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Nogales Trip
While most U.S. citizens
have heard of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and know
of the poverty in Mexico, they usually can draw no connecting threads
from one to the other. However, after visiting the maquiladora Curtis
de Mexico and hearing Kiko Trujillo, Borderlinks’ director in Mexico,
speak at House of Mercy it’s impossible not to notice the tie in
factors. There are obvious items implicating NAFTA has at the very
least been contributing to Mexico’s poverty. The article “NAFTA’s
Impact on Mexican Agriculture and Rural Life” produced by the Institute
for Agriculture and Trade Policy indicated that by 1995 NAFTA had caused
the loss of 1 million Mexican jobs (Suppan 14). A fact like this
unfortunately seems to stay buried in academic journals where the
average American never sees it. Perhaps a comparison would be more eye
opening.
Phoenix,
Arizona is currently experiencing a population explosion. The Phoenix
area has grown from approximately 439,000 in the 1960’s to 1.4 million
in 2004 (http://phoenix.gov/BUDGET/bud04pro.pdf).
Maricopa County is one of the fastest growing counties in the country
and housing communities are spreading across the valley like wildfire to
meet these expanding needs. The city is investing in more roads and
miles of freeway to attempt to alleviate the bottlenecked streets and
contractors are building pink-stuccoed strip malls full of food and
goods at the most competitive rates possible. Even with all of the
houses, roadways and shopping centers there is still a 3-4 month wait to
purchase a new house, traveling across the valley takes at least an hour
at peak periods and parking lots are full beyond capacity. It seems as
though Phoenix can’t quite handle the influx of people.
Nogales,
Sonora seems small, when comparing its population to that of Phoenix.
Nogales has felt a similar growth spurt, gaining population from 30,000
in the 1960’s to nearly 300,00 today. In contrast to Phoenix, Nogales
has not seen an increase in roadway construction, housing communities
built by professional contractors or affordable priced food and
clothing. As we saw the homes are constructed with whatever building
materials are available, usually on land that has been squatted. The
roads that are paved, have been paved with rough concrete and there’s no
highway to speak of.
As indicated
by the article “We Are Not Machines: Corporations that bring jobs must
bring justice too,” the hard-line difference between these two growing
cities is the infrastructure (Torres17). In her article, Maria Guadalupe
Torres discusses the problems found in the colonias due to the
maquiladoras. In Phoenix, though the infrastructure is having difficulty
adjusting and adapting to the growth, it’s still there and being
increased to meet the demands that are being put on it. In Nogales, the
city is only now trying to create an infrastructure, woefully behind the
development of the city itself.
Much of the
demands placed on Nogales’ growing infrastructure have been placed there
by NAFTA and the maquiladora industry that it helps to build and
sustain. NAFTA’s policies are such that U.S. companies find it cheaper
to move the labor aspect of their companies to Mexico, where the average
worker salary is only $8.30 per day and the tariffs on importing the
goods back into the U.S. are nearly zero. Nogales being situated so
close to the border makes it an ideal city in Mexico to build the
maquilas. The presence of the maquilas and their proximity to the
border has encouraged thousands of Mexican citizens to migrate north
into the city. This massive influx of life has been so overwhelming for
the formerly small town that the people have nowhere to go. As Kiko
Trujillo of Borderlinks told us, many people upon first arriving in
Nogales sleep under a tree for a few days before they can find some land
to squat on and build.
The influx of
people will only continue so long as NAFTA’s policies continue to
encourage the export of labor into Mexico, and therefore Nogales will
continue to suffer. There’s no easy solution to this problem, as the
infrastructure that Nogales is trying to create has been too long in
coming. Maquilas will not pull out of the area back to the U.S., they
would only move to a cheaper country if the U.S. or Mexico were to incur
fines or some other penalty for the type of slave labor that they
encourage. Mexico, and Nogales in particular is caught in a massive
globalizing modernization without the resources to become modernized.
Until the government of Mexico finds a way to increase its
infrastructure and support itself without having to rely on the maquilas
for employment the situation will only continue to worsen.
Work Completed by: Stephanie Cleland |