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Nogales Trip by Borderlinks

In my first semester at ASU I took a class entitled “Latin American Cities”.  In this class we discussed economic, historical, and architectural aspects of South America.  When we were observing the different architectural structures, we spent some time studying the favalas that the lower class communities lived in.  These, of course, were not beneficial to the aesthetic environment, but none the less, it was important to see how this group of people lived.  I felt some sympathy for the conditions that these people endured, but photos cannot compare to the experience that our Nogales trip gave to me.

The conditions the residents of Nogales live in are horrific. I'm not judging these conditions by “American standards”, but rather by human standards.  Lack of clean water, proper sewage, electricity, and adequate housing are serious health risks to the men, women, and children that so desperately cling to the U.S.-Mexican border.  Not only do these citizens suffer from the inadequacies of basic needs for survival, but their only source for substandard income is from foreign-controlled of factories that add to the destruction and pollution of the region.  According to the Texas Center for Policy Studies, in 1995 the maquilas were producing 164 tons of hazardous waste per day.  The study further reports that the lack of treatment plants allows these factories to simply dump this waste into the desert.  An article written by Global Exchange reported that improper disposal of the chemicals has greatly increased birth defects and cases of hepatitis.  The readings given for this trip did not supply exact figures of health records or life expectancy rates for the region, but I am sure these reports are frightening.

As a history major, I immediately examined my trip from a historical point of view.  I concluded that Nogales had a strikingly similar resemblance to my studies of American history.  The introduction of heavy industry in the late 18^th and 19^th century left many unskilled workers in America leading similar lives.  Recently I read Upton Sinclair’s, The Jungle.  This fictional novel depicts life in Chicago at the turn of the 20^th century.  Wages in Chicago for unskilled labor was no more than a few dollars a day, and living conditions were perhaps slightly better than those of Nogales.  Rick Ufford-Chase, director of BorderLinks, stated in “Glimpsing the Future”, that the standard wages in maquilas is $3.50 per day.  These wages are comparable to the United States, from nearly a century ago!  In the 1890s in the U.S. a photo journalist named Jacob Riis wrote a book entitled, How the Other Half Lives.  In this book, Riis photographed personal accounts of immigrants’ living conditions in New York.  Riis’ book and his photos stirred enough commotion in New York that the state began to legislate house and sanitation codes.  When I asked Kiko Trijillo, the director for BorderLinks in Mexico, about what the citizens of Nogales were doing to change these conditions, he basically said that they were idle in this matter.  Kiko Trijillo stated that most of the 400,000 residents were first generation migrants who were not interested in changing the environment.  I understand that in American history, it took nearly a century to create reforms that assisted workers.  How long will it take Mexico?

MM 05/11/05