Maquiladora

Well, that business had gone on for a long time, and it got bigger and bigger and bigger, and at one point, we had about ten thousand employees in about ten different sites, many of the...

in the Maquiladoras in Mexico, Chihuahua, Jalisco-

Mm

...

In the context of this border region, Paso del Norte, you can argue in favor of this economic development by looking into how other industries have thrived in here.

So, for example, the Maquiladora industry, right? And these are foreign-owned assemble factories that operate in the border, and they're able to get, like, a very high profit rate by avoiding importing tariffs and also by paying very low wages to workers in Mexico.

And so I think that the conversation, at least in here, is going to be about how we're seeing the consequences of prioritizing the economic development over community welfare.

Because, like I said, one of the perspective is that you're bringing all of these companies that are interested in putting their data center projects in the region.

They are asking their commissioners to also require water sustainable plans for the functioning of these data centers.

So I think, like I said, what we are seeing, the type of resistance that we are seeing here in the border, is that people are becoming more active in this proposal period of these data centers, but asking for accountability of, of how are these projects going to work sustainably and in a way that really works for our community, and how are we also benefiting from it?

Veronica referenced the Maquiladora industry, which is not something I was familiar with at all.

I don't even think I'd heard the word before.

So...

I spent several years in the name that we gave to those companies here in Mexico is Maquiladora.

And after around 14 years, I started with the law enforcement service.

And I discovered that that was my mission and passion in life.

They had companion struggles in Guerrero, uh, with struggles against the, uh, expropriation and the enclosures of a communal forest, for example, which became very violent with landowners assassinating organizers for years.

And then the movements around the border area, not only in the Maquiladora factories with young women organizing and then the auto workers building the first national independent union in Mexico, but also the mass movement against the violence against women in, in the border region in Mexico.

So in some ways, the Zapatistas kind of sparked these autonomous movements throughout Mexico that dealt with issues of violence against women, uh, in the workplace, transforming the labor movement in Mexico, and that had a kind of ripple-up effect, if you will, that the PRD was able to, um, prevail over, uh, the two dominant parties that after, um, after the PRI had dominated Mexican politics for seventy years, the PAN started to alternate power with the PRI, and the PRD kind of came out of that.

And again, the Zapatistas refused to join the PRD, um, the, the Social Democratic Party.

My route is Monterey to Tijuana.

I transport goods from Maquiladoras.

It is roughly an 18-hour drive when I do not stop too much.

I know every curve, every gas station and every dangerous area by heart, but there is one stretch of highway that I have tried to avoid for the past two years.

What are you doing?

He sound, he sounds like the Clintons when Bill Clinton during, when the arguments for NAFTA, and he was like, "Do you understand how poor they are down there where the Maquiladoras are on the, on the Mexico side of the US-Mexico border?" And I was like, "I don't give a shit."

Yes.

"I don't care.