In most histories of Silicon Valley, domestic manufacture is assumed to have given way to foreign manufacture starting in the sixties, when the first large plants in Asia and Mexico opened. Widening the perspective on outsourcing to include insourcing practices like the production of semiconductors on Navajo land provides a valuable perspective from which to view the material culture of computing.

The visual archive of promotional materials, brochures, annual reports, and press releases about the Fairchild Shiprock plant and its workers reveals how electronics assembly work became both gendered and identified with specific racialized qualities.

Indian-identified traits and practices such as painstaking attention to craft and an affinity for metalwork and textiles were deployed to position the Navajo on the cutting edge of a technological moment precisely because of their possession of a racialized set of creative cultural skills in traditional, premodern artisanal handwork.

Despite these daunting conditions, the hundreds of Navajo women who stayed on excelled at this work, and the industrial discourse produced by and about the plant attributed its success to the female gender of its workers as well as Indian racial traits.

To explain the plant’s success, the article equates creative cultural skills such as weaving and silversmithing with circuit building.