This site was created with the publication of my book on Mexico and the Border 9 years ago (2014). It contains historical memories of visits to Mexico, my two decades of research in the border regions and in Mexico with the State of Texas and the Federal Government of Mexico as well as my current thinking about issues in Mexico. The coming year, 2023, will be extremely important for Mexico, the Border and all of the United States.

Then

As a young boy in the 1950’s, I traveled with my parents to Juarez twice and once to Tijuana. The trips were side excursions from auto trips to California traveling the road before IH 10 was built. Both cities were quiet and Juarez would feature Indian women from the mountains about a hundred miles to the south and west of the city of Chihuahua. These are the Tarajumara and the women would sell handcrafted wares to American tourists. They spoke no English and only limited Spanish. One of the items I have from my boyhood is a wooden object that looks like a 2 inch pig about the size of your thumb and has legs that move. You put an insect like an ant in it and as the ant moves inside, the legs move.  The women would make these small items to sell to visitors. They would sit alone and not have much interaction with Mexican people.

Decades later as I completed my doctoral work at Penn State and the University of Oklahoma, I took a faculty position at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces, New Mexico. My wife and our one year old son first lived in a rental house on the west side of El Paso. Housing was more varied and less expensive than what was available in Las Cruces. In addition to teaching psychology in New Mexico I taught statistics in the Sociology-Anthropology Department of University of Texas at El Paso, UTEP.  Our family would drive over to Juarez 3 or 4 times a week. Groceries were about half the price over there and restaurant meals were very good and very inexpensive. Crime was low, and bars and “houses of ill repute” were restricted to very specific neighborhoods. One of the more prominent was just across the Rio Grande from the campus of UTEP.

During the two years we lived there, we saw an interesting development created by a man that built and rented warehouses in Juarez. He was Jorge Bustamante and was creating what were called maquilas, factory assembly plants. He would rent a warehouse to an American factory that would ship partially finished items such as the mother board on a computer that needed to have components inserted. The worker would sit at a place on an assembly line and do a single step repeatedly. That step could be done as readily in an American city like Minneapolis, Kansas City or Dallas, but in Juarez at a far lower cost. Such factory labor in an American city would be 2 or 3 dollars an hour. The Mexican workers were paid 10 or 15 cents a hour. The plant manager and any engineers would live in El Paso and commute daily to the factory in Juarez.

This innovation was an early step in globalization and created fundamental changes in a Mexico that was mainly agricultural with most of the population living around Mexico City 700 miles to the south. The Mexican population then was 50 million with most living in central Mexico near Mexico City. Spanish was the predominant language but millions spoke only a native Indian language. Then and even now in many parts of rural Mexico Spanish was not the dominant language but instead an Indian language. Over 80 percent of Mexicans speak Spanish as the dominant language but about 20 percent speak only a native language. Apart from Mexico City most employment until late in the 20th Century was on farms and ranches.

I did some interviews in the maquilas and found that almost all of the assembly line workers were women. They came from towns and rural areas in the south of the state and other states south of Chihuahua. When I asked why they came, they uniformly said they were there to have a new life, very different from their mothers and sisters back home. They did not want to marry or marry later in life not as a teenager. They spoke about having their own money and being able to shop in El Paso.

A surprising effect of the maquila was to change the culture of Mexico, particularly of women. Both Jorge Bermeudez and his wife, Olivia, told me that they did not anticipate the culture change that came with the maquilas but were proud of what they saw as modernization of life in Mexico. Yet these changed roles of women created conflict with men and for many years cities like Juarez had increased rates of homicides of women.

Now

Contrast that world of 30 years ago to the one today. Mexico is urbanized not rural and farm based. The population is over 130 million with rapid growth of cities along the border. Most citizens earn their living working in a job. Services is the dominant occupation with mining and oil field work as much smaller areas. Tourism is an important source of jobs with about 62 percent working in such service. Manufacturing is second with just over 20 percent. This job structure represents how important having tourists is to the Mexican economy as well as the impact of globalization that brings jobs to low-wage economies.  Earnings from Mexicans working in other countries is significant in the nation’s economy with about 5% each year coming from funds earned in other nation’s and sent to Mexico. Most of this comes from the United States.

Mexico’s transition from a rural, farming and ranching world to an urban world involved in trade, tourism and manufacturing has been a journey of the last 50 years or so. One of the headaches in this transition is developing a government that meets its responsibilities and has the respect of the population. That transition has slipped in the last two decades. A clear measure is the rate of crime and in many ways the most simple is homicides.

A disturbing measure is the rate of homicides. El Paso is on track to have a record number in 2022 of 65. Juarez will have about 1,000 in 2022! The population estimated for El Paso is 975,000 and 1,600,000 for Juarez at the end of 2022.

This puts the immigration on the border into a broader picture. Mexico is a very violent land and some of the extremes are along the border with the United States. Here is a regularly updated graph of violence in all the states of Mexico and many individual communities: https://elcri.men/en/violence-map/

There is a similar pattern at the other large twin city in the far west in California and Baja California.

Population      Homicides

San Diego           2,000,000       60

Tijuana                 2,200,000       1,000