Don't Start the Revolution Without Me! - Jesse Ventura [46]
She laughed. “That’s true,” she says.
I started thinking about how so many of us in the United States, myself included, have a false impression of Mexico because of the border towns—which we created. Mexicali, Tijuana, Nuevo Laredo, Juarez, and others largely came into existence because of our outlawing of alcohol. When Prohibition happened in the U.S. in the 1920s, a lot of drinkers simply ran across the border into Mexico. That’s what also brought about all the prostitution and gambling activities in those little towns. Mexico is still dealing with this today, the result of our Prohibition.
Border areas like Mexicali are also coping with another of our exports—the multinational corporation. Since the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1994, which eliminated most trade restrictions between our two countries, hundreds of factories called maquiladoras have sprung up. There they make goods on the cheap and ship them back across the border. Companies like Sony, Mitsubishi, Honeywell, and Daewoo now have assembly plants in Mexicali. The big food processors like Nestlé are visible, too.
President Clinton predicted this would be a boon to everyone. It certainly has been for the corporations, which have cut back their labor costs and increased their profits. Thousands of workers from Mexico’s poorest southern states have arrived to work in Mexicali. They make the equivalent, I was told, of a little more than four dollars a day. But it’s better than having no job at all. So, on the one hand, Mexicali is experiencing an economic boom. It’s constantly growing, with close to a million people now. Many of the newly rich have moved into gated communities.
I’m a staunch capitalist, and I was a big supporter ofNAFTA in the beginning. Today, I have a lot of reservations about what it’s brought about. NAFTA has resulted in hundreds of thousands of job losses in the U.S., because employers moved south of the border. Half of the people working in these Mexican maquiladoras are women, and there is also child labor, and long hours, with no right to unionize. They’re really nothing more than sweatshops, in a lot of cases.
On the outskirts of town, you see the ramshackle homes made from cinder blocks and scraps of metal. You see the waste-littered streets. Often, these people have no running water or electricity. They are the people of the maquiladoras. So driving through Mexicali does make you wonder—what price, in terms of quality of life, are a lot of people paying in order to enrich these companies? Would they maybe be better off sticking with agriculture, since the Mexicali Valley produces some of the biggest crops in all Mexico?
“It makes me think of my grandfather,” I say to Terry as we ease out of town onto Mexico Highway 5. “He’d grown up working in the coal mines of Pennsylvania, after his parents came to this country from Slovakia. He knew it was gonna kill him, and that’s why he brought my dad and his other kids out to Minnesota. Looking for a better life. So you can’t blame the poorest Mexicans for coming to northern Baja, trying to find the same thing. It’s just . . .”
My voice cracks for a minute. Terry fills in my sentence. “What are the real opportunities?”
CHAPTER 6
Breaking Down Barriers: China and Cuba
“History will absolve me.”
—Fidel Castro
Passing through Mexicali, I can’t help but think about another country I’ve had an opportunity to visit: China. Early in the twentieth century, Mexicali was actually more Chinese than Mexican, and even today the border town has probably the highest concentration of Chinese residents within Mexico.
Originally, the Chinese came as laborers working for the Colorado River Land Company that was building a massive irrigation system in the Valle de Mexicali. As often happened with immigrant labor, the high wages they were promised never came to pass. In fact, a desert peak below Mexicali is still called “El Chinero,” commemorating the deaths of about 160 laborers who never made it across the San Felipe Desert. A Mexican boatman had