential to encourage others to become more educated.
Possible: Active and engaged participation and the development of critical consciousness (conocimiento critical) is required from all learners.
Challenging: Schools and learning systems must be integrated into everyday communal life. There is a mutual exchange where the community is required to actively support the advancement of the learners and the learners, in turn, are dedicated to serving the community.
Possible: All members of the community are entitled to and capable of benefiting from universally accessible education through inclusive methods that adapt to the needs of the learners for their optimal skill and capacity building.
For this practice to be actualized, it is critical that practitioners agree that education is a mutually beneficial experience for both the teacher and the learner, and that the roles of teacher and learner can be interchangeable. Hammond also affirms that practitioners of popular education must consider the prior personal knowledge and motivations of the learners to be most effective. This thought is reiterated through the belief that what one learns is determined by how one learns and which circumstances are present to positively contribute to that learning process.
Further studies have found that that much of the research on experiential
learning originated from the field of women's studies to better understand
women's learning processes to foster environments that allowed them to thrive
in academic spaces. Additonally,
subsequent research reports that both women and members of minority or
oppressed groups within society are drawn to and are more likely to succeed in experiential learning modalities (
In practice, popular education has the potential to take place both inside
and outside of formal academic walls. For example, the organization CO-MADRES,
which was founded by Salvadoran mothers in 1977 to address state violence
during the civil war, embodied this principle building one of the most
effective education-driven organizations in Central American history which
lobbied for human rights education, women's empowerment, and the amnesty of
political prisoners. (
Quintana Pacheco's professional journey is an extension of this tradition, as her knowledge base and educational activity expand the concept of popular education in practice. Her experiences, and the experiences of her students, lie between the systemic-borders of factory and university, and civil unrest to political silencing in El Salvador. Through Quintana Pacheco's journey from the factory floor to the professoriate and back, this research explores how she aims to apply each of the critical components of popular education, both presumably applicable and the those with limited applicability.
Therefore, this study is guided by two research questions:
This study employs an
interpretivist qualitative research design grounded in four intersecting
qualitative traditions: narrative inquiry, collaborative autoethnography,
duoethnography, and participatory action research (PAR). The combination
reflects a five-year cross-cultural collaboration between two scholars, a
co-authored analysis of one researcher's lived trajectory, and an institutional
program observation. Each tradition contributes a distinct analytical
dimension, and together they enact methodological coherence rather than
eclecticism. Narrative inquiry centers lived experience as legitimate scholarly
knowledge (
Robertson and Quintana Pacheco
have known each other since 2021, when Robertson conducted a 10-month Fulbright
U.S. Research Grant in El Salvador observing women's experiences in the global
apparel supply chain. What began as a researcher-participant relationship has
evolved over five years into a genuine collaboration between colleagues and
friends, encompassing factory visits, co-design of Ingenieros en Acción and Hilos de Amistad, attendance at personal and professional milestones,
and sustained cross-cultural conversation across two countries and two
languages. Ethnographic accountability requires not blind trust in the
researcher but the building of genuine trust through sustained relational
engagement (
Patricia Betsabe Quintana Pacheco is the primary research participant and co-author of this study. Born and raised in western El Salvador, supported by her mother as the sole head of household, she enrolled in the industrial engineering program at UNICAES but paused after her first year due to financial constraints. This scenario explains an early intersection of class and gender that positions her trajectory as the structurally predictable path of working-class Salvadoran women rather than individual deviation. In 1996, at age 19, she entered the apparel sector as a sewing trainer at American Park free trade zone through a social network connection, not through a formal application process. Her first attempt at Expo Salva ended with a full day outside the gates without a call-in. This access was mediated by relational capital rather than merit when Quintana Pacheco was recommended for entry by a former professor at UNICAES who has in an internal connection. Once she passed through the interview phases that checked for physical and mental fitness, Quintana Pacheco remained in the sector for nine years, advancing across sewing training, production supervision, and human resources, while taking one to two courses per semester on a schedule running from 5:00 a.m. to 9 p.m. She graduated as Ingeniera Industrial in 2006, began teaching part-time at UNICAES in 2009 motivated by the need for supplemental income during the global economic crisis, transitioned to full-time faculty in 2015, then launched Ingenieros en Acción in 2020, and Hilos de Amistad in 2026.
Primary narrative data were
collected through three complementary sources providing triangulation across
data types (
This study presents findings organized around four thematic narratives drawn from narrative analysis of Quintana Pacheco's personal written chronicle, solo recording, and dialogue interview, alongside Robertson's five years of participatory observation. Each theme addresses the research questions by tracing how Hammond's popular education framework in Latin America relates to the transformation of maquila-based labor expertise into pedagogically transferable knowledge through Quintana Pacheco's case study (RQ1) and how intersecting identities of gender and class shape the professional and educational trajectories of working-class women in El Salvador's apparel manufacturing sector (RQ2). Each theme is situated within SDGs 4, 5, and 8, naming specific targets the Salvadoran apparel sector meets nominally, violates structurally, and contradicts simultaneously. A consistent finding emerges across all four themes: what dominant frameworks classify as individual merit or personal resilience is, in every instance, the product of structural conditions.
The first two themes of our findings are derivatives of exploring RQ1 and the second two themes are derivatives of the exploration of RQ2.
Quintana Pacheco's access into the factory was mediated by relational capital rather than merit. SDG 5 Target 5.1's elimination of discrimination against women is violated not in dramatic moments of overt sexism but in the ordinary organizational logic that makes social networks the gateway to opportunity for working-class women whose credentials alone are insufficient currency. The conditions of her entry into mid-level management were immediately and explicitly gendered:
The word “normal” is the analytical crux.
Quintana Pacheco does not describe the 16:4 ratio as exceptional or openly
contested; she describes it as the unremarkable structural order of the
industry, mirroring what
The hiring assessment revealed a further structural contradiction. Quintana Pacheco was among the least technically skilled candidates:
This finding reveals a second contradiction in how skill was recognized inside the factory. Quintana Pacheco was not retained because she had already mastered the technical operation of the machines, but because her leadership capacity was visible even while her sewing skills were still developing. This affirms
Beyond formal job classification, Quintana
Pacheco's time in the
This finding
supports RQ1 by showing that Quintana Pacheco's maquila-based expertise was
formed through direct participation in the physical rhythms of production.
Hammond's second principle is most visible here because critical consciousness
develops from active engagement with lived conditions rather than from abstract
observation alone. His third principle is also relevant because this labor
knowledge later moved across the boundary between factory and university,
allowing formal education to remain connected to everyday communal and
industrial life. In this sense, her return to the factory as an educator
translated embodied labor experience into pedagogically transferable knowledge,
while also reflecting Hammond's broader commitment to education that serves the
community from which it emerges.
Maria arrived at the factory on her eighteenth birthday having never left her rural community near the Santa Ana volcano. Her first day is the intersection of all three SDGs in one life: excluded from formal education (SDG 4), subject to the gendered expectation that her labor should begin at the earliest legal opportunity (SDG 5), entering a labor system without dignity (SDG 8). In the dialogue, Quintana Pacheco described that first day:
“
In her written chronicle, she named what came next:
Maria's experience supports RQ1 by showing that Quintana Pacheco's maquila-based expertise was not limited to technical production knowledge, but also included the ability to teach, guide, and support women entering unfamiliar labor and urban environments. This finding most directly reflects Hammond's third and fourth principles of popular education: learning was integrated into everyday communal life, and instruction was adapted to the needs of the learner, beginning with basic forms of navigation and extending to occupational health and garment production. Through this process, the factory floor became an informal educational space where knowledge was exchanged in response to immediate social, economic, and bodily needs. Maria's movement from rural isolation toward greater confidence in the city also connects SDG 4, SDG 5, and SDG 8 by showing how education, gendered mobility, and access to work were intertwined in one woman's early experience of maquila labor.
In the dialogue, Quintana Pacheco also suggests the recognition of a potential pattern of abuse:
“
In her written chronicle, she named Sara's case and the mechanism that made institutional support possible:
The meritocratic narrative of Quintana Pacheco's educational trajectory is refuted not by her account of failure but by her account of the precise structural conditions under which she succeeded:
The factory's production
rhythm, El Salvador's inadequate public transit, and UNICAES's evening schedule
were all structural conditions beyond Quintana Pacheco's control. These are the
material conditions under which SDG 4 Target 4.3's equal access to quality
technical education for women confronts its own structural impossibility. She
took one to two courses per semester, constrained by exhaustion, not
aspiration. Her salary was approximately $500 per month; tuition was $120 per
month (
In her solo recording, she named the financial dimension explicitly:
Her motivation was not individual ambition but intersectional consciousness:
In the dialogue interview, she
revealed that her deepest motivation was family survival: "My biggest
motivation is to help my mom around the house. I didn't want to be separated
from my mom because if I didn't work, she would definitely have to leave, to
emigrate" (
This finding supports RQ1 by showing that Quintana Pacheco's educational knowledge was formed through the daily negotiation of factory labor, university study, and financial constraint. Through Hammond's third principle, her experience illustrates how learning was integrated into everyday communal and working life rather than separated from it. It also connects to Hammond's fourth principle and SDG 4 by showing that access to technical higher education required adaptive structures, such as evening courses, while still placing significant physical and economic costs on working-class women.
Her position in the factory also allowed her to create professional openings for other women navigating the transition from university into engineering work. In this sense, the factory became not only the site of her own constraint, but also a place where she could help others access opportunities that formal education alone had not guaranteed.
Her classmates who went
straight through without interruption needed her factory position to access the
professional opportunities their credential alone could not unlock. The factory
enabled the university, not the other way around. This is also popular
education in the
Quintana Pacheco graduated in 2006 and began teaching at UNICAES part-time in 2009 out of economic necessity during the global financial crisis. The vocation emerged from the practice. In her solo recording she named the epistemological core of what the factory had produced in her:
This finding
supports RQ2 by showing how Quintana Pacheco's professional and educational
trajectory was shaped by the intersection of class position, gendered labor,
and access to technical knowledge inside the maquila. Her growth did not occur
outside the factory system, but through the simultaneous demands of paid labor,
university study, and applied production work. Through Hammond's second
principle, her active participation in the production process became a source
of critical learning, as she developed knowledge of productivity, efficiency,
and planning through practice rather than through theory alone. Her experience
also reflects Hammond's third principle because the knowledge produced in
everyday working life later became connected to formal education, allowing the
factory and university to function as linked spaces in her professional
formation.
Ingenieros en Acción was launched in 2020 and was originally entirely in virtual format during
a global pandemic, which required Quintana Pacheco to build and sustain
industry relationships through online platforms while the physical world was
closed. That the program took root under these conditions demonstrates that its
infrastructure is relational and epistemological, not logistical. The program
targets fifth-year industrial engineering students at UNICAES and is designed
to ensure graduates do not enter the sector only able to work at the operative
level, but are prepared to access managerial and supervisory roles, junior human
resources positions, quality assurance and control roles, logistics and supply
chain management positions, and graphic design and chemical engineering
applications within apparel manufacturing firms (
Hilos de Amistad, launched in 2026 as a direct extension of Ingenieros en Acción, connects Salvadoran industrial engineering students with international textile and merchandising students in the United States. It positions Salvadoran students as knowledge holders rather than recipients of international exchange, refusing the colonial assumption that knowledge flows North to South. Its full empirical analysis will be published as Part 2 of this research program.
Quintana Pacheco closes her chronicle with a declaration that carries the analytical weight of both research questions:
“Nada es casualidad” should be read less as a claim of inevitability and more as Quintana Pacheco's recognition that her professional trajectory was shaped by the convergence of labor, education, relationships, and opportunity. This finding supports RQ1 by showing how her return to the factory as a university educator grew from knowledge developed across multiple spaces: the maquila, the university, human resources, logistics, and the classroom. It also supports RQ2 because this movement was shaped by the gendered and classed conditions through which she worked, studied, and later taught. Through Hammond's third principle, her trajectory reflects the integration of education into everyday communal and working life, while Hammond's fourth principle is visible in her later effort to create more accessible pathways for students entering the apparel manufacturing sector.
This declaration considers the impact of all three SDGs simultaneously. SDG 4 is answered not by enrollment statistics but by the institution Quintana Pacheco built from the knowledge SDG 8's sector classified as unskilled. SDG 5 is answered not by policy declarations but by 250 students redirected toward management and leadership. SDG 8 is answered not by GDP figures but by the structural accountability Quintana Pacheco demands of industry partners. Table 3 maps this structural alignment chronologically.
The findings suggest that Hammond's framework of popular education helps interpret Quintana Pacheco's movement from the factory floor to the academy and back through her work with students.
In response to
RQ1, her maquila experience became pedagogically transferable because it was
rooted in lived labor, community responsibility, and direct knowledge of the
apparel sector. Her teaching and programs, including Ingenieros en Acción and
Hilos de Amistad, show how factory-derived knowledge may inform student
preparation, industry engagement, and inclusive international higher education.
In response to RQ2, the findings show that gender and class shaped Quintana
Pacheco's trajectory through unequal hiring practices, limited recognition of
women's leadership, long work-study schedules, and the structural costs of
These findings
also speak to broader research on feminized export manufacturing beyond El
Salvador.
Because this article is based on a single case, the findings should be read as exploratory rather than universally generalizable. The study offers an analytical contribution for future comparative research on how women's labor knowledge in export-oriented manufacturing contexts may inform popular education, professional formation, and inclusive international higher education.
This study suggests that
The findings from this study imply that inclusive education in the Global South could benefit from further epistemological development beyond policy reform and be more informed by the voices of the oppressed rather outside observers of oppressed persons and experiences. Quintana Pacheco's Ingenieros en Acción offers a replicable model for future researchers to either adopt or analyze. The strengths of this approach to pedagogical innovation lie in the curriculum built that was built from industry-insider knowledge, her maintained industry partnerships which held to structural accountability and ease-of-transition into the labor force for her students, and in-class student preparation aimed at refining management and leadership styles, from which the inequality regime historically excludes working-class women. Universities across Central America and the Global South operating in proximity to feminized export manufacturing sectors have the opportunity to examine whether equivalent programs can be built from equivalent knowledge systems already present in their communities.. For higher education institutions, this also extends to co-authorship with practitioners whose expertise has been institutionally dismissed is not merely an ethical gesture. It can represent a standard for methodological and moral practice for the researchers who are inevitably in service to the communities in which they study.
Quintana Pacheco's educational activism in practice also holds significant political and policy implications as related to the international development frameworks – SDG 4, 5, and 8. There is potential for these three frameworks to be both qualitatively and quantitatively examiend as interlinked societal needs for improvement rather than separate goals. Policy-makers within government settings and educational institutions could observe the compounded structural costs that working-class women absorb when labor conditions, gender norms, and educational access are treated as separate policy domains rather than intersecting structural realities
This study identifies four primary directions for future research. First, future studies could undertake longitudinal outcome tracking of the approximately 250 students who have participated in Ingenieros en Acción since 2020. Their long-term employment trajectories, wage attainment, leadership advancement, and retention within the apparel sector have not yet been systematically documented. A longitudinal mixed-methods study following cohort outcomes over five to ten years could provide a stronger empirical basis for assessing the program's educational, professional, and structural impact.
Second, future research could pursue regional comparative analysis across Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua, where maquila sectors similarly rely on working-class women's labor and expertise. Comparative narrative inquiry across these national contexts would help determine whether the conditions documented in this study are specific to El Salvador or reflective of broader regional patterns. Such research could also examine how popular education frameworks may require context-specific adaptation across different Central American settings.
Third, the second phase of this research program could provide a fuller empirical analysis of Hilos de Amistad, including its learning outcomes, curricular structure, cross-institutional dynamics, and contributions to inclusive international higher education. This future work could further examine how Salvadoran students and U.S.-based students engage in reciprocal learning when factory knowledge, textile production, and international collaboration are placed in dialogue.
Finally, future research could examine the institutional, policy, and industry partnership conditions that make programs like Ingenieros en Acción possible within Central American universities. This line of inquiry could also consider the epistemological, institutional, financial, and political barriers that may shape whether similar pedagogical models can be adapted in other settings.
The findings from this study offer new contributions to broader research on inclusive higher education in Latin America, while also remaining careful not to make universal generalizations based on a singular case study.
The trajectory documented in this study challenges meritocratic interpretations that have the potential to attribute professional advancement primarily to individual determination or exceptional personal achievement. Patricia Quintana Pacheco's pedagogical programs emerged not solely from personal perseverance, but from the convergence of structural conditions, relational networks, and epistemological resources developed through nine years of simultaneous industrial labor and higher education. The significance of Quintana Pacheco's trajectory lies not only in her individual success, but in the ways the knowledge produced through that journey has been redirected into teaching, mentorship, industry engagement, and the educational possibilities of those who follow.
Inclusive education in the Global South cannot rely solely on the uncritical transfer of Northern theoretical frameworks into globally Southern institutions. Rather, this study suggests the importance of recognizing knowledge systems already embedded within surrounding communities, including those developed through labor experiences in factories, agricultural fields, and domestic spaces. These knowledge systems have historically been positioned as sites of production rather than sites of learning. This study presents one documented example of such recognition and examines an institutional model through which these forms of knowledge may be legitimized within higher education.
The authors declare that this article has no ethical implications regarding its development, writing, or publication
We would like to acknowledge Jung Ha-Brookshire, PhD, for her unwavering belief in this research and the continuous support of her students and colleagues. We also would like to thank the U.S. Fulbright Program and the administrators, faculty, and staff at the Universidad Católica de El Salvador for their support.
All data supporting the results of this study are published in the article itself.