Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World Highlight

In 1965, Fairchild opened a factory on the Navajo reservation in Shiprock, New Mexico, taking advantage of high unemployment with a low-wage “trainee” program and $700,000 in loans from the Navajo Nation.52 Scholar Cedric Robinson calls sites like Shiprock “production enclaves,” places where corporations “could be guaranteed special privileges and higher rates of exploitation.”