Globalization at work :
Brief history of the “Maquiladora” Industry in Mexico
Por Rodrigo Bonilla Hastings
Licenciado en Historia y Ciencia Política,
Maestría de Ciencia Política,
Universidad de París I – Panthéon Sorbonne
Recent globalization is a process that raises many issues. Whether is good or
bad for development of nations and individuals is a constant debate. Joseph
Stiglitz, winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, ex-World Bank Chief
executive and vice-president from 1997 to 2000, believes that: "I saw first
hand the devastating effect that globalization can have on developing
countries, and especially the poor within those countries."(2) This essay will
try to illustrate how maquiladoras are a product and the living proof, of
recent globalization (3). They are a result of it, and now portray its major
characteristics. Through their study, the study of their history, their early
development, their evolution, and their characteristics, it is possible to tackle
the major problems and issues brought about by the recent and actual model
of globalization.
How do Maquiladora's represent globalization and its controversial issues?
Firstly, it is fundamental to start by clearly defining the vast concept of
globalization. Secondly, it seems necessary to try to find the historical roots
of the maquiladora industry in Mexico. After which, the focus will be placed
more specifically on the historical evolution of maquiladora industry in two
different cities until recently. Finally, the problems raised by the maquiladora
industry system will be presented in order to illustrate how this historical
process reveals globalization's main contradictions.
In order to work on the process of globalization, it is important to quickly set
some parameters on its definition and chronology. What is globalization?
Stiglitz defines it as: "The closer integration of the countries and peoples of
the world brought about by the enormous reduction of costs of
transportation and communication, and the breaking down of artificial
barriers to the flows of goods, services, capital, knowledge, and people
across borders."4 Globalization can be therefore understood as a process of
growing interconnection between different actors or entities, that tend to
unify the latter in a world-wide network. These actors and entities are: states,
civil society, individuals, local or international organizations, firms, and
companies. How long has this process been developing? It is a very long
process that can be traced back to medieval or even ancient times. In this
sense, Immanuel Wallerstein affirms: "The division of labor has always
crossed borders and thus created networks of goods that respond exactly to
the description of world production today. Today, we talk about 'global
automobiles' because they are built from components that come from all
over the world. Such was the case in the production of large ships during
the XVII century"5. However, it is unquestionable that this process has
known an unprecedented acceleration during the Twentieth century. A.
Longchamp emphasizes the importance of both World Wars, in that they
gave globalization the "technical and political tools" it needed to take-off:
"electronics, computer science, air transportations."6 That said it is
necessary to add that this recent globalization is also marked by the political
and economic philosophy of neoliberalism. Its principles and ideals are
presented in F.A. von Hayek's The Road of the Serfdom, 1944.
This model presents the state as "an obstacle to development and liberty,
therefore it must limit its prerogatives and promote in the contrary, freemarket"7. The supporters of this system had to wait for the consequences of
the 1973 oil crisis, which put an end to almost 30 years of sustained
prosperity in developed and developing countries, to start implementing
their policies. The large Keynesian welfare state models implemented after
the Second World War seemed to falter to the new phenomenon of
stagflation. The new neoliberal policy makers strongly altered the state's role
in economy and society. It had to "guarantee free-market mechanisms by
reducing social spending, control popular discontent and assure monetary
stability (...). The economic neoliberal agents (scholars, firms and financial
institutions) played a major role in suggesting concrete measures
concerning budget restrictions, the creation of an army of unemployed
aiming to weaken unions, and fiscal reforms favorable to companies"8.
This evolution in the role of the state is very important. The state is probably
one of the actors most affected by the characteristics of recent globalization.
This political institution administrates a precisely defined territory and
population, using the legitimate use of physical violence in order to
guarantee its functions. Recent globalization has hurt every single one of the
elements that constitute it, as will be mentioned later on. How did the
appearance of maquiladoras take place in such context?
Maquiladoras9 appeared in the Mexican side of the US-Mexican border in
the 1960s'. However, they are the result of a strong economic transformation
in the region, mainly due to the Second World War. Historian David E. Lorey
affirms: "The Second World War ushered in an era of unparalleled growth in
the border region"10. The war deeply changed the economic activities of the
border. On the U.S. side, the states of California, Arizona, Texas and New
Mexico began to focus their activities on defense and high-technology. As for
Mexico, the country was living what was later known as the 'Mexican
miracle', a period of major economic prosperity, modernization and
industrialization that went from 1940 to the 1960s'. The average GDP growth
rate was of 6.3% from 1940 to 1968. Mexico's border states: Tamaulipas,
Nuevo León, Baja California, Sonora, Chihuahua and Coahuila, played a
major role in this period of economic growth. They received 50% of the
country's new paved roads. This impulse of Mexico's nationalist government
was strongly aided by two consequences of the war. Firstly, U.S. exports
abroad decreased considerably, since the country's production was reserved
for the war effort. This protected Mexican manufactured goods and therefore
aided industrialization. Secondly, the war increased demand from the U.S.
market, therefore raising the price of Mexican products. The state of Nuevo
León and its capital Monterrey, became the heart of Mexico's heavy industry.
They forged a strong entrepreneurial identity, rivaling the capital. As a larger
and larger labor force developed, they were able to escape the government's
official labor union, the Confederación de Trabajadores de México (CTM).
Instead, they organized tamed company unions. Therefore, worker
organization has traditionally been weak and has had trouble developing in
the whole south border region.
In 1965, the Mexican government established the Border Industrialization
Program (BIP). It planned the creation of large numbers of assembly plants,
that would import raw material from the U.S., assemble it into finish
products, and export them back to the U.S. Unemployment was an issue at
the time for two reasons: the Bracero program 11 was over and the
traditional extractive industry was in crisis after the important changes in
U.S. industry and the decrease of demand at the end of the Second World
War. The BIP wanted to reverse this situation. Previously that same year, the
United States had passed a tariff law, that exempted U.S. products,
assembled outside the U.S., of general import duties. It was therefore
possible to sharply lower the cost of assembling in the production process. It
became considerably cheaper to send the raw material to Mexico, assemble it
into finished product, and import it back, than to follow the whole process in
the U.S. The BIP facilitated this process. Quickly, U.S. investment in Mexico
shifted from traditional extraction industries, to manufacturing assembly
plants and sometimes even production plants.
The benefits of the maquiladoras were numerous and Lorey clearly presents
them. Importation to the Mexican side of materials, supplies and machinery
was duty-free as long as the whole of the product was for export. The only tax
paid to enter the U.S. market was tax on value added, and not the general
import duties. Maquilas were the only firms exempt of respecting the
Mexican law requiring a majority of Mexican ownership in a firm. The U.S.’
advanced transportation infrastructure was very close, guaranteeing access
by plane, road or train to any part of the U.S. market. As mentioned earlier,
labor organization was weakly developed in the region, which guaranteed few
strikes. This way, "maquiladora plants came to constitute an increasingly
important link in the booming intra-industry trade reshaping global
investment and commercial flows"12. It mainly took the form of twin cities:
labor intensive on the Mexican side, development and capital intensive on
the American side. With the introduction of the North American Free Trade
Agreement, signed in 1992 and adopted in 1994, by Canada, the U.S. and
Mexico, the maquiladoras were boosted. The system was extended to new
industrial activities (automobile industry) and to new regions of the country
(Puebla, Toluca and León). The system was now institutionalized as Mexico's
industrial model.
Some remarks can be introduced concerning these early developments. How
is globalization embodied here? How does it affect the region? Firstly, by the
consequences of the Second World War in the US-Mexican border region. It
wouldn't be utterly wrong to affirm that Adolph Hitler's invasion of Poland
on September 1st, 1939, had an indirect impact on the every day life of
Mexicans and Americans on both sides of the border. Secondly, it is possible
to note the beginning of recent globalization, with its neoliberal
characteristics, through the BIP. The BIP is Mexico's reaction to adapt to a
neoliberal globalization. It is a neoliberal reaction. First of all, it is opposed to
the nationalist agenda that was initially held by previous Mexican
governments since President Lázaro Cardenas and his major and symbolic
nationalization of Mexican oil and expropriation and redistribution of land.
This project wanted to make of Mexico a powerful, autonomous Latin
American power, and was the ideological support of the "Mexican miracle".
The law obliging firms in Mexican soil to be owned by a majority of Mexicans
can be easily interpreted as the expression of this Mexican nationalist project
(which is still present today, and visible through the current opposition to
the privatization of state owned oil company, PEMEX). By exempting
maquiladoras from this obligation, the government did not respect the
nationalist project. This is illustrative of how an alternative model of
development is progressively replaced by the neoliberal model of
globalization, depicted earlier. The BIP includes more explicit neoliberal
characteristics. The maquiladoras' legal framework is interesting because it
virtually erases the presence of the state and its "obstacles": not only the law
concerning Mexican ownership, but also, the absence of import duties, and
the absence of proper labor protection. Through the BIP, the state is
practically wiped out from the domains in which it is normally a present,
active actor. The BIP assures more "freedom", guaranteeing the mechanisms
of free-market, controlling popular discontent through the non-existence of
effective unions. This is clearly in the line of thought of F.A. von Hayek,
mentioned earlier. Once the origins of the maquiladora have been
mentioned, it is important to study their development closely.
It seems necessary to make a detailed description of maquiladoras and their
development in the different regions where they appeared. The model was
progressively "exported" from the border region to many other regions of the
Mexican Republic, such as Yucatan, Aguascalientes and Guadalajara. In
2004, there were an estimated number of 2,805 maquiladora plants in
Mexico, employing 1,1 million people.13 Some cities on the border have been
dependent on maquiladora industry for half a century now. These
maquiladora cities, illustrated by Ciudad Juarez, Tijuana or Matamoros,
present the traditional development of the system and established its main
characteristics. Scholar Maria Eugenia De La O clearly describes the
historical evolution of maquiladora industry in Ciudad Juarez and the major
changes it brought about 14. The introduction of maquiladoras radically
changed the industrial productive pattern of the city and the state. Before the
BIP, there were four major plants in Ciudad Juarez, dedicated to beer and
whisky production and agriculture. In 1998, there were 23 industrial parks in
Chihuahua, 18 of them in Ciudad Juarez, of which 16 were private owned and
only 2 state-owned. Although traditional industries still remain, it is mainly
electronics and automobile parts that characterize the city's production since
the NAFTA treaty, with the presence of major foreign firms such as: Ford
Motors Co. (4 maquiladoras), General Electric (3 maquiladoras), ThomsonRCA (2 maquiladoras) and others such as Epson and Toshiba America Co 15.
The cities of Matamoros and Tijuana follow a similar pattern. Today, Ciudad
Juarez is considered the "assembly capital" of the world, where, in 2004, 75%
of the economically active population was directly or indirectly related to the
maquiladoras. Maquiladora employees in Tijuana and Ciudad Juarez account
for 31% of the total number of maquiladora employees in the Republic.
Maquiladora plants in these two cities account for 30% of the total 16. This
evolution shows how the maquiladora system went from being a response to
unemployment in the 1960s' to a proper model of national industrialization,
consolidated during the 1980s' and reinforced after 1994 17. This
reinforcement is also visible through the appearance of maquiladoras
elsewhere throughout Mexico.
The maquiladora industry in Yucatan complements richly the description
above, and gives further insight on its strong connection to neoliberal
globalization. Yucatan’s economy had been based on henequen plant 18
production for more than a century. A dramatic fall in the production of
henequen in the early 1990s' left a massive amount of unemployed men that
quickly filled in the first maquiladoras in the region 19. The Yucatan
peninsula became a potential destination for maquiladora firms mostly for
two reasons: it guaranteed a safer place for business than the traditionally
dangerous border with the U.S. (Dinastía Mexicana, a subcontract jewelry
firm of JC Penny & Macey's, moved from Ciudad Juarez to Yucatan in 1987)
and a guaranteed relative proximity to the U.S. market. The port city of
Progreso is only 970 km away from New Orleans, 1.060 km from Tampa and
1.170 km from Miami on a direct boat trip. Mexico City is more than 1.500
km on a sea-land trip. These were major attractions for foreign investment
from everywhere around the globe. Although American and Mexican
investment employs more than half the workforce, this region, has become a
major international pole of activity. Investment from Hong Kong employs
23% of the population and owned the biggest plant in 1999, of multinational
clothing firm Monty, employing 3.456 people in the city of Motul, northeast
of Mérida. The Italian bathing-suit firm La Perla de Bolonia, arrived in view
of penetrating the U.S. market after the signing of the NAFTA treaty.
Morales, García and Pérez, can't be more emphatic on the situation in
Yucatan: "The structural changes imposed by neoliberalism will accentuate
the strategic dimension of the border in the internationalization of economy.
[The border] will abide to trans-nationalizing and globalizing forces that will
transform it and restructure it." The maquiladora industry is seen by them as
one of the "axis of this globalizing process". These descriptions allow us to
now analyze the major issues that this recent historical process has arisen.
The recent globalization process produced maquiladoras, defined their
characteristics, and established them as a durable model of industrialization
in Mexico and Latin American. However, the results are questioned by many.
Firstly, what was the real impact of maquiladoras in the economic
development of Mexico? Secondly, what were its social consequences?
It is possible to affirm that the maquiladora industry model had no relevant
impact in reducing poverty and inequality in Mexico. Information from the
World Bank tends to show that from 1994 until 2002, there haven't been any
major changes 20. Extreme poverty was reduced back to the level previous to
the shattering 1994-1995 financial crisis only in 2002. That is a 7-year-long
recovery. In 2002, half of Mexico's population lived in poverty and a fifth in
extreme poverty. Inequality in Mexico prevails and increased during the
1996-2002 period. During that period, the indicators of the INE or National
Institute of Statistics show that maquiladoras present a slow but steady
increase throughout the Republic 21. It can be affirmed therefore, that their
impact wasn't relevant and that the model didn't solve Mexico's historical
and serious problems of inequality, wealth redistribution, poverty and
extreme poverty, as the supporters of the BIP and NAFTA loudly proclaimed
it would.
Secondly, the maquiladora system, although being now durably installed in
Mexico, is characterized by irregularity and instability. It is naturally and
strongly dependent on the economic and financial situation of the U.S. In
recent history, it is possible to determine at least four major crises in the
sector, that underline how limited such system really is as a long-term
national industrial model. During the 1970s', the U.S. stumbled into a strong
recession and an important number of maquiladoras shut down. Criticized
for being a "volatile and short-sighted" system, those years were called the
"Golondrina"22 years, making reference to the sporadic and opportunistic
nature of such investments 23. Mexico was struck by a major financial and
social crisis in 1982, U.S. investment in maquiladoras flooded in again,
attracted by lowered wages and living standards (the latter guaranteeing a
low level labor-related conflict). However, they retracted once again in the
early 1990s' U.S. recession, to come back once more after the implementation
of the NAFTA treaty in 1994. By 2001, maquiladoras were strongly
consolidated, but the economic downturn following 9/11 terrorist attacks in
the U.S., severely hit the sector. Accounting for 3,735 plants in 2001 before
the attacks, the number hadn't recovered in 2004, with only 2,805 plants. As
for the employees, it went from 1,3 million to 1,1 million from 2001 to 2004
24. These losses weren't only caused by the U.S. post-9/11 recession. It is
another global factor, which remains until today probably the most serious
one: competition from Asia and particularly China. Economic development
specialist, scholar Daniel H. Rosen, points out Mexico's incapacity to stay
competitive in relation to China: "from 1996-2002 Mexico's Global
Competitive Report ranking fell seriously from 33 to 45, while China moved
from 36 to 33. (...) China wins on low labor costs and many other costs of
doing business, while quality control, technology diffusion, mid-level
management skills, and physical infrastructure are improving fast enough to
impress even skeptics and make Mexico's shortcomings in these areas more
apparent. (...) So China is eating Mexico's lunch". He points out that it isn't
China's cheaper workforce that causes China's competitiveness, but Mexico's
"comparative disadvantages" such as corruption, poor infrastructure, underinvestment in human development and, he adds, revealing a neoliberal
stance, "an intrusive bureaucracy (...) sometimes hostile to the private sector
(...) and a less dynamic industrial structure reflecting imperfect
intermediation and residual statism."25.
However, Martínez gives pretty emphatic numbers concerning China's
cheaper workforce: "In 2002 entry-level workers could be hired for as low as
$0.25 (U.S.) an hour in Asia, compared to $1.50-$2.00 in Tijuana and
Ciudad Juárez". He also points out the recent stability of the Mexican peso,
new taxes and the prospect of new regulation as factors directing U.S.
investment to Asia. Whether it is Mexico's industrial system's general lack of
competitiveness or Asia's rock bottom wages, the maquiladora system is in
crisis, once again. This renders evident its high sensibility to global economic
changes, its superficial and ephemeral benefits for the population, what
Martínez calls: "The acute vulnerability of the maquiladora industry to
international wage competition and periodic global recessions"26.
This has a third major economic drawback. Maquiladoras account for 50% of
Mexico exports 27, which emphatically reveals the country's serious
dependence towards this industry. Moreover, this dependence is not only
towards an economic activity but also towards a country: 82.2% of Mexico's
exports were destined to the U.S. market in 2007 28.
The maquiladora system hasn't had any impact in solving Mexico's most
serious problems. It has made the country highly vulnerable to international
economic variations and particularly dependent to U.S. investment and
economy. It is possible therefore to affirm that the system is precarious and
doesn't benefit the country's long-term development or its population's.
Furthermore, and as it will be mentioned bellow, the system has many
questionable social consequences on the population.
Maquiladora industry has guaranteed employment to thousands of Mexicans
for decades now, albeit its volatility explained above. It has been very
attractive and thousands of workers from everywhere in Mexico have moved
North and to several of the new maquiladora regions. However, critics
aiming at the social, cultural and environmental consequences of
maquiladoras are numerous. This is well summed up by Martínez 29. The
initial goal of the program was to employ men who were inactive after the
end of the Bracero program in 1964 and the regions' general downturn, both
mentioned earlier. However, the firms' and the program's concern was profit.
Therefore, firms aimed at a docile and reliable work force in order to keep
wages low and productivity high, hiring mostly women, who were indeed less
prone to activism and effective on the job. With the system's consolidation
however, that changed, and men progressively entered the sweatshops. The
attraction of the maquiladoras produced a shortage in housing in most of the
border cities, and the development of informal housing.
Environment is a major issue. In a study issued by the Federal Ministry of
Environment, Baja California and Chihuahua are the states with the higher
percentage of companies producing toxic waste, with 51% and 20%
respectively. Most of them are concentrated in their respective capitals,
Tijuana and Ciudad Juarez. In total, the maquiladora industry produces
52,148 tons of waste a year. Some scholars go further affirming that 85% of
pollution in the region of El Paso-Ciudad Juárez are produced by
maquiladoras 30.
As for working conditions and low wages, Carlsen, Wise and Salazár find that
there are two major obstacles for their potential increase: the high mobility of
the firms and the major obstacles for unionization. Behind relatively stable
employment indicators, hides a different reality: firms shut down and new
ones reopen constantly, thus imposing a high rotation level amongst the
work force. This has many consequences that are beneficial for the employer
and detrimental for the employee. The employer can maintain wages low,
since the workers cannot obtain seniority and the consequent wage raises
and benefits that come with it. A study presented by the authors, shows that
in the period going from 1990 to 2000, for every three job creations in a
maquiladora, one job was lost and for each maquiladora that opened,
another one shut down.
As for what goes on inside the gates of a maquiladora, the narratives of Lugo
and Salzinger are quite enriching in describing how the inside organization of
space and hierarchy also play in keeping the workers as divided as possible.
Lugo mentions how the recurring lack of chairs plays an important role in
establishing tension between the co-workers and therefore preventing them
from forging solidarity ties 31.
Finally, we can mention the cultural impact the maquiladoras can have on
the population. Coming back to Yucatan, the henequen plant has been
planted in the region for centuries and constitutes the basic element of
Mayan and Lacandon culture in the peninsula. Albeit traumatizing events
such as the Spanish conquest, they have been able to safeguard their
traditions and culture. But will this be possible with important percentages of
Native population moving to cities and working in maquiladoras. Judith
Rosenberg quotes a good example of a Mexican peasant in San Gabriel
Chilac, a small town near Puebla. After having sold a special flavored corn to
Mexico City for decades, the NAFTA treaty impeded him of selling his
product because he simply couldn't compete against cheaper hybrid corn
produced by bigger producers from Mexico and the U.S.32. Will he be
tempted to move to Puebla and find a job in a maquiladora?
This presentation has illustrated how Mexico's recent history is entangled
with that of the world, and this is a proof of how globalized the world is. The
Second World War, the 1973 oil crisis, Osama Bin Laden´s attacks and
China's economic aperture, all had impacts in the everyday lives of Mexicans.
Mexico answered to the recent process of globalization by creating, in
coordination with the U.S., the maquiladora industrial system. After
developing in the U.S.-Mexican border region, it moved to other parts of the
Republic. It was strongly consolidated by the NAFTA during the 1990s'.
However, it still represents an inadequate answer to Mexico's structural
problems and constitutes a fragile source of employment and long-term
development. Moreover, it has proven to have negative social and cultural
impacts. These considerations put into light how the recent history of
globalization is a history of contradictions. This history shows how the model
of globalization imposed by the "top" (multinational firms, international
institutions such as the World Bank, the IMF or the Inter-American
Development Bank, and governments) follows a neoliberal agenda that has
serious problems answering to the problems of the "bottom". In light of these
contradictions and the more recent financial melt down, the history of recent
globalization shows a neoliberal model that has serious difficulties and needs
serious change. Coming back to Stiglitz: "The way globalization has been
managed, including the international trade agreements that have played such
a large role in removing those barriers and the policies that have been
imposed on developing countries in the process of globalization, need to be
radically rethought."33
Notes:
1. Vargas Llosa, Mario. Globalization at Work – The Culture of Liberty.
Catedra Siglo XX Lectures Series. Washington, D.C.: Inter-American
Development Bank. September 20, 2000.
2. Joseph Stiglitz, Globalization and Its Discontents. New York: W. W.
Norton & Company Inc. 2003. p.IX.
3. This will be the thesis of the following essay. However, I discovered further
on during my readings, that this subject and this have been already tackled
by Judith Rosenberg, of University of Texas at Austin, quoted in my
bibliography. However, the approach is considerably different, as the reader
will discover through his reading.
4. Joseph Stiglitz, Globalization and Its Discontents. 2003: New York, W. W.
Norton & Company Inc. p.9.
5. Immanuel Wallerstein, in Mutsaku Kamilamba, Kande, ed. La
Globalización vista desde la periferia, Mexico: City: Grupo Editorial Porrúa,
2002. p.7.
6. A. Longchamp, in Mutsaku Kamilamba, Kande, ed. La Globalización vista
desde la periferia, Mexico: City: Grupo Editorial Porrúa, 2002. p.7.
7. Mutsaku Kamilamba, Kande, ed. La Globalización vista desde la periferia,
Mexico: City: Grupo Editorial Porrúa, 2002. p.9-10.
8. Mutsaku Kamilamba, Kande, ed. La Globalización vista desde la
periferia, Mexico: City: Grupo Editorial Porrúa, 2002. p.9-10.
9. “The word ‘maquiladora’ developed from maquila, which meant a tax in
kind that flourmills used to charge wheat farmes”. Rosenberg, Judith - The
Rhetoric of Globalization: Can the Maquiladora Worker Speak?
Dissertation Abstracts International, A: The Humanities and Social Sciences,
vol. 67, no. 12, pp. 4531. Jun 2007. p.3.
10. Lorey, David E. The U.S.-Mexican Border in the Twentieth Century - A
History of Economic and Social Transformation. Delaware: Scholarly
Resources Inc., 1999. pp.82-91.
11. Bracero program, 1942: US-Mexican coordinated emergency farm labor
plan responding to shortage of labor on the U.S. side of the border caused by
the War. Region farmers pressured the federal government for permission to
import temporary workers. It was expanded to railroad workers in 1943. It
was maintained, and with the Korean War, the Congress enacted Public Law
78 in 1951, prolonging it until 1954, after which it was constantly renewed
until 1964. "This wartime flow of labor north to the US border states and
beyond marked the beginning of the massive influx of Mexicans to both the
Mexican and US border states. The northward movement of inexpensive
Mexican labor, beginning as an implicit subsidy to US agriculture, would
gradually mol the economic and social profile of the United States in the late
twentieth century". Lorey, David E. p. 90.
12. Lorey, David E. p. 103-115
13. Martínez, Oscar J. Troublesome Border. Tucson: University of Arizona
Press, 2006. p. 111.
14. María Eugenia de la O, Ciudad Juárez: a pole of growth of maquiladora
industry, in Quintero, Cirila, and María Eugenia de la O, eds. Globalización,
trabajo y maquilas: Las Nuevas y Viejas Fronteras en México. Mexico City:
Friedrich Ebert Foundation: Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores
en Antropología Social, 2002. pp.25-71.
15. De La O: 40-34
16. Martínez, Oscar J. Troublesome Border. Tucson: University of Arizona
Press, 2006. p. 111
17. Carlsen, Laura, Tim Wise, and Hilda Salazár, eds. Enfrentando la
Globalización - Respuestas Sociales a la Integración Económica de México.
Mexico City: Grupo Editorial Porrúa, 2003. p.203.
18. Henequen: Agave whose leaves yield a fiber also called henequen which
is suitable for rope and twine, but not of as high a quality as sisa.
19. Morales, Josefina, Ana García, Susana Pérez, Regional impact of the
maquiladora in the Yucatán peninsula, in Quintero, Cirila, and María
Eugenia de la O, eds. Globalización, trabajo y maquilas: Las Nuevas y
Viejas Fronteras en México. Mexico City: Friedrich Ebert Foundation:
Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social,
2002. pp. 311-344.
20. The World Bank - Poverty in Mexico Fact Sheet.
http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/COUNTRIES/LACEXT/M
EXICOEXTN/0,,contentMDK:20233967~pagePK:141137~piPK:141127~theS
itePK:338397,00.html
21. María Eugenia de la O, Ciudad Juárez: a pole of growth of maquiladora
industry, in Quintero, Cirila, and María Eugenia de la O, eds. Globalización,
trabajo y maquilas: Las Nuevas y Viejas Fronteras en México. Mexico City:
Friedrich Ebert Foundation: Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores
en Antropología Social, 2002. p.24.
22. Golondrina = a bird, a swallow. It is also known as hot money in
Economics.
23. María Eugenia de la O, Ciudad Juárez: a pole of growth of maquiladora
industry, in Quintero, Cirila, and María Eugenia de la O, eds. Globalización,
trabajo y maquilas: Las Nuevas y Viejas Fronteras en México. Mexico City:
Friedrich Ebert Foundation: Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores
en Antropología Social, 2002. pp.32-33.
24. Martínez, Oscar J. Troublesome Border. Tucson: University of Arizona
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