A Tale of Both Nogaleses

By Rob Goodspeed

The white 15-passenger van lurched awkwardly on the potholed dirt road. Outside, in the evening twilight, I could see Flores Magon, a neighborhood of cinderblock and brick homes bearing satellite TV dishes and air conditioners, and wood-and-tarpaper shacks clinging to rocky, barren hillsides along improvised dirt streets. Flores Magon is one of the most recently settled sections of Nogales, a city straddling the border between Arizona and the Mexican state of Sonora.

Looking over the border from the Mexican side (above). Moving clockwise: 14-foot steeland resin sculptures by Guadalupe Serrano and Alberto Morackis. Innovative homebuilders fill tires with soil to form foundations. Electricity is haphazard in the neighborhoods. Razor wire atop US-Mexico border near Nogales remind some residents of the Berlin Wall.

I’m participating in Residential College 360, “Labor in Mexico’s Maquiladora Zone: Nogales Field Study,” and our class of 25 is on its way to a two-night stay with residents of one of Nogales’s poorest neighborhoods. A group called Borderlinks has helped organize our visits with local political and health activists, government officials and citizens. In addition to providing tours to college and religious groups, Borderlinks runs a community center and food kitchen.

Nogales is one of a string of Mexican border cities that have boomed in the past few two decades. It was home to some of the first foreign-owned maquiladoras (assembly plants), which Mexico set up in the 1970s to produce goods for export under its Border Industrialization Program. The factories, called maquilas for short, operate tax-free and in effect are often subsidized by the state, which supplies roads, electricity and other infrastructure at no charge. More recently, Mexico has allowed maquilas to open almost anywhere in Mexico. (See sidebar.)

The Flores Magon neighborhood is less than six years old. Its more affluent residents have only recently received electricity and still lack sewers and running water. In some areas, residents have run extension cords from one home to many others and share utility costs. Some illegally tap into the lines. The roads cut across the rolling hills of brown rocky soil, and the homes reflect an ingeniously improvised architecture—walls are built from all types of scrap material, and auto tires filled with soil serve as staircases and retaining walls.

My group stayed with Maricruz, who lives with her husband and 10-year-old daughter. Our host family would be middle class in the States. They own a computer, cell phone and telephone; one older daughter is married and another is in college. But they lack running water and sewer connections, the wooden walls of their three-room house are thin, a carpet covers their floor of leveled loose rock, the roof is tin, and the whole structure leans downhill. Maricruz’s husband works long hours as a bus driver, and she sells the table cloths she embroiders. They host visiting groups for Borderlinks to add to their income.

The unimproved drainage system dates from teh 1930s; 11 million gallons a dayof polluted wastewater flow under the border in this pipe.

The maquila our class visited assembled electrical components. Clean, new and efficient, it resembled a US plant except the workers’ pay was equivalent to only $4 to $8 a day. Mexican employees pay a payroll tax making them eligible for medical care and other benefits under the government’s social security program, but the World Bank has been pressuring the Mexican government to eliminate that program. People in the “informal” job sector, like most of our hosts, don’t qualify for government benefits.

We met two organizers for a Mexican trade union who were distributing literature about Mexican labor law and the Mexican constitution house-to-house, hoping to organize workers at the electrical plant and other nonunion maquilas. “It’s hard to change mentalities,” one tells us. “The managers lose sight of the fact that they are working with human beings.”

Borderlinks operates the Casa De Misericordia (House of Mercy), a compound purchased from a religious group, in one of the more established yet poor neighborhoods of Nogales. The Casa serves a free meal to hundreds of neighborhood children each day, and operates a community garden, food co-op and bicycle repair shop as well as a dormitory for tour groups. At the Casa we met Kiko Trujillo, the director of Borderlinks in Mexico. “I’ve seen this small town go to the mess we have today,” Trujillo told us, who began in the maquila industry working in management with a US businessman. “Absolutely nothing justifies paying workers $5-6 per day,” he told us. “It’s true the [Mexican] minimum wage is $4.60 per day, but that still does not resolve the conditions of the workers. That’s what bothers me about the maquilas. We [Borderlinks] are not against world trade. We’re just against the way it’s been done.”

From Walnuts to a Wall

Nogales is about an hour south of Tucson by car. Together, the US and Mexican cities are known as Ambos Nogales (Both Nogaleses). The site was a pleasant desert wash, a shallow valley in the rugged mountains running south to north. The city’s name, “walnut trees,” comes from a long-destroyed grove in the otherwise arid region. Settlers arrived in the 19th century, and the Mexican government established a customs checkpoint along the tracks at the new border.

14-foot steel and resin sculptures by Guadalupe Serrano and Alberto Morackis.

Nogales today bears little resemblance to the sleepy customs checkpoint. Until the 1990s, the border slicing through the heart of downtown was marked with little more than a chain-link fence. Residents fondly remember casually crossing into the US to shop or work. After an aggressive crackdown on illegal migrants in California and Texas, more and more began making their way here. Today, Mexican Nogales has a growing population of more than 300,000—from fewer than 30,000 in the 1970s. The growth has overwhelmed municipal services on the Mexican side. On the US side, the 2000 census counted 20,878 people in an area of roughly the same size, 94 percent of whom self-identified as Hispanic or Latino.

In 1994, the US government replaced the chain link fence with a 20-foot cement and metal wall. Topped with razor wire, the wall is monitored by video cameras and floodlights placed atop towers every few hundred meters. Vibration sensors installed in the ground along the border and desert migration routes alert the 500 US Border Patrol agents in the area.

The border fortifications, which many here compare with the Berlin Wall, have forced migrants to attempt crossings into the United States in the remote and dangerous desert region west of Nogales, where at least 175 people died of dehydration or of hypothermia in 2001. Despite the billions of dollars spent on border security, the migrants our class met said virtually all succeed in entering the States, although sometimes it takes a few tries. Officials estimate that more than 2,000 successfully make the three-day desert trek each week.

The Journey North

For migrants from Mexico who seek work in the States, the journey north no longer leads to Nogales. Instead, most take commercial bus lines to the small town of Altar 60 miles southwest of Nogales in the rural desert. Here, we met migrants who had scraped together $1,000 for up to three attempts at crossing. They spend a night in one of four hotels or over 100 guesthouses. Next, most meet up with guides they have contacted ahead of time; others look for the “coyotes” or polleros (“chicken cowboys,” roughly) to help them cross the border at the tiny town of Sasabe, an hour’s ride north.

The population of Ambos Nogales (Both Nogaleses) was about 30,000 on each side of the border in 1965, when the BIP was first introduced. Since then, the population of Nogales, Arizona, has stayed roughly the same, while that of Nogales, Sonora, has swelled to about 10 times that total, with almost no expansion in funding for water, power, sewage or roads, let alone health and education.

Illegal migration is a local industry. Padre Rene, a young priest who helps migrants, told us that more than 40 percent of Altar’s residents have jobs related to the migration and that some of the polleros have offices and houses in Mexico City.

Along Altar’s main roads gas stations, restaurants and little shops cater to the temporary residents. Unlike typical Mexican pueblos, Altar’s town plaza is almost always swarming with people. Every few minutes, large commercial buses pull up to the plaza and drop off Mexicans, mostly from the far southern states of Chiapas, Oaxaca and others where most people are of Mayan ancestry.

A few of the people we met have been to the States before. Some had picked apples in Washington state; one had built chimneys in the Atlanta area. They bombarded us with questions, such as what were their legal rights? where would they be safe? were they likely to be arrested on the street? We had few answers. All of them faced a three-night desert trek. Most would be picked up at designated spots and driven to Phoenix, the staging ground for the trips to their final destinations. A few, however, had been returned to Mexico by the Border Patrol three times and lacked the money needed to attempt more crossings or to return home. They were stranded in Altar.

At the crossing point of Sasabe, an ex-Navy Seal now working for the US Border Patrol said, "Where else do they pay you to drive around and go hunting?" He said that he didn't mean he enjoyed shooting people, just catching lawberakers.

We rode north from Altar toward the border at Sasabe on a heavily traveled dirt road. A Mexican army checkpoint stopped us along the way. The young troops assured us the inspection was routine, apologizing for the inconvenience. As we reloaded our vans, a beat-up conversion van passed by, one of the many we’d seen with “Altar-Sasabe” painted on the side. These shuttles take migrants to Sasabe on a 60-mile road cut straight across a flat desert of stately cacti and scrub brush dotted with the shells of burnt-out cars, empty bottles, tires, mufflers and oil cans.

In Sasabe, the police chief wore a silk shirt decorated with a large rooster. He showed us his chicken key chain, apparently taking pride in his town’s status as the pollero capital of Mexico. The town is barely more than a small strip of homes and businesses clustered near a border crossing. From the town we drove a few minutes until the road dead-ended at a barbed wire fence, one of many crossing points on the outskirts of Sasabe. On the other side stands the Tohono Indian reservation and the majestic O’odhane Mountains marking the route north. Abandoned bottles litter the desert, evidence of the area’s heavy use by crossers.

At the end of our Spring Break trip we returned to Ann Arbor. We were the third class to make the trip to the Mexican border, and in past years students reported meeting migrants who were heading for jobs in the Detroit metropolitan area. (The 2000 census recorded 33,143 people identifying themselves as Mexican in Detroit—3.5 percent of the city’s population—at least some of whom have traveled north to find work.)

Wanting to do more than submit our required trip journals and other academic assignments for our instructor, Ian Robinson, our class organized several outreach programs. They included an exhibition of photographs—including those accompanying this article—at a number of local venues, a five-minute video, a teach-in with local high school students, and community service in the Mexican community in Detroit, among other projects.