The Secret Sisterhood of Offshore Oil Workers

Living on a remote oil platform 60 miles out into the Gulf of Mexico is no easy assignment. Now imagine being one of the first women to ever step on board.

Photos courtesy of María de Jesús Ramos Cárdenas | Story edited by Farah Mohammed

María de Jesús Ramos Cárdenas didn’t know what she was doing when she arrived at the helicopter pad in Ciudad del Carmen, an island city along Mexico’s gulf coast, in September 1988.

She didn’t know much about the offshore oil industry. But she was tired of using her medical degree only haphazardly — giving consults when and where she could, often door-to-door, while also cooking food, sewing clothes, cutting hair, and painting nails in between to pay the bills. Things had been better during the past few months; she was thrilled to have finally gotten a chance to put her degree to use more regularly, working on the island at a hospital run by Pemex, Mexico’s national oil company.

The refrain that Ramos repeated to her supervisors, and indeed the reason she was hired, was “send me wherever you need me.” And now, they had taken her up on it. She was being sent to an oil barge about 60 miles offshore, where she would take over for a doctor who had fallen ill. “I didn’t even know what an oil barge was,” she remembers. “I had never been on a helicopter.”

Ramos arrived at the heliport at around 5 a.m. that September morning, dressed in a blouse, pants and tennis shoes. She looked around. She was the only woman in sight, and all eyes were on her. Ramos, then 33 years old, had never flown before, but when she was told to board, she walked toward the small helicopter, she says, “as if I were an expert at flying.” She watched the pilot pull on a life vest, and she did the same. Then she watched the way he secured his seatbelt, and again she mimicked his movements. As the helicopter lifted, Ramos felt the air carry them away, watching one world disappear below her and another one come into view, a world of giant metal structures that towered out of the ocean, each a little city of its own, pulling petroleum from the waters below. “Where am I?” she thought. “What am I doing?”