Fairchild Semiconductor was founded in 1957 by eight entrepreneurs in South San Francisco; it eventually became one of the most successful chip manufacturing companies in the area and launched Silicon Valley. Today, over 2,000 companies that currently dominate the tech industry can be traced back to Fairchild. 

In 1965, the Fairchild manufacturing plant was built in my home community of Shiprock, New Mexico on the Navajo Nation. This semiconductor assembly plant primarily employed Navajo women to create circuit boards, fueling the beginning of Silicon Valley. This gendered exploitation of my Diné community has never been addressed and continues to have a lasting impact on the women workers and their younger generations. As during the days of manufacturing in Tó’díí / Shiprock on our homelands, my community continues to be exploited by being erased in the history of creating today’s technology boom. The erasure and exploitation of Dinétah, and of our community is deeply personal to me not only as a Diné woman and as a descendant of one of the Fairchild plant workers, but also as a current Stanford student living in Silicon Valley who is forced by location, history, and ongoing oppression to continuously weigh against each other my Indigeneity and my education. 

My grandmother was a weaver and many women in my family continue to weave and rely on their weavings for their livelihood. Creating tapestries is a translation of my work into a textile form that is in conversation with my family's history of weaving that is also connected to Fairchild since the Diné women workers of the plant such as my grandmother were praised and exploited for their “innate” ability to manufacture circuit boards as a result of our cultural practice of weaving.