A century ago, the binational town of Nogales, spanning the Arizona-Sonora border, was a tiny hamlet far from American and Mexican centers of populations, only recently a beneficiary of the new rail network’s steel tentacles that knitted the two nations together in an ever-expanding labor market. Fifty years after that, on the Sonoran side of what was then a simple barbed-wire fence, the Flores Magon neighborhood—which I have twice had the pleasure of visiting while on the Border Studies Program—was vacant land with no recorded residents.
In contrast, the Nogales, Sonora of 2011 is a teeming city, its vacant outskirts filled with workers from the foreign-owned maquilas, or export-only factories, that have sprung up since the mid-1960s. Flores Magon’s story is a microcosm of the recent history of northern Mexico, from Tijuana in the west to Matamoros in the east, a story of the treacherous whirlpool of foreign-controlled development, slowly sinking communities deeper into an economic abyss; just as importantly, however, Flores Magon illustrates the never-ending struggle of people against economic aggression, a struggle manifest throughout Mexico.
In sharp contrast to the industrial history of the West, maquila towns were non-union corporate utopias founded after 1964 along the border by foreign capitalists (typically American, but also European and Japanese), and individual factories exist only to export finished goods back to the companies’ countries of origin. Flores Magon residents spoke of the lure of (relatively) high wages in the early decades of maquila development—and the importance of Nogales as a way station for U.S.-bound migrants. Some of the town’s migrants decided to stay in Mexico, however, and their settlement spilled into colonias on absentee landlords’ land.
The colonias are legal gray areas—residents are without title, but the Mexican Constitution mandates access to unused land—and the landlords mostly want to keep it that way, so that they’re not required to provide services to residents. Community organizing in the colonias picked up in the 80s, said longtime Flores Magon residents. Wages then were high enough to sustain one-income families, leaving some residents the time to organize, slowly winning concessions from the government in access to roads, electricity, sewage, and useable water. At several points, residents nearly gained legal title to their land.
The emergence of even cheaper labor sources in East Asia, however, has depressed wages in Nogales in recent years, and some maquilas have even departed from Mexico, rendering single-income families a relic of the past, and cutting deeply into time for organizing—the town found itself plunged deeper down the whirlpool.
Local resistance to the system continues: one long-time Flores Magon resident has steadfastly refused to work in maquilas for decades; a new community center serves the neighborhood; and local organizing ploughs forward, albeit with less support from the overworked maquila laborers. People we encountered in Nogales, Sonora carried on with life, generally hopeful and glad for what they could provide with the jobs they had.
Unspoken, however, the nadir of the whirlpool looms ever closer—a large-scale movement of maquilas to East Asia, at which point Mexican border residents would have little choice but mass emigration to the United States for low-wage work here or return to mostly abandoned farming communities further south in Mexico. It’s not hard to think of which option American capital—ever concerned with cheap labor, in the U.S. and abroad—would prefer.
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