A Visit to Maquiladoras in Tijuana

 

I was able to visit a few maquiladoras  with Fred Lonidier, activist, artist, UCSD professor ( above), who has been working with workers rights issues at these factories since the early 1980s. He invited me to lecture to his class at UCSD. Our first stop after the lecture was the Che Cafe. In the center is Rigoberta Menchú. This is Fred’s photograph with me in the foreground joining these heroic women. The cooperative cafe has survived a lot of challenges to its existence by UCSD administrators.

 

The  next day we went to the  East Tijuana industrial district via the crossing at Otay Mesa.

 

 

Gloria Anzaldua eloquently characterized the border as “Una herida abierta”  (an “open wound”) where the Third World grates against the First and bleeds. And before a scab forms it hemorrhages again, the lifeblood of two worlds merging to form a third country – a border culture. … a borderland is a vague and undeterrmined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary.” Gloria Anzaldua, Borderlands/La FronteraThe New Mestiza, (1987,1999)

 

According to Fred, corporations have been playing games since the late 1960s with the free trade idea originally with an old promise of twin factories, one in US, one in Mexico. Only the US half usually didn’t happen.The free trade area used to extend 20 miles to the South of the border, but with NAFTA the whole country is now a free trade zone

 

It is much easier to work outside health and work regulations in Mexico.

 

These factories manufacture many household goods including televisions, furniture, mirrors, eyeglasses ( think Zeiss), and now electronics, especially high tech hospital equipment.

 

Workers have fought abuses at these factories for decades and it is ongoing to this day. Organizing is more difficult because of the disparate character of the communities which consist of people from all over Mexico who have neither familial nor ethnic bonds. New relationships have to be forged.

 

Groups like the Environmental Health Coaltion, based in San Diego/Tijuana and Coalition for Justice in the Maquiladoras  an umbrella group  work for justice in the maquiladoras for workers and call for justice against women who ” suffer discrimination, humiliation, and sexual harassment in the workplace.”

 

 

Before we saw the factories,we went to a muddy lot  (above) where many squatters used to live. Only a few are left at this location today.These squatters are living in the midst of toxic run off from factories, they have no services at all, no electricity, no sewage, nothing. They are newly arrived people from other areas of Mexico, who start here and sometimes work their way up to having a house in a “colonia” which actually does have city services from Tijuana.You can see one electrical wire in the photograph.

 

 

We even saw middle class homes (and middle class youth): these are the homes and children of the supervisors of the factories, or the more skilled engineers and technicians.

 

The majority of workers are making small electronic devices, with repetitive motions. Back when Gloria Anzaldua first wrote about the factories they were making cassette tapes. Today they are making hi tech electronics, the reason why so many women are employed – it requires delicate manual dexterity. But from then to now, the workers have been exposed to toxic substances that go into the consumer products that they make. Exposure to toxins is in the factory itself, and then it follows them home as the run off from the factories pours out of open pipes.

 

 

Then there is the question of labor unions, the topic that Lonidier has addressed in various ways in his important work. Lonidier has been bridging the (considerable) gap between labor unions and visual art with his work, making visible in his sophisticated, but also entirely understandable, photograph-text pieces, the struggles of workers for better working conditions. He also shows his work in both union halls and art galleries. Here is a review of a recent show he held in an art gallery.

 

The wages of maquiladora workers are abysmal, as low as $8. a day, there are no safety precautions ( a topic that Londier is known for from a 1979 work that is gaining new attention recently, suggesting how important it still is.)

 

 

 

 

If  the workers try to organize a real democratically run union, the “company union” representative is sent to the meeting to calm everyone down.When the workers return to work, the organizers get fired. Fred took me to one site of a victory, where a badly contaminated site had finally been sealed by the government after, as he said, years and years and years of hearings and protests. Naturally the government now takes credit.

 

The recession has hit this area hard, and many workers have been laid off. We in fact saw very few workers even at lunch time, when normally they would have been thronging the food stands. Apparently, the newer factories now provide lunch in the factory, probably at a deduction from a meager pay check. Plus of course, a chance for a change of pace and environment is lost.

 

 

The new factories are fortified with big fences and guards, who called their bosses as soon as we paused to take a picture. The older factories are more on the street, with a less militant atmosphere.

 

 

 

I also saw the actual border fence as it is in this part of Tijuana- several electrified fences with surveillance lights and razor wire. In Tijuana’s main crossing it goes right into the ocean.

Fred also took pictures of me photographing it.

 

After visiting Tijuana, we went to the Centro Cultural de la Raza  in San Diego where there was an exhibition called La Hermanidad ( Brotherhood) about workers of all backgrounds united in struggle. The building has murals all over it and even spreading into the park around it.

 

 

The exhibition included work by David Bacon ( stunning website) , Fred Lonidier, and works honoring people who have been lost at the border.

 

  

 

Last we visited Chicano Park, which has murals painted on the freeway supports. It has been going for quite awhile and now the murals are actually being restored. I met Victor Ochoa, one of the important muralists there. That’s his mural of Revolution with Zapata, the inspiration for the uprising of the peasants then and now.  The second mural says the earth belongs to those who work it with their own hands.

 

 

 

Most of the murals were nationalist in flavor, looking to the culture of Mexico, the Revolutionary era in Mexico, and other inspiring subjects. They are also about farm workers issues which of course are on going and, if anything all the more urgent today.

 

One of Fred’s students, Amy Sanchez, an art historian is collaborating with Misael Diaz, an artist, on a border project called Cognate Collective. They have a small shop space in Tijuana, near the border, and they are encouraging indigenous women in particular to make embroidery as well as other projects related to clothing.The indigenous women are from all different backgrounds. This is one of the painful aspects of the massive dislocations going on in Mexico as a result of free trade.

 

I want to end with this great photograph Fred took of me slipping in the mud as I left a toxic area. It seems to capture how slippery information is about maquiladoras.