Boon or Bust? : Border Plants Provide Work for Poor but Turnover Is High

TIJUANA —  If the United States and Mexico eventually conclude a free-trade agreement, sweeping away restrictive tariffs and other commercial barriers, a fast-growing neighborhood here known as El Ejido Chilpancingo may offer a glimpse into the future.

The community and its inhabitants provide a human context to upcoming free-trade negotiations, which are likely to focus on technical issues such as tariffs, import fees and commodity quotas.

Here, in a bustling desert valley along this border city’s eastern periphery, life already resonates to the rhythms of what now passes for free trade--the plethora of mostly U.S.-owned assembly plants known as maquiladoras, which form an imposing presence on the hillsides and mesa above the residential community.

Overlooking the neighborhood, huge banners solicit unskilled workers to sew fabric, fashion electronic parts and assemble plastic components for firms that have found profit in this economic frontier.

Throughout the day, horn blasts from the industrial cluster resound through the broad residential valley below, sending employees in work smocks scurrying in and out of low-lying factories in an updated version of the company town, just a mile south of the international boundary.

“Where else could my children and I find jobs?” asks Enriqueta Garfias, a 37-year-old mother of six from Mexico City. Garfias, along with three teen-age offspring, works inside the most ample factory atop the hill, the 850-employee complex owned by Douglas Furniture of California. Like many furniture firms, Douglas has relocated here from the Los Angeles area. “This is a lot more work than we ever had before,” she said.

Each morning, Chilpancingo, as the neighborhood is known, disgorges its inhabitants for the trek up the hill to the plants, receiving them anew in the afternoon, their day’s labor complete. Residents from distant neighborhoods disembark from buses and vans at the central plaza en route to the factories.

Both critics and proponents of the projected free-trade pact expect it to prompt even more U.S. companies to build export-oriented production facilities in Mexico--particularly in the border zone.

The attraction: Low Mexican wages (typically less than one-quarter of U.S. salaries), less rigorous enforcement of costly environmental and worker-safety guidelines, and the region’s proximity to the U.S. consumer market.

Although maquiladora workers reside throughout Tijuana, many have recently chosen to settle in Chilpancingo, a long-established suburb 8 miles east of downtown that has grown and been transformed dramatically because of its proximity to Otay Mesa, base of many of the foreign-owned plants. Ironically, the Chilpancingo area, now emblematic of foreign investment, was once an ejido --a nationalistic form of communal, campesino land ownership that emerged from the Mexican Revolution.

Most employees of the booming maquiladora industry--the plants now provide jobs to about 500,000 Mexican workers nationwide, mostly in northern border cities, including more than 70,000 in Tijuana--appear to be migrants from elsewhere in Mexico, like most border residents.

Their homes inevitably provide striking contrasts to the high-technology environments in which they toil. From Chilpancingo near the Pacific Coast to the almost-identical colonias of Ciudad Juarez on the Rio Grande to the squatter communities of Matamoros on the Gulf of Mexico, tens of thousands of maquiladora workers are crammed into dilapidated apartments and shacks of cardboard and scrap wood, often without running water and electricity.

Such living conditions, although shocking from a U.S. perspective, are not at all exceptional in urban Mexico. Chilpancingo is neither desperately poor nor rich by Tijuana standards. In fact, most maquiladora workers interviewed say they are better off here, because at least they have jobs and steady incomes--something largely unavailable in their home villages, towns and cities.

“I wanted to stay home and study, perhaps enter the university eventually, but there was no way to earn a living back where I come from,” said Mario Felix, 18, one of seven young men from a town near the northern Mexican city of Los Mochis in Sinaloa state who share a home and work in maquiladoras.

All seven live in a battered, makeshift abode on the banks of a polluted stream that flows into Chilpancingo from the hillside and mesa that host the maquiladoras . “There’s work here, but it’s hard to live like this,” Felix said, sitting inside his fly-infested dwelling and gesturing outside to the waterway, where a roommate washes dishes in fetid water from the stream.

Like Felix, most maquiladora employees are young, typically in their late teens or early 20s. The work force is largely non-unionized.

Maquiladora workers say they usually earn from 80 cents and $1.20 an hour, compared to perhaps 50 cents an hour elsewhere in Mexico. (Industry representatives say average real wages are closer to $1.30-$1.50 an hour, including insurance and other benefits.)

“There was nothing for us back home,” said Teodora Gonzalez, 39, also from Sinaloa state and a neighbor of Felix on the dirt lane in Chilpancingo. She is the mother of four teen-age children who have found jobs in maquiladoras .

However, Gonzalez, who worked for five months in a U.S.-owned plant that made plastic security tags for clothing, says she has become disenchanted with life in Tijuana.

“It’s very boring work, and they never let you rest inside,” Gonzalez said. Her complaints are commonplace among maquiladora workers, who say grueling production speedups are frequent and that they are often exposed to chemical fumes. Such working conditions help explain astronomical industry turnover rates that routinely exceed more than 100% a year.

“When you had a headache, you couldn’t even go to the bathroom,” Gonzalez added, standing outside his home, facing the polluted stream. “No, I’m going back home. I may die of hunger there, but I’m not staying here.”

Although salaries in maquiladoras exceed national averages, residents note that living costs--for rent, land, electricity (when available) and other expenses--are also more dear in the border zone.

“We’d like to buy a little lot and build a home, but everything is so expensive here,” said Enriqueta Garfias, as she, two daughters and a younger sister--all veteran maquiladora workers--stroll through Chilpancingo’s sparsely vegetated central plaza, which comes to life after workers leave their jobs and unwind in the park. (The site is named after Emiliano Zapata, revered revolutionary champion of the Mexican peasantry.)

Garfias arrived from Mexico City almost two years ago, along with five of her children (her oldest had moved to Tijuana already), after hearing of job opportunities from her younger sister, Gregoria. The sister had arrived in Tijuana a year earlier, joining her husband, Marcial Garcia, who had ventured to the border with plans to cross into the United States but instead found work in a maquiladora and remained.

“In Mexico City, the only work for women is washing dishes or clothes, or ironing, and the pay is very little,” said the elder Garfias, who sews fabric at Douglas Furniture, which is known here as Industrias Cokin. “There’s work in factories in Mexico City, but you have to know someone to get a job there. . . . I like my job now.”

Her daughters, Leticia, 19, Enriqueta, 15, and her son, Hugo, 16, all work at Douglas furniture. Garfias’ husband, Ernesto Hidalgo, 38, is employed in a nearby U.S.-owned metal reclaiming plant, as is her younger brother Pedro Garfias, 24.

“My daughter (Leticia) wanted to continue her studies, but she had to work to help the family,” said Garfias, clearly regretting the girl’s missed opportunity.

The couple, their five children and her brother live in a one-room flat that lacks running water, on the top floor of a two-story concrete building across from Chilpancingo’s central plaza. The flat is reached by using an exterior metal staircase. The landlord rents similar rooms to other maquiladora workers; tenants pay about $85 a month, a sizable rent here.

As Tijuana’s maquiladoras have multiplied rapidly, outlying neighborhoods such as Chilpancingo have grown haphazardly, quickly transforming ranchland and brush into housing lots; rent-gouging is common, as it is throughout Tijuana. Inevitably, services such as running water, electricity, sewage and public transportation have not kept pace.

“Tijuana is a strategic point for many activities--for industry, for maquiladoras, for tourism--but we face a serious shortage of infrastructure,” Tijuana Mayor Carlos Montejo Favela noted in an interview last week.

Chilpancingo residents have a major advantage over many maquiladora workers: Their homes are close to the plants, saving long commutes and costly bus fares. Often, employees living in distant districts travel an hour or more to their jobs, transfering two or three times before reaching their destination.

“It’s a long trip, but I do it to earn something for my family,” said Jose Rosario Murguia, a father of three from the northern city of Guadalajara, who said he commutes 1 1/2 hours each way from his home to Douglas Furniture. “But, at least I have a job,” Murguia added.

In Chilpancingo, as elsewhere in the city, many residents use scrap cardboard and wood from the assembly plants to build homes and cooking fires; U.S.-produced metal drums, once used to store toxic paints, solvents and other chemicals, are widely used to store water for washing, despite the clearly labeled “poison” markings (in English) on many, warning against reuse.

In traditional Mexico, where most poor women are still largely confined to the role of mother and homemaker, considerable social upheaval is associated with an industry that relies so heavily on females. Women compose about 60% of the nation’s maquiladora work force--a fact that industry representatives say stems largely from their dexterity and patience for the painstaking assembly work typical in the plants. (Critics see another reason: Women are less likely to agitate management for higher wages and better working conditions.)

Like many young couples, Rosa Reynosa and Francisco Javier Carrillo met while both worked at an assembly plant, a Japanese operation where television cabinets are produced.

“My wife earns more than I do, but still it’s hard,” said Carrillo, 24, a furniture worker, who resides in a one-room cinder-block dwelling in Chilpancingo with his wife and two children, Jorge Alberto, 2, and Laura Patricia, 1 1/2.

The couple’s combined salaries of about $93 a week leave them little to spare, Carrillo says, particularly since day-care payments to an area woman amount to about $26 weekly. Both try to send money to families back in the Mexican interior.

“We seldom eat meat,” said Carrillo, who has been in the city three years. “Before I came, I heard that there was a lot of work in Tijuana. . . . But no one tells you how hard it is to live here. I thought it was going to be easier.”

In recent years, Mexican officials say the proportion of women workers in the plants has been declining as the industry increasingly involves heavier manufacturing, such as the production of furniture, vehicle parts and machinery.

However, in the mostly Japanese-owned electronics assembly plants above Chilpancingo, scores of women, often in production smocks, emerge from behind the gates when the sirens signal closing time. Like high-school sweethearts, many walk hand-in-hand with novios (boyfriends), who are also employed in the industry.

“I’ll probably keep working after I get married,” said Patricia Diaz, 18, as she holds hands with her boyfriend, Armando Montero, also 18, after work one day in Chilpancingo. Both wear laminated identity cards from the Japanese plastic-manufacturing firm where each is employed. “This job is all right for now,” continued Diaz, her face a playful teen-age dazzle of black mascara and red lipstick. “But maybe afterwards I’ll go to L.A., where I have a lot of uncles and I can earn a lot more.”

With the border so close, and thousands of compatriots crossing illegally each day into U.S. territory, the lure is ever-present--particularly for those with relatives and a place to stay in the United States.

“In one day over there I can earn what it takes me a week to earn here,” said Pancho Terraza, 17, who took an interim job in a U.S.-owned furniture manufacturing plant in Tijuana after U.S. immigration agents arrested him during two successive attempts to cross the border into San Diego. Despite those setbacks, he has no intention of remaining in Mexico.

“I’m going up to Los Angeles in a couple of weeks,” said Terraza, as he and a friend stood on a corner after work one day in Tijuana’s industrialized Otay Mesa area, just north of Chilpancingo. “Why should I stay?”