[Excerpt] In the United States, where news about Mexico is sporadic at best and usually rife with stereotypes, Mexican workers are largely invisible, portrayed mainly as competitors for U.S. jobs — whether as undocumented immigrants or as laborers in international runaway shops. Women workers are doubly invisible, discounted as a marginal element of the paid workforce. Yet it is women who are taking the most initiative to break through the barriers of silence and invisibility, seeking friends and allies on the other side of the border and drawing support from church, community, labor and women's groups in the United States. Such efforts, while still in their infancy, could play a major role in strengthening the hand of the labor movement against transnational corporations and in building coalitions among these groups.