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Socialist Review Index (1993–1996) | Socialist Review 178 Contents
From Socialist Review, No. 178, September 1994.
Copyright © Socialist Review.
Copied with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
On the Line: Life on the US-Mexican Border
Augusta Dwyer
Latin America Bureau £8.99
They are called the Mallory Children. They live in the Mexican town of Matamoros, just south of the US border, and they have much in common. They are not all deaf but they do all have learning disorders, some very severe. Physically they have broad noses, thin lips, bushy eyebrows and webbed hands and feet. All their mothers, while pregnant, worked in the same factory, Mallory Capacitors, owned by Duracell Batteries.
Doctors think these unusual birth defects were caused by the pregnant women washing components in a solvent containing widely banned PCBs. But they can’t prove it. There is no legal way to force Mallory Capacitors to disclose its methods or materials.
This lack of regulation is just one reason for the huge number of factories built by US companies just inside the Mexican border. The few factory laws are not enforced. Workers are both skilled and cheap. The unions are corrupt, the leaders loyal to the factory owners and Mexico’s one party state.
The result has been a profits bonanza for big (mainly) US companies at the expense of the mass of the poor who live and work in and around these maquiladora factories.
By 1992 there were 2,129 such plants along the 2,000 mile border, employing 511,000 workers, earning wages typically around US$3–4 a day. Mexican developers and entrepreneurs have also got rich, while Mexican workers suffer dire poverty and widespread malnutrition.
The rapid growth of maquiladora industry in the last 20 years has fuelled a huge expansion of the Mexican border towns. Since the companies pay almost no taxes, the new towns have almost no amenities. Huge slums have sprung up. Open sewers run with a foul mix of untreated human waste and toxic industrial waste.
For many Mexicans the quickest route out of the misery is across the border into the US. The notorious border patrol deported 1.2 million people in 1992 alone, and officially estimate that for every person caught two get through.
There is a huge demand for Mexican labour in the southernmost US states – to do dirty jobs for little money, with no security or healthcare provision. Mexicans used to work mainly in agriculture, but today agriculture accounts for only 15 percent. Most Mexicans work in construction, residential care, hotels and restaurants, electronics and textiles.
Millions of Mexicans work illegally in the US. The police are used to keep the majority scared, quiet and cheap. Border patrol slang for a Mexican is ‘tonk’, from the noise made hitting one on the head with a large torch.
For most Mexican workers north of the border wages are below the legal minimum, long periods of unemployment are common and the cost of living is far higher than in Mexico.
Augusta Dwyer’s detailed research pays off. She skilfully combines interviews and personal stories with facts and figures, to provide an unflinching account of some of the horrors of 1990s capitalism.
But what makes the book complete is that Dwyer never loses sight of the resistance of workers – even in the most desperate circumstances. It is this commitment to fighting for change that makes this book far more than a cold, academic study – it shows capitalism and its gravedigger.
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