June 1, Nogales, Mexico: Steep stone steps lead up from the street to the comfortable home of Cecilia and Francisco Guzman in Nogales, Sonora. They have invited us to lunch and to talk. Cecilia, the activist in the family, does most of the talking, while Francisco saws and finishes mesquite wood for bar tops on the deck outside the living room. Photos of their three adult children and their three grandchildren decorate the walls and the massive, intricately carved wooden bookcase.
Cecilia has spent her life – more than sixty years – in Nogales. “I was born on a very clean, very peaceful border,” she tells us. During the sixties, about 30,000 people lived in Nogales. Walnut trees, the nogales that gave the town its name, covered the hills. The town’s economic life depended on the train and on tourism, with trinket shops and occasional bullfights needed to entertain the visitors.
Everything began to change at the end of the sixties. The United States terminated the bracero program, sending home to Mexico the thousands of guest workers who had traveled north to work over more than forty years. That is when the maquilas came to town. Maquilas or maquiladoras are factories making goods for export. Under special deals with the U.S. and Mexican governments, manufacturers got tax breaks and used cheap Mexican labor to manufacture goods and export them back to the United States. Electronics factories – Motorola, WestCop and Señor Ricard – were among the early maquilas.
Population growth continued through the 1970s and 1980s, ballooning during after the 1990s to today’s unofficial total of about 400,000. As Mexico’s agricultural sector suffered under the weight of neo-liberal economic policies and NAFTA (the North American Free Trade Agreement), displaced farmers and workers headed north to the maquila zones – and to the United States.
“Nogales was not prepared to receive all these people,” Cecilia says. “The topography with all the hills do not have room for all the houses. … All these people working in the maquilas or deported back from the U.S., have no place to live.” With no available housing, the newcomers squatted on land they did not own, carving colonias out of the hillsides, shanty towns with dirt roads. Concrete block homes rank highest in the colonias, but most people start with wood or even cardboard. Even long-established colonias often lack electricity, sewer and water services.
“Some of the maquilas have a subsidized housing program now,” Cecilia says, “but you have to pay at least two minimum wages. the people don’t have the money so they have to squat or invade the land.
“In many families both parents must work and that leaves the children at home alone, without supervision, and they can go to school or not as they please, and this causes a lack of orientation and severe social problems.”
During the 1990s, Cecilia worked with tunnel children. Cecilia explained that the tunnels under Nogales reach all the way across the border, and were used to smuggle both migrants and drugs. Many children lived in the tunnels, some as members of armed gangs.
“There was a very dangerous tunnel that the authorities would not enter – neither Mexican nor U.S. authorities – partly because of the pollution and partly because of the armed people. In this arroyo, there was always water running, draining garbage, chemicals, sewage. So the children were very sick, in part from drug addiction but also many other illnesses. My mission in working with them was to try to get them out of there, to reconnect them with their families, to get them medical care, and to teach them to read and write. … These were kids from 10 to 18 years of age.”
Cecilia says that her work with the children was so all-consuming that it affected her family and her health. By 1998, she realized that she had to find other work. Four years later, the military and the Border Patrol invaded the tunnels, finally closing them off from the children. Today, Cecilia works with BorderLinks, which does advocacy and educational work around immigrant issues on the border, and has staff on both sides of the border.
In her analysis, the maquilas offer some benefit, providing work for people, even if salaries are low. The minimum wage in Nogales is about $4.50 per day, and many maquila workers earn more than that.
But the maquilas also create new problems. She recalls the Nogales of her youth. “Once the place was full of walnut trees, but now there are none. And we also had many oak trees. Now they cut down all the trees to make the maquilas, where we used to go on Sundays for picnics and to walk. Everyone in the city would go there, but now there is nowhere to go.”
Even worse, she says, the industrial and chemical wastes from the maquilas have poisoned the water and the air. Across the border, public health studies show alarmingly high rates of lupus and skin cancer in the sister city of Nogales, Arizona. Cecilia believes that her city suffers even worse, with elevated incidence of anencephaly and other birth defects – but similar public health studies have not been done here.
Despite the problems she sees around her, Cecilia continues to work for change. “We Mexicans do not live on hope, we live on faith,” she insists. “We have much faith that there will be changes. I work with BorderLinks because it is sowing a seed of change. …
“This year we are in elections. This is a vulnerable moment, and I think that we need to keep insisting on change and we must be ready to make change within ourselves, too. If there are changes within each person, we can make changes outside .. over the generations, with children and grandchildren. The young people, the students, the youth give us hope.
“I don’t think hope should ever die.”
Mary Turck