Phoenix]Tucson]Nogales and back...

...or, A College Student's Experience with International Relations

            I will be the first to admit:  I went into the fieldtrip with an extremely pessimistic attitude and even lower expectations.  Quite frankly, I expected the natives to be disagreeable, the country impoverished, and let’s not even get started on the quality and safety of the food.  Contrary to my rather xenophobic expectations, the overwhelming majority of the Mexicans that our group encountered were extraordinarily friendly, and the food was quite good (and enjoyed by some members of our group more than others…Tyrone, this means you).  However, the country itself, while not in an advanced state of extreme poverty like I had imagined, is nevertheless in serious need of some very drastic improvements.

            One of the things that impressed me the most (and when I say impressed I do not necessarily mean the word in a good way) was the general and pervasive state of randomness, confusion, and lack of a workable infrastructure.  This was most obviously evidenced by the extremely poor state of whatever actual streets there were (and there were not many), and the traffic conditions upon said roads.  The most prevalent and important road rule seemed to be that if your car was either big enough to force a way through, or small enough to weave a pattern in between other vehicles on the road, you automatically had the right of way.  Further evidence of the random internal structure of the city was the “pattern” of housing.  In lieu of a functioning set of building codes there existed a policy which seemed to consist of “¡Mira!  ¡Hay tierra vacia y hojas de madera!  ¡Que construyamos una casa!” (“Look!  Empty land and sheets of wood!  Let’s build a house!”).  I am not attempting to be insulting here; what I say is essentially corroborated by my own experience as well as in Maria Guadalupe Torres’ account of maquiladora workers “We Are Not Machines:  Corporations that bring jobs must bring justice too”.  She states:  “Families build their homes themselves, buying cheap construction materials over time” (17).  The home of the family that my group went to eat with was constructed using a concrete slab for the floor, sheets of wood for walls, bed sheets and other assorted linen for doors, and a corrugated steel roof.  There were no sidewalks or actual roads to speak of, and what water there was had to be boiled before use.  They did, however, have electricity sent in for the city government.

            The lack of infrastructure in the particular colonia that our group visited, Bellavista, was partially due to a lack of agreement and global planning between Mexico and the maquiladoras.  As Torres points out, maquiladoras, unlike companies located in the U.S., do not have to contribute to local taxes.  The government of Mexico knows that if they had to pay taxes, costs would subsequently increase, and the companies would pull out of the country and do business with a “more reasonable” government.  Never mind that this is a morally and logistically reprehensible thing to do, it is economically sound in that as long as Mexico will keep providing labor at a bargain basement price, companies will keep bringing work in for the people to do and make a semi-living wage.

            I was, however, somewhat surprised when we visited the Amphenol Optimize maquiladora in Nogales.  Our in-class readings had me prepared to witness a literally slave-like work environment with hundreds of either very old or very young people painfully bent under chemically harmful workloads.  Instead, the building itself was clean, if a bit dingy, and the working conditions seemed almost a paradise indeed compared with the alternative:  nothing.  In the excerpt from La Crónica, a Mexicali newspaper, it was professed that maquiladoras pay women an average of 11% less than their male counterparts, but work them anywhere from 6-10 more hours per week.  This, among other things, proved not to be true in the maquiladora that our class visited.  It was specifically asked by our group, and answered by the representative, that men and women are paid the same wage, barring of course time with the company:  $7 per day.  While this seems to be, and of course is, a shamefully low wage, it is possible to live on this (however sparsely), in Mexico.  In addition to this pay, workers at Amphenol Optimize receive medical and dental benefits, free schooling for their children, food coupons, and bonuses based on things such as punctuality and the amount of time employed by the company.

            However, just because conditions in that particular maquiladora were perhaps better than most does not mean that conditions are equally acceptable throughout the rest of the country, or even the rest of the city.  It would be easy to become frustrated with such a life.  To help cope, many of the city’s residents have resorted to alcoholism; as our guide, the head of BorderLinks Mexico pointed out, there exists in Mexico an amazing proliferation of roadside “beer to go” stands.  Most of these, even at 3:00 in the afternoon, had several people frequenting them.  While the great majority of my initial expectations of this trip were proven baseless, my assessment of the interior of Mexico proved to be grounded in fact.  There is a great need for change in Mexico, and not merely the immigration polices between that country and the United States.  Most, if not all, aspects of the country need drastic improvements to be able to compete on an equal level in a global market in the 21st century.