The plants, which looked just like the ones constructed by those same companies north of the border, were drawing tens of thousands of laborers from across Mexico each year with the promise of work. The constant influx of people was rapidly creating a booming metropolis. Indeed, the city of Juárez was growing so fast that it was nearly impossible to map.
The city's roadways were a hodgepodge of paved and unpaved streets, some marked, others anonymous sandy paths that led to the shantytowns and squatters' villages continually springing up on the outskirts of town. When viewed from north of the border, Juárez appeared a vibrant and major metropolis, but on closer inspection the city seemed to be El Paso's poor, depressed relative, more reminiscent of a third world country.
The one- and two-story buildings crowding the narrow streets just off the Santa Fe Street Bridge from El Paso were dilapidated, their pastel colors dulled by a layer of brown dust from the sandstorms and car fumes. There were no emissions laws in Mexico, and pollution continued to be a problem.
In addition to car exhaust, road debris was a major concern in the city. Ramshackle tire shops little more than wooden huts dotted almost every corner, offering motorists a quick fix for the innumerable blowouts caused by such debris. American-built cars and trucks from the seventies and eighties dominated the landscape, many of them looking like they'd been resurrected from junkyards.
After dark, loud music blared from the nightclubs and cantinas that lined the streets of the red-light district, frequented by local street gangs, drug traffickers, and those who wanted to dance and party. Bars stayed open all night on Mariscal and Ugarte Streets, magnets for those eager to cross the border and indulge under the veil of anonymity.
Driven by a desire to maximize profits, the city's factories also operated on a twenty-four-hour schedule. Even some of the schools held two sessions each day to accommodate the ever-growing student population.
Getting a job on one of the hundreds of assembly lines meant a chance at a better life for the impoverished and often untrained laborers flooding into the Juárez area from throughout the region. Construction and forestry jobs had all but dried up in other parts of the country. Juárez was one of the few places in Mexico that was experiencing a growth in the job market.
The truth, in fact, was that there were plenty of employment opportunities in the factories of Juárez so many that entire families could expect to find work there in a fairly short period of time. Girls in their early to mid teens were especially sought after because they didn't expect much money for their labor and could rapidly perform detailed assembly work. Many were under the legal age of sixteen and had lied about their ages on their job applications to secure a paycheck, most with the dream of earning enough to buy a pretty dress or a fashionable pair of shoes.
Silvia Elena Rivera Morales was just seven years old when her family relocated to Juárez in the mid-1980s from La Laguna, a region in Coahuila, the third-largest state in Mexico. The construction industry was on the decline, and Silvia's father could no longer find steady work. The family's eldest son, Domingo, was employed as a teacher in one of the local elementary schools. But his salary was not enough to provide for the family of seven, so the Moraleses decided to try their luck in Juárez.
As in other Latin American cities, there are extremes of wealth and poverty in Ciudad Juárez. While the Mexican city is literally within walking distance of El Paso, Texas, the two cities couldn't be more different.
Ciudad Juárez is located in the northern state of Chihuahua, one of thirty-one states that make up Mexico. By 1990, its population of 1.5 million was nearly triple that of the state capital of Chihuahua City.
Crossing into Mexico costs little more than twenty-five cents for pedestrians. Vehicles pay a nominal fee in each direction, except at the Bridge of the Americas, which is free. U.S. and Canadian citizens need only show a valid identification, such as a driver's license, to enter Juárez. In contrast, citizens of Mexico and other countries need a passport and a multiple entry visa to come to the United States.
Prior to the Mexican-American War of 1846, El Paso and Juárez constituted one large metropolis, its people divided only by the Rio Grande. But when the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was signed in 1848, the two nations agreed to split the city, with the area south of the river falling to Mexico. Four bridges with pedestrian and motor vehicle access connect the twin cities, as they are often called. The United States and Mexico now share the waters of the Rio Grande through a series of agreements overseen by the joint U.S.-Mexico Boundary and Water Commission.
But the river has all but dried up in many parts, due to drought and overuse. For much of the year, it is little more than a sandy ditch filled with household refuse and other trash. From its riverbanks, Mexican locals watch the steady stream of vehicular and pedestrian traffic crossing into their city. Many have set up camp in small cardboard boxes there. They use the area as a way station until they can execute their escape from the poverty of their native land for what they hope will be a better life in the United States of America.
Ironically, most of the job opportunities in the El Paso/Juárez area are on the southern side of the border, in Mexico. The U.S.-owned factories provide the majority of income for residents of El Paso, who cross daily to work as managers and other middle-level employees at the maquiladoras.
The lower-paying assembly-line jobs are what the young Mexican girls and their families travel hundreds of miles to fill. These jobs pay little more than three to five dollars a day, enough to put food on the table but not always enough to put a roof over the worker's head.
An increase in the number of factories in Juárez and along the northern border came in 1982 with the devaluation of the Mexican currency, the peso. By 1986, 94 percent of maquiladora employment was in the border states of northern Mexico. The shift in jobs to the industrial sector came after the cancellation of the Bracero Program, a U.S. government program started in the early 1940s to bring a few hundred experienced Mexican agricultural laborers to harvest sugar beets in the Stockton, California, area. The program soon expanded to cover most of the United States to provide much-needed farm workers for the booming U.S. agricultural sector. But the program was halted in 1964 in response to harsh criticisms of human rights abuses of the Mexican laborers. The following year, the Mexican government implemented the Border Industrialization Program (BIP), better known as the Maquiladora Program, to relieve the resulting high unemployment rates in northern Mexico. The new program used low-wage Mexican labor to entice U.S. manufacturing to the region, allowing companies to move production machinery and unassembled parts into Mexico without tariff consequences, as long as the assembled product was returned to the United States for final sale. In exchange, Mexican laborers would receive salaries that they wouldn't otherwise be able to obtain.
By 1991, there were almost seven hundred maquiladoras located in the Mexican border cities, with more than three hundred in Ciudad Juárez, as compared to ninety-four in Matamoros and eighty-two in Reynosa, just across the border from Brownsville and McAllen, Texas.
Juárez underwent a second transformation in the mid-1990s under the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), between Mexico, the United States, and Canada, that established the world's largest free trade zone.
On December 17, 1992, in three separate ceremonies in the three capitals, President George H. W. Bush, Mexican president Carlos Salinas, and Canadian prime minister Brian Mulroney signed the historic pact, which eliminated restrictions on the flow of goods, services, and investment in North America. The U.S. House of Representatives approved NAFTA by a vote of 234 to 200 on November 17, 1993, and the U.S. Senate voted 60 to 38 for approval on November 20. The agreement was signed into law by President William Jefferson Clinton on December 8 and took effect on January 1, 1994.
Under NAFTA, the tax breaks enjoyed by the maquiladora industry would no longer be confined to the border area but would be available throughout Mexico. The U.S. and Mexican governments anticipated that the provision would entice manufacturers to leave the overstressed border area and expand into Mexico's interior.
Instead of relocating deeper into the country, however, the maquiladoras of the northern region increased employment dramatically.
While Tijuana had the largest number of assembly plants, Ciudad Juárez had the largest maquiladora workforce, totaling in excess of two hundred thousand by 1994. The numbers were growing at an uncontrollable rate with tens of thousands of workers pouring into the city annually with hopes for a better life.
But there was no thought or planning for the influx of workers. The treaty exempted foreign companies from paying any local taxes, so the city had no funds for basic residential infrastructure. That meant that workers whose wages were already low had to fend for themselves in every way, from housing to child care to garbage disposal.
Many set up what resembled temporary camps in the arid foothills surrounding the city. Families crammed into single-room wooden shacks and makeshift homes of cardboard. They lived with dirt floors, no indoor plumbing or electricity, and badly rutted roads that wound through oppressive, dusty communities without parks, sidewalks, or sewers. There was no one to pick up the garbage, so it was dumped indiscriminately and scattered on nearby hillsides. Most of the shantytowns were springing up on land accessible only by foot.
To get to work, young girls had to travel alone, often late at night or in the wee hours of the morning, on treacherous unlit terrain to the nearest bus stop miles away. Neighborhoods changed from one block to the next, with sections of paved streets regularly giving way to dirt roads and rough, rocky terrain. Tire repair shops were plentiful along the main roadways and the dusty desert paths.
In many ways, Ciudad Juárez had become like Tijuana. The downtown cantinas stayed open late and attracted college students and thrill seekers in search of cheap liquor and a good time. The district had also become a haven for drug dealers and prostitutes. Prostitution was legal in Mexico for women over the age of eighteen. Many of the clubs hired pretty young girls to dance and serve alcohol. The jobs at the bars often paid more than the three or five dollars a day at the maquiladoras.
The Moraleses believed their living conditions would dramatically improve when in 1986, they packed their belongings and set off for the northern border city, leaving their roots and their small village behind. Ramona and her husband had grown up in La Laguna, where they met and married. She was sixteen when she wed Angel Rivera Sánchez Morales, four years her senior and the son of a family friend. The two had dated less than four months before exchanging vows. They had five children when they picked up and moved to Juárez. In addition to Silvia and her eldest brother, Domingo, there was Juan Francisco, who was twenty, sixteen-year-old Angel Jr., and Javier, who had recently turned thirteen.
Angel immediately found work as a machinist in one of factories, as did three of his sons. His eldest boy, Domingo, who was then twenty-two, was elated when he found a teaching job at one of the local schools.
The family rented a small house with plumbing and electricity in the modest community of Nuevo Hipódromo, a treeless neighborhood or
colonia
on the outskirts of the city that was densely packed with unfinished cinder-block houses. It was a short bus ride away from the downtown district and the factories that dotted the landscape.
Within a year, the family had earned enough money to purchase a small lot across the street from an abandoned field owned by the Mexican national oil company, Pemex. This property was one of the last pieces of habitable vacant land in the colonia.
With the help of friends, Angel built a small, boxy house with a cement patio for his family in the working-class neighborhood. It was simple, with concrete floors and two bedrooms. There was a kitchen with running water and a bathroom with a toilet and shower. He painted the house a pale pink and erected over the front patio a simple grape arbor, which he tended with care.
Ramona enjoyed the arbor's shade during the stultifying summer months and idled away the hours chatting with friends and family under its protective cover. Next to the front door, the family hung a colorful placard that read "Rivera Morales Family. Anything is possible with Christ."
Unlike many of her peers, Ramona Morales's daughter had shied away from the topless bars and seedy downtown clubs, where other girls her age had found work as dancers, waitresses, and barmaids. There were more than 6,000 cantinas operating in Juárez, in contrast to just 624 schools. Working at the clubs was an easy way to make money. Silvia had also shunned the assembly-line jobs of the maquiladoras, where shifts were ten and twelve hours long and women were often subjected to sexual harassment.
She didn't have to work in a maquiladora. Silvia had options because her father was a machinist, and her brothers all brought income into the house. She was able to take a job in a decent neighborhood at a popular shoe store, Tres Hermanos (Three Brothers), on Avenida 16 de Septiembre, the city's main shopping strip.
Silvia was concentrating on her studies, determined to someday find work as an administrator or a teacher like her brother Domingo. With her wavy black hair, full lips, and almond-shaped eyes, a rich shade of cocoa brown, she bore a striking resemblance to her musical idol, Selena, the Texas-born singer who had risen to stardom both in Mexico and the United States. Silvia too loved to sing, and she possessed a powerful voice for her slight five-foot-two frame. She had taught herself the lyrics in English to the pop star's hit "I Could Fall in Love with You" and liked to belt out the words as she went about her early-morning routine. It was clear she preferred them to the religious hymns of her Sunday choir group.
