The Devils Highway - Luis Alberto Urrea [83]
At the same time, our vaunted trade agreements couldn’t penetrate Mexico, couldn’t overwhelm the hopes of minimum wage, all the burgers you can eat, color TV, and what looks like free health care. The businessmen and women who run the maquiladoras (internationally owned and operated Mexican factories) that were to transform the border have found more, and cheaper (it didn’t seem possible) labor in China. By 2002, four hundred maquiladoras had shut down in Mexico with more slated for doom. The Mexican paper La Opinión reacted with this headline: “ANOTHER INSULT—Now the Chinese Are Taking Our Jobs.” Anti-immigration buffs will appreciate the ironic echo of the complaint.
Just when it seemed like there couldn’t be any more people left in Mexico to cross the border, new waves surged. The Coyote operations expanded. As the onslaught swelled, the Border Patrol thinned.
After 9/11, over three hundred Border Patrol agents fled the service and became air marshals, riding in planes for a living with their .40 cal automatics tucked under their arms, watching for terrorists and hijackers over the tops of their Maxim magazines. The quip was: Life sucks, then you join the air marshals.
At the same time, the American Right demanded more Migra. The INS took direct missile fire for its boggling of the Arab Threat and the collapse of the Mexican border. The old boys of Wellton Station kept driving into the desert, every day of the year. Foamers, wets, walkers, Coyotes, OTMs, and now Arabs. Homeland Security, that long arm of the Fatherland, moved to absorb the Border Patrol into itself, recombining federal agencies and trying to forge a colossus of border enforcement.
The cutters themselves reacted with a strange lack of gratitude: the move cut them off from their union representation. Hardly a bunch of pinkos, the officers in the field still felt they needed fraternal support. Rumors began to fly almost immediately that a substantial percentage of the cutters would flee the new King-Size Homeland border forces.
One of the signcutters smiled when asked about al Qaeda.
“Well,” he said. “They’re from desert countries. But they’re not from this desert. They wouldn’t get too far.”
Today, thousands of maquiladora workers, many of them strangers to Tijuana, Mexicali, Juarez, Matamoros, wake up to find themselves without money in an inhospitable region far from home, where the cost of living is higher, and the padlocked doors of the maquis are echoed by closures and failures all along the line. When Vicks VapoRub comes from a Mexican plant, and your cassette tape and VCR are assembled by an “Oaxaca” who can’t read, and the big boys take their Learjets and martinis to Beijing, taking their little blue bottles and their Mylar and circuits with them, it becomes the duty of El Norte’s businesses to take up the slack. If only burgers could be cooked in Africa and teleported! If only toilets would scrub themselves, pants stitch themselves, tuna can themselves, lawns mow themselves! If only robots would slice the throats of cows and grind them into sausage! If only tomatoes and oranges and apples, and cotton, and sugar cane, and peaches, and cherries could be harvested by monkeys! If only we had clones! If only wildcat construction projects would frame and roof and shingle themselves!
If only Mexico paid workers a decent wage.
In Iowa City, Omaha, Nutley, Waycross, Metairie, those who survive the northern passage can earn in an hour what it took a long day’s work in radioactive chemical Mexican sludge to earn before. The green hills of eastern Arkansas are ripe with chicken plucking factories, and the woods are now alive with Mexican “Templos del Evangelio”—crazy backyard churches not unlike the Sonoita bible temple down the street from the legendary El Negro’s compound. Signs that once said “Jesus or Hell” now say “Cristo o Muerte!” The Oaxacas rush to the Arkansas hills to make