MAQUILOPOLIS - The history of maquiladoras

A brief history of the maquiladora system, told through the eyes of the women who make it work.
	Maquiladoras are the multinationally-owned assembly plants which dominate the economy of the U.S.-Mexico border region, employing over a million people. Carmen is one of these people. She works the graveyard shift, six nights a week, in Tijuana's Panasonic factory. After making television components all night, Carmen comes home to a shack she built out of recycled garage doors, in a neighborhood with no paved streets, no sewage lines and no electricity. A single mother, Carmen takes care of her three children all day, and if she's lucky she sleeps for an hour or two before heading off to work again. At 29, she suffers from kidney failure and anemia resulting from her years of factory work. Carmen earns six dollars a day.
A new factory built in hours using pre-fab materials, in the Ciudad Industrial in the Mesa de Otay, one of the first industrial parks in Tijuana and near the Otay border crossing.

She is typical of the many thousands of Tijuanenses who together produce 70% of the world's televisions, along with electrical cables, toys, clothes, lenses, washing machines, computer keyboards, batteries, IV tubes, cassettes and more. Laboring around the clock, these workers weave the very fabric of daily life for every consumer nation. In their own daily lives, they face low wages, poor labor conditions, lack of housing, human rights violations and environmental degradation.

In the 1960s, U.S. companies began opening assembly plants in Mexico's border region, drawn by cheap labor, lucrative tax incentives and weak enforcement of environmental and labor laws.

The maquiladora industry originally sought out a female work force, a strategy which has transformed gender roles, family structure and migration patterns in Mexico. Tijuana, one of the first "maquilized" cities in the Americas, has more than quadrupled in size since the advent of the maquiladoras. Its infrastructure has not kept pace with this growth, leaving vast areas of the city without basic services. Today, Tijuana grows by two acres a day and is a sprawling, chaotic city which provides for the rest of the world before it provides for its own people.
Tires hold on the tarpaulin roof of a house in colonia Lagunitas.

All photos this page by Darcy McKinnon

The maquiladora industry originally sought out a female work force, a strategy which has transformed gender roles, family structure and migration patterns in Mexico. Tijuana, one of the first "maquilized" cities in the Americas, has more than quadrupled in size since the advent of the maquiladoras. Its infrastructure has not kept pace with this growth, leaving vast areas of the city without basic services. Today, Tijuana grows by two acres a day and is a sprawling, chaotic city which provides for the rest of the world before it provides for its own people.
	Tires hold on the tarpaulin roof of a house in colonia Lagunitas.
All photos this page by Darcy McKinnon