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World community
The following article originally appeared in Salt of the Earth. It is posted here for private use only. It may not be reprinted in whole or in part without the permission of Salt of the Earth magazine.
Snapshots from the edge:
a report from the U.S./Mexico border
Kevin Clarke
Mud-splattered rancheros crouch in the backs of Ford and GM pickup trucks on their way to another job, or another bar. Indian women with small children huddle under ponchos and beg from street corners or roam the sidewalks selling photo-ops to tourists who whirl from shop to shop, dodging sidewalk hawkers, urban vaqueros, and their fellow Americans.
The sidewalks are packed, the streets are congested, and completely humorless Mexican border agents are ready to greet you. Welcome to Nogales, Mexico. Welcome to the border.
A short walk through its rowdy and colorful commercial district—particularly at night—is proof enough that Nogales, Mexico lives up to the somewhat checkered reputation of U.S./Mexican border towns. At night Nogales comes alive with crowds and couples traveling the bar circuit or visiting the cinema or the town's many restaurants; the town's prostitutes begin their customary rounds, and the abandoned children and teenagers who live in the drainage tunnels under the border come out to run the streets, ripping off tourists or travel-tired stragglers from the south, or just "huffing" toluene, glue, or paint among themselves.
There is movement and excitement on the streets of Nogales, Sonora that is absent on the tired-looking streets and shut-down storefronts of Nogales, Arizona. Here in the Mexican Nogales is a vibrancy and color that energizes its visitors from across the border—at least long enough for them to spend some of their American dollars on woolen blankets and "authentic" Aztec trinkets or to squeeze a fresh lime into a Tecate beer in a Nogales bar.
Day trippers from Arizona and long-distance travelers from other parts of the U.S. make their way through this Nogales, waving off shopkeepers and holding tightly to their purses, casting a nervous hand across inside coat pockets. They spend their money and their time and go home to tell their friends of the food they ate and the bargains they discovered and the adventure they had.
But there is a different Nogales not far from the one most of its visitors see, assailing the hillsides and peopling the assembly factories of the city. The round hills of this Nogales, Sonora, Mexico rise above the wavy flatlands of her sister Nogales, Arizona, USA. In this Nogales, ramshackle houses of tin, plywood, and cardboard—and some of more substantial brick or cinder-block construction—climb along the sides and crowd the tops of the Sonoran hills in no particular form, following no particular lines, creating communities and streets that follow no urban designer's plan but only the specifications and ingenuity of their builders.
This city of perhaps 300,000 tells many stories to its visitors, the story of two communities separated by two flags, two countries united by trade and tradition, even the conflicting stories of the First and Third World, rich and poor. Nogales is a city of contrasts and unintentional ironies, a city of the free-market future and the industrial past, and straddling everything is a long, green fence that marks an invisible line they call the border.
The fence
It's a formidable 15-foot fence that crosses the face of Nogales, Sonora and prevents her from viewing her sister in Arizona. The forest-green military fence went up in 1995—surplus from the Gulf War—with an eye to stanching the hemorrhage of illegal crossings that had been running through Nogales.
"We used to talk as neighbors across the old fence," says one Nogales resident. "Now we can't do that. It really serves no purpose because people still jump over it.
"It's just ugly," he adds after a moment.
The remnants of the previous "windscreen" fence—all patches, cutaway sections, and pulled-back metal cross-stitching—are a mute testament to the ease of previous crossings. The new fence has actually done its job fairly well. Fewer people cross into the United States from Nogales. Most drift further east now to Douglas, Arizona to try their luck or follow the Nogales fence until it trails off a few miles from town to make a more perilous and sometimes deadly crossing in the hot isolation of the desert.
Still, if you stand in front of the Imperial Hotel on Calle Internacional in Nogales for an hour or two, you are sure to see at least one group of young men climb over the old fence's more intimidating replacement. All day long young and not-so-young men stand before this hotel on the last street in Mexico. They watch the fence intently as if somehow it will communicate the moment when it is safest to jump—when the Border Patrol Blazers are far enough away or an agent has stepped away from his surveillance monitor—and perhaps a spot where they will not break a leg landing on the other side.
Josh just laughs when asked what the best time of day is to cross the border into the U.S. "Anytime," he says, smiling broadly. "The people are crossing— how do you say it in English?--`all the time,' " He laughs again. "Yes, they are crossing all the time—whenever they want."
Josh is a ranchero—part cowboy, part farmworker—and this afternoon, all smiles. He works on an ejido, a kind of cooperative farm, in the countryside around Nogales. He has no ambitions about escaping into el norte himself. He is happy working on his ranch, but he understands what compels a lot of other Mexicans to cross the border. The motives for most are, after all, not that difficult to appreciate. "There are no jobs," he says. "The people are looking for money; they are looking for jobs. They are looking for a better life.
"Here the government is too corrupt," he says, shaking his head in disgust. "Everything is too corrupt; the government is no good. Over there," he says, throwing his thumb over his shoulder where the border stands about 30 feet away, "everything is more, you know, progressive.
"Progress, money," he says, nodding. "That's what they've got in the U.S."
The wash
The Nogales wash is a rock- and garbage-strewn gully that snakes its way through town and over the craggy countryside of Sonora before trailing off into other streams and gullies just across the border into the United States.
On dry days people park their pickup trucks alongside or within the wash; others throw their garbage into it or wander along its rocky path looking for salvage. And on rainy days the wash suddenly comes alive with crashing water, untreated sewage and rubbish, and, some say, industrial pollutants.
The wash is as handy a metaphor as one could want to depict the ironies and interconnections of the relationship between the United States of America and its neighbor, the United States of Mexico. In this part of Mexico, owing to higher elevation, water flows northward—into the United States. That means that industrial undesirables produced by the U.S.-owned assembly factories of Nogales, Sonora head north into Arizona. As one Mexican environmentalist puts it: "Water doesn't need a passport."
Both nations share custody of the huge Santa Cruz River Basin that runs between and beneath Sonora and Arizona. Though most of the aquifer is located in Mexico, that giant sucking sound you hear in Sonora is the flow of most of its water north into Arizona, the land of retirement cocktails and preternatural desert golf courses.
Americans may worry over the quality of their drinking water and have the cash to invest in improving it, but policymakers in Nogales, Sonora have little opportunity to attend to such niceties as nontoxic drinking water. Quantity is the biggest problem its fast-growing population faces.
While U.S. authorities push their Mexican counterparts to build more facilities for treating sewage and cleaning the water that they know will eventually end up in the U.S., Mexican officials attempt to direct their scarce resources into methods of increasing the total volume of water for industrial and public consumption.
"There are a lot of difficulties in the politics of water between the United States and Mexico," says Luis Cervera, an environmental analyst at the Colegio de la Frontera Norte in Nogales. "How is sustainability possible within this shared region and with such different attitudes toward the use of water?
"Industrial solvents are our biggest pollution problems—and related to the problem we see with cancer—but the biggest problem is that U.S. Environmental Protection Agency studies are conducted on their side of the border, and the same is true in Mexico with PROFEPA, the Mexican equivalent of the EPA. No one's looking at this issue holistically."
The result, he says, is that U.S. analysts find cancer and lupus clusters in Arizona—not in Mexico—but don't conduct studies or make the comparisons that could tell them why that is happening. "I guess that means we are more resistant [to polluted water] than you guys," Cervera says with a wry smile.
"On the border we have many difficult environmental problems, but the first issue is finding a mechanism for working together." A recent agreement between the two nations' environmental agencies to begin comprehensive evaluations of a 100-kilometer zone along the border may be a first step toward finding that mechanism.
The colonia
Driving along the hillsides of Nogales into the colonias that rise around the city is a slow and rocky journey, requiring the hardiest of automobile suspensions, and a somewhat fearless driving demeanor. Hardy spirits in general are what is required to make a life here on these hillsides.
The colonias are the barrios that surround Nogales, remarkably self-reliant communities where most of the city's workers have built their own homes, carved red-clay streets out of hillsides, strung precarious electrical lines. There are few of the comforts here that most people in the U.S. take for granted. Many of the plywood homes are held together with little more than esperanza—hope. Their steep hillside entranceways are defended against erosion by layers of abandoned car tires.
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What one parish is doing |
Municipal water, sewage, and street pavement are nowhere evident in the colonias, but crazy lines of electric wiring have reached many of these streets, offering the bizarre apparition of American programs blaring out of beat-up TV sets in the smoky cinder-block or plywood "living rooms" of colonia residents. |
Doña Vicky lives in a cinder-block cabin in one of the colonias overlooking Nogales' city center. She and her family share three rooms: kitchen, living room, and bedroom. Her home is heated by a wood-burning stove in the kitchen—its draft so poorly aligned that within minutes a visitor's eyes are smarting from the smoke that is filling the home.
Doña Vicky is clearly matriarch with a capital M. Her three daughters and their children hover about her in the small kitchen where she stands smoking and directing the dinner traffic. Her husband, who alone in the family is somewhat fluent in English, stands by silently while she does most of the talking.
She has been in this colonia five years and worries that she may be forced to leave if the landowner raises the rent as he threatens to. It would cost her about $2,000 to buy the lot outright. "But where are you going to find that much money in Mexico working at the factory?" she asks. "What they give you is 180 pesos a week," she says holding out her empty hands in distress.
"This is how we are working our fingers to the bones," she says. "And this is what we get for it: $18 a week."
Most colonia residents depend on the weekly visit of a tank truck for the water they use for all their household needs. The water trucks follow a lumbering course along the colonia "streets," stopping to fill old oil drums Nogales families line up beside their homes. The drums have been salvaged from the factories. Many are clearly marked for toxic-waste storage.
The past few nights have seen temperatures dip into the 20s. There is actually snow on the ground here, for the first time in almost ten years. Inside the colonia homes, some will sleep tonight in relative comfort on cement floors by propane heaters or near kitchen stoves. Others in more primitive plywood constructions will sleep little if at all tonight, focusing all their energy just on trying to stay warm around outdoor fires.
"The life here is getting more difficult," Doña Vicky says sadly. "Everything has gotten more expensive: the electricity, the gas, everything in the grocery store, the tortillas, the milk.
"In the factories [in response to the peso devaluation], they raised the wages 17 percent, but it's not enough. In July the electric rates will go up; they say they will double.
"We can't depend on the government; we don't have a government we can go to for help. We hope people will come
here and see and understand what is going on. Here there's no way of struggling to get better, to improve yourself. Year after year, the only struggle we have is to survive.
"For a lot of people, the only thing left is illegal work like smuggling people across the border. Others are smuggling drugs."
Doña Vicky looks around her cinder-block home with its tin roof and uncertain carpentry. "And that's all some people can do," she says, "to have a place like this."
The city
Border cities like Nogales are experiencing the highest rates of population growth in Mexico. That's more problem than progress since most of these border towns are not able to provide the social services their growth rates demand.
On all levels—water supply, sewage, trash disposal, education, utilities, and infrastructure—Nogales and other border towns are being outrun by their populations. The strain is obvious on the hillsides of Nogales where each new
surge of hope-filled workers from the south or transients heading north brings a wave of new wildcat construction.
The U.S.-owned assembly plants—called maquiladoras (or short: maquilas)--"came here to use cheap labor, cheap labor that wasn't even living here yet," says one Nogales community activist. "It was just the jobs that were here. There was no transportation; there wasn't public housing. People had to create their own infrastructure." That remains true even today.
In the late 1960s when "twin plant" agreements first brought the maquilas to Nogales, the city was home to about 50,000 people. Now the official census registers a population of around 260,000 people, but independent studies suggest the figure is closer to 300,000. Some here say the true population may even reach as high as 400,000.
Francisco Trujillo is the director of Nogales' Chamber of Commerce. Trujillo says frankly that the government number is the least trustworthy, though he acknowledges that, owing to the "fluidity" of the north-yearning population, it is difficult to keep an accurate census.
And the people keep coming to Nogales. Fewer of them are able to cross the border into the U.S. since President Clinton doubled the border patrol and the big green fence went up. More of those stragglers from the south are being forced to stay in Nogales, to find some kind of work and make some kind of life here. "They are staying and contributing, but we can't get the official recognition and resources," Trujillo complains.
Nor can Nogales' civic leaders expect much help from the maquila owners. City Secretary Gonzalo García Velasco says that the town, because of the special agreements which brought the factories to Nogales in the first place, has never been able to collect a dime in tax revenue from the manufacturing plants that generated the Nogales population boom and its concurrent social-services meltdown. But he is optimistic that this position is slowly changing and that in the future maquila owners will show a little more civic-mindedness.
García points to new commitments from state and federal authorities in collaboration with maquila owners to build more schools in Nogales, pave more roads, and develop a municipal water and sewage system. He says that all of these civic improvements will be conducted within three years.
Some of Nogales' citizens, when told of García's promises, are less optimistic that they will ever see such improvements completed. "They have said this before," one resident complains, shaking her head in dismissal. "They have no plan for this city."
The workers
The minimum-wage workers who find jobs at most of the Nogales' maquilas encounter as squeaky-clean and organized an industrial world as their world in the colonias is haphazard and uncertain. After spending a night in the colonia, it is hard to imagine a starker contrast than to walk across a maquila floor.
At one plant, state-of-the-art computer-guided industrial machinery cuts and molds flats of metal into the tiny carburetors that help to run some of America's modern conveniences. When they leave the factory, workers return to the cinder-block cells the lucky ones call home. The unlucky ones or the newcomers to Nogales return to even worse conditions—plywood or tin, cardboard or anything else they've managed to scrap together to build a shelter with. There are about 90 other such maquilas in Nogales, providing about 30,000 jobs to the city's working population.
Though more young men are finding work in Nogales than in the past, the workforce here remains primarily women. As many as 70 percent of the maquila laborers are women.
Factory managers say women are preferable to men because of their attention to detail and because their small hands and dexterity better complement the delicate assembly work being conducted at most of the maquilas. Critics say the real reason has less to do with delicacy than it does with exploitation.
In this macho world, rightly or wrongly, women are perceived as less "troublesome" employees, easier to manipulate and less likely to complain. They'd have a lot to complain about.
Labor activists report regular cases of sexual harassment, even physical abuse and sexual assaults, of the young women who work in the maquilas. Though some plants offer maternity leave, others dole out birth-control pills so unplanned pregnancies—at least as far as factory managers are concerned—don't interfere with production quotas.
Looking around one shop floor, the faces of many workers seem to belie the plant minimum age of 16. Few seem older than 25. "Workers" as young as 11 are not unknown in Nogales. Education in Mexico is only mandatory up to the sixth grade, when parents can sign consent forms that will allow their children to legally accept full-time jobs in the factories.
It's an option that many impoverished families have little choice but to take, mortgaging their children's education, their future, against the dire needs of the present. "A lot of kids are not interested in going to school," a onetime social worker from Nogales says, "because they are tired of being hungry and they want to get to work."
In fulfillment of one of the original agreements that first brought U.S. capital here, there is no true independent union movement in Nogales, though government unions purportedly represent the workers.
Standard work weeks are 48 hours. The vast majority of workers in Nogales earn only Mexico's minimum wage, 24 pesos or about $3 to $4 a day, $18 to $20 a week. Most people work overtime on Saturdays or after the 10-hour workday ends.
Workers can earn small bonuses designed to improve performance or attendance. The slightest slipup, however, can mean the loss of these bonuses—extra cash that workers, particularly since the collapse of the peso, have come to depend on. Bonuses are also offered at 5- or 10-year intervals, but few workers earn anything resembling a pension.
Maquilas do provide some benefits, though. One plant manager points out that his company offers a subsidized lunch to its employees. "Lunch is only 50 cents," he says, smiling broadly—in other words, "only" one sixth to one eighth of a productive worker's daily take-home pay.
The Casa
"In the U.S.," José Torres says with the mischievous smile that rarely departs from his face, "you hear all of the good news. `The economy [in Mexico] is going up, up, up! Everything is good.'
"But if you come here and spend a week or two weeks, you'll see the reality; you'll see how the poor are living." Torres sees it every day. After retiring from a long working life in the United States, Torres has returned to his hometown to take over his departed mother's "business," a feeding and service center for the poorest of Nogales' poor: Casa de la Misericordia, "House of Mercy."
His retirement work affords him a view of life in the global market few on Wall Street ever have the chance to enjoy. Each day, he and his volunteers dole out lunch to perhaps 300 children from the Colonia Bella Vista, where the Casa is located. "The only good meal they get is here. We have one rule: they're allowed to come up for more two or three times—as much as they want—as long as they finish everything."
In fact, there are a lot of kids heading up for seconds of this simple meal of tortillas, refried beans, and rice. It is the standard fare of the colonias. Other kids line up in two rows by the lunchroom door, waiting in remarkably good order for their chance to eat.
"They have rice and beans every meal; maybe once a week they have meat," Torres says, surveying his lunchtime crowd. "It's very rare—meat or eggs. Their parents work in the factories or else picking up the garbage. I know a lot of people here [in Bella Vista], adults, they go to bed hungry every night. They may have enough to feed the kids, but not properly, much less for themselves. They got no heat; they keep warm by sleeping all together or by standing next to a can of firewood. That's very dangerous around here with all these wooden constructions."
Torres survived a childhood little different from his lunchroom customers' before he crossed the border as a young man and made a life for himself and his family in the United States. "I still remember being 6 or 7 years old and going to bed hungry. I know what it feels like when somebody is eating an apple and you can't afford one." This he suggests is evidence of the greatest tragedy of Mexico and its experience as host to the maquilas. "Forty years later," he says grimly. "Forty years later, and things are still the same.
"Twenty percent of the kids you see here don't go to school for one reason or another. You see a lot of kids, 12 or 13, working the streets, making a living.
"A lot of the girls work in the factories during the week. On the weekends they work as prostitutes. What they make at the factories is not enough, so they sell their bodies.
"Most of the people here come from Chihuahua. Most of them are farmers. Ask them why they came and they'll just say there's nothing for them back home.
"Some come with the illusion that they will go to the U.S., but they stay here; they can't go north; they can't go south; they stay here. I drive around and I see it in their faces: `There's no tomorrow; there's no way for advancement.'"
Many of those who make the long journey to border towns like Nogales come from primitive farming communities in the south of Mexico which have no capacity to compete with big companies like Del Monte and Green Giant. These agribusinesses have found Mexico a simpático host nation for both production and sales. Even growers and producers of traditional Mexican commodities like corn or products like tortilla are under tremendous pressure because of the presence of these multinational agricultural giants.
"Basically, the Mexican economy is not competitive in international markets," says Rodolfo Rubio, an administrator for the Colegio de la Frontera Norte. "That's creating big problems in agriculture."
Since 1992, following the government's conversion to free-market policies, Mexican farmworkers have been allowed to sell their parcels of Mexico's large cooperative farms. This has meant a short-term relief for many Mexican subsistence farmers from their personal economic crises. But over the long term it may mean an enormous transfer of Mexican farmland into the hands of multinational agribusiness and the continuing dislocation of Mexico's campesinos.
A child from the food line has slipped Torres a note. It is a request for some food from a mother of seven who has run out of money.
Her words are so apologetic and respectful that it is almost physically painful to hear them. "Señor Torres: I'm sorry for the intrusion," he translates, "I'm sending you this little girl to see if you can help us with a little soup so we can get by for today."
He stops and looks up. "I know her father. He is a working man, but what he makes in a week, he buys at [the supermarket], and it's gone by Thursday."
Torres reads notes like this all the time, but he worries even more about the many he does not receive. "She was brave to send us the note. A lot of people—how do you say it in English?—they are too proud to send me a note like this.
"Just take a look at these houses," Torres says, throwing his arm toward the buildings on the hillside beneath him. "It's not that the people don't want to better themselves, to build better houses. I talk to people and they are trying, try-ing, trying,...but they can't do it."
Torres blames most of the suffering he sees around him every day on the low wages at the maquilas and a "the poor will always be with us" mentality among management, which takes pride in respecting Mexico's minimum wage but seldom offers to pay more. "The fact that we live in Mexico doesn't mean we got to live in the dirt," he says, showing the first flash of anger this afternoon.
"Eighty percent of the kids here go to sixth grade, and that's it. They're 15 or 16 years old—where do they go? The factories, and that's it. The opportunities are not there for them; it's just factory work, factory work, factory work."
The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was supposed to be the great lifter of economic boats for both the Mexican and American people. Since it was initiated in 1994, however, all the U.S. may have to show for the tortuously negotiated treaty is a minor net job loss. Mexico has endured more dramatic dividends since NAFTA was signed: the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas and the collapse of the peso and emergency bailout from the Clinton administration in 1995.
"That NAFTA, that thing," Torres says with a pained smile. "I think they put a big lie to the people in the U.S., but mainly to my people. Free trade is not working, not for the poor people.
"People thought their salaries would double, that there would be more work, that things would cost less. Mainly the opposite has happened." All Mexico may have to show for NAFTA, Torres says, is the invasion of American chains like Walgreens and McDonalds. "All it's doing is putting shopkeepers out of work."
Trujillo, whose commerce office supports the small business owners of Nogales, agrees. "NAFTA has been a shock to us. We're crashing against a leading world economy, and we're not ready for it. [Former Mexican President Carlos] Salinas tried to make us believe that we were. But as different stages of NAFTA are put in, we are seeing more evidence of our unpreparedness.
"The government is trying to make us believe that we will benefit from it, but all we're seeing is that people who used to be owners of businesses are forced to become someone's employee."
"If things were getting better," Torres says, "You wouldn't see all these people in this border town. Why are they all here?"
The Mexican dream
"I don't think Nogales can change unless the whole picture in Mexico changes," says Trujillo. "We can do little things, pave some streets, get municipal sewage." But in the long run, he says, "We're all suffocating under the economic problems in Mexico; we're all suffocating in it—that has to change."
He suggests that suffocation should be a concern to people living in the United States. "Sometimes I don't understand people in America, the things they do, the way they talk about and treat illegals all the time. If they want to solve the illegal problem, I think they should try to resolve the cause of that. They should look at improving things instead of ignoring them.
"They spend all this time and money on Saddam Hussein, but they don't do anything about what is happening in their own backyard. There's a lot of guerrilla activity in the south; they should be thinking about that. It could be their problem, too.
"I'm not saying they have to solve all our problems for us, but I think the States could have a lot of influence on the Mexican government to improve things." One simple improvement he suggests is pressuring maquila managers to pay their workers a wage that pushes them past mere survival.
A few blocks from his office and down the street from the formal port of entry crossing into the United States, the frustration and despair because of the "suffocation" of Mexico is played out in graffiti across the green face of the border wall. "Viva Zapata EZLN," someone has spray-painted in support of the Chiapas rebels. "Un mundo, una humanidad" (One world, one humanity); "Vivir sin fronteras es vivir de verdad" (To live without borders is to live truly), someone else writes.
In English, someone has spray-painted: "Freedom without boundaries." Other graffiti are more straightforward suggestions about things—mostly unpleasant—that should happen to the American Border Patrol. One final white scrawl catches the eye: "El sueño Americano es una pesadilla"—The American dream is a nightmare.
And the Mexican dream? José Torres watches the last of his kids leave his compound.
"The only dream Mexicans have is the dream they have at night," he says, with a laugh that suggests he really doesn't believe this is so.—END
Copyright © 1997 by Claretian Publications
Kevin Clarke is a contributing editor to U.S. Catholic and a freelance writer in Chicago. He can be reached at clarkek@claretianpubs.org.
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