Sásabe is a dusty border town, with 50 people living on the U.S. side and a few thousand living on the Mexico side. Thousands of immigrants travel the road to Sásabe each week, mostly headed for unofficial, uninspected desert crossings. The stories they carry on that dusty road show the inescapable connection between globalization and immigration.

 

The road to Sásabe begins in Washington, D.C. and in Mexico City, where powerful corporate interests command legislation that bankrupts small business owners in Veracruz and subsistence farmers in Chiapas, driving them north to serve as cheap labor in fields and factories.

 

NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement, took effect in 1994, and has built corporate profits, while depressing Mexican wages and driving more than a million small farmers off their land. Corn farmers were devastated as cheaper U.S. corn flooded Mexican markets, beginning in the 1990s. Their U.S. competition comes mostly from large farming operations, which receive the lion’s share of U.S. farm subsidies, to the detriment of small farmers in the United States as well as those in Mexico.

 

After NAFTA, the Mexican government also ended the CONASUPO program, which had provided marketing assistance and support to small corn growers. (Cuts to CONASUPO had begun in 1988, even before NAFTA, as part of neo-liberal economic restructuring.) Now small Mexican farmers have no way to compete with large U.S. grain companies, such as Cargill or ADM. At the same time, government subsidies that had kept down the price of corn tortillas ended. Between 1997 and 2002, the price of corn tortillas, a staple food in Mexico, more than doubled.

 

Farmers in the southern Mexican states of Chiapas and Oaxaca were hit hardest by NAFTA, with millions of people forced off their land to seek work somewhere else in – or outside – the country. René and Mauricio are two of those migrants. They left Chiapas in May, in a search for jobs that is now taking them to the United States. On June 1, at a migrant shelter in Altar, about sixty miles from the border, they stayed up late to talk with a group of Minnesota visitors.

 

“I worked in a cattle ranch and earned about 400 pesos ($36.00) per week,” Mauricio told us. “Then last October it rained a lot. My boss lived next to a river. The ranch was flooded, killing cattle and chickens and everything. I lost my job. The flood wiped out the mangoes, too. My boss was ruined.

 

“I started working at another job. Then I came up here with my friend. I worked to harvest calabazas (squash) up here for a couple of weeks – they weren’t paying much. I went to Guaymas, Sonora, and they weren’t paying much either.”

 

“I’m not married – I just support my mother and a nephew. I’m her only son and she wants me to go back to Chiapas. I say “I’ve come this far. I’m not going back to Chiapas with nothing.’ I’m afraid of robbers and snakes. But I’m with my friend and we are going to make it across.”

 

The town of Altar has become a major jumping-off point for migrants, who must now cross through forbidding desert terrain. Walls and major enforcement efforts have made safer crossings impossible for most. In the high season for immigration, January through March, about three thousand migrants take the road from Altar to the border at Sásabe each day. In May, the Mexican Grupo Beta police, a force charged with protection of immigrants, say the number is down to about 1,000 daily.

 

Grupo Beta stops northbound vehicles at a checkpoint on the heavily rutted dirt road that runs from Altar to Sásabe. They count the people packed into the vans that traverse the trail daily. They tell people to stay with a group, warn women that they especially need the protection of a group, warn them never to let their children leave the group. They warn of the dangers of the desert – dehydration, scorching sun during the day, snakes and scorpions, robbers.

 

Mountains beckon in the distance. Along the road, majestic saguaro cactus stretch their arms thirty or forty feet toward the blazing blue sky. Squat barrel cactus and spiky ocotillo bear shriveling flowers. Paddle-shaped nopales  and shrub-like chollas grow everywhere, mixed in among the creosote bushes and mesquite trees. . 

 

Neither the forbidding terrain nor the discouraging messages from Grupo Beta nor the U.S. government’s posturing with National Guard troops and increased Border Patrols can turn back many of the determined migrants on the Sásabe road. Most will make it across the border. Some will die in the desert – 460 bodies counted last year. Many will be captured and sent back across the border. Most will make it to the north.

 

One of the two Grupo Beta agents at the checkpoint is from Chiapas. He has found work in the northern part of Mexico. Many of his fellow Chiapanecos find work in the maquilas (factories producing goods for export only) clustered along the northern border.

 

Cecilia Guzmán, who has lived in the northern border city of Nogales for more than sixty years, watched her city grow from 30,000 people to its present size of somewhere between 300,000 and 500,000. The maquilas began coming, she says, after the United States ended the bracero program in 1965, sending thousands of Mexican “guest” workers home. At first, the maquilas paid rent to the Mexican owners of the land and factory buildings. After the passage of NAFTA, foreigners could buy the land outright, so less money comes to Mexicans. In 2000, about 100 maquilas operated in Nogales, but the economic downturn after the 9/11 attack in the United States resulted in 20 or 30 closings. Now the number is back up to about 90.

 

The official work week in Mexico is 48 hours. The minimum wage in Nogales is now 48 pesos per day, about $4.50. Most maquila workers make more, earning bonuses for perfect attendance or error-free production or taking fewer bathroom breaks. The average worker may earn closer to 70 pesos per day, closer to six dollars. They work in electronics manufacturing at Motorola or Anfenol, making staples and office supplies at Acco or combination locks at MasterLock or leather belts to be sold at Wal-Mart and K-Mart.

 

Guzmán believes that there is some benefit from maquilas, because they do provide work for people. Some maquilas even provide a type of subsidized housing for some workers. Most workers live in colonias, spreading over mountainsides with housing ranging from cardboard and wood shacks to prized cement-block homes. Colonias generally lack sewage, running water and other amenities.

 

She points out that maquilas cause other problems. Nogales means walnuts, and oak and walnut trees filled the town when she was young. Now the pleasant groves where her family picknicked on Sundays are gone, cut down to make room for maquilas. Today industrial wastes poison the people and environment.

 

The economic refugees crowding Nogales and other border towns or crossing the desert at Sásabe will not stop because of National Guard troops or better walls or enforcement, but most would happily return to their homes if only they could earn enough money to feed their families. The road to Sásabe begins in Washington, DC and Mexico City with trade agreements and neo-liberal economic policies imposed by political and corporate power. The same powers that pushed through NAFTA and CAFTA, that ended CONASUPO and food assistance to the poor – these are the powers that must act to build or rebuild just and sustainable economies, so that migrants have no need to take the dangerous road to Sásabe.