Open Markets, Closed Borders?:
Between Mexico and the United States
in the Era of Free TradeClosing the Door
"The border between the United States and Mexico is one of the most unreal borders in the world," Carey McWilliams wrote thirty years ago, "it unites rather than separates the two peoples." He did not mean that it united them on equal terms. He meant that the relationship, however difficult, was unavoidable.
The border is a place of paradox. One of the few places where the Third World meets the first, it might seem like a sharp divide. But cultures, economies and peoples flow across it with extraordinary intensity. 250 million people cross the border each year, more than any other border in the world. Yet this does not make it a friendly place. As Gloria Anzaldúa has put it, "the U.S. Mexican border is an open wound where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds. And before a scab forms it hemorrhages again, the lifeblood of two worlds merging to form a third country –a border culture."
Neither wholly of one culture or another, the border is a space between –a space that in many ways is expanding, as the peoples and economies of North America are integrated. Yet it also remains a line of violence as well, and especially recently many on the American side wish to turn it into a wall.
On the first day of 1994, the North American Free Trade Agreement went into effect. Goods and capital flowed between the three countries with much greater ease than ever before. National borders seemed no longer to be a barrier to products or to investors. By special provisions of the Agreement, the immigration of highly trained technical professionals was made far easier and simpler; not only could American companies invest with greater ease in Mexico, but their management staff could cross the border with ease and little paper work. But as doors were opened for the wealthy and skilled, they were closed for the poor.
At the same time, in key places along the border, walls were going up. The American INS was implementing a new strategy, called "prevention through deterrence." In the past, the Border Patrol had concentrated on catching undocumented immigrants when they crossed the border. Now, the idea was to frighten them into not attempting to cross at all.
The strategy had first been tried out in El Paso in 1993, in Operation Blockade (later renamed Hold-The-Line). The idea was to build far more elaborate barriers than before, increase Border Patrol staff, and introduce high-technology devices to make staff more effective. At first, it was a great success. Border Patrol officers were working overtime, but they were catching fewer migrants. The INS quickly expanded the program, with Operation Gatekeeper in San Diego, Operation Safeguard in Nogales, Arizona, and Operation Rio Grande in east Texas. At San Diego and Nogales, the size of the local Border Patrol doubled. On a national level, Congress allocated funds to double the Border Patrol by 1996. The military is getting involved as well; Army reservists have built difficult fences along key stretches of the border. A Border Research and Technology Center has been established, to develop high-technology devices to further improve the performance of the Border Patrol. Clearly, the border is being turned into a military fortress. At the very moment that goods and capital are being allowed to flow free, a great deal of money and energy is going in to make sure that people stay put.
The "prevention through deterrence" strategy is designed to make it much more difficult, dangerous and expensive to cross the border. There is no question it has been successful in this. But while the number of people caught crossing at major points like El Paso and San Diego is down, far more are now caught crossing at more remote places. Making things difficult at one point only pushes migrants to another point.
The strategy has also made business for smugglers much better. The price of being smuggled across the border has doubled. In general, Doris Meissner, the head of the INS admits, "as we improve our enforcement, we increase the smuggling of aliens that occurs, because it is harder to cross and so therefore people will turn more and more to smugglers." At the same time, Meissner claims that the INS is "moving as aggressively as we can... so that we can put them [smugglers] out of business." Since it is precisely INS strategy that is strengthening the importance, complexity and profits of smugglers, this seems unlikely. In many ways, it is the tighter border enforcement that makes migration an organized crime issue.
The most ironic effect of hardening the border is that it makes it difficult for migrants to cross back and forth. It therefore has turned many temporary migrants into permanent settlers in the U.S. The complexities of the border, and of the U.S. relationship with Mexico, cannot simply be wished away, or walled out.
Documents1. Adelita, A Clandestine Maid, 1980s
2. Pedro, Smuggling People Across the Border, 1980s
3. María Puente, So Close, Yet So Far: San Diego, Tijuana, 1989
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Sources and Further ReadingRecommended Books
Marilyn Davis, Mexican Voices, American Dreams: An Oral History of Mexican
Immigration to the United States (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1990)
Judith Hellman, Mexican Lives (NY: The New Press, 1994)
Marcelo Suárez-Orozco, ed. Crossings: Mexican Immigration in Interdisciplinary
Perspectives (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998)Sources
1. A Clandestine Maid, 1980s
Adelita Sandoval, interview, in Judith Hellman, Mexican Lives (NY: The New Press, 1994), 161-171.
Adelita came to Tijuana in 1980 to escape from her alchoholic husband, moved in with her cousin, and got a job with her in an assembly plant, or maquiladora. She later left this job and started working in the U.S..
I don't notice it [the border] now as much as I once did, because I've lived her for twelve years and I guess I've gotten used to it. But, believe me, life at the border is really crazy. First, we're all running to the other side to buy manufactured things we can't get here, or that cost too much here. If you want a hair dryer, or clothing for your kids, or somebody steals your gas cap or breaks off you windshield wiper, you've got to find a way to get to the other side, or you give money to a friend who can cross to buy you these things in Chula Vista.
And then the americanos come over here to buy huge sacks of rice and beans and flour. Or at least they used to, when prices on these goods were still set by the government. Now that the politicians have taken away all the price controls, we're running over there to buy even the most basic things. That's because, strange as it seems, it's cheaper to buy a bag of rice in the U.S., which is a rich country, than in Mexico, which is poor. And this is true even when something comes from Mexico, like oranges or tomatoes, or gasoline.
It seems like half my life has been spent trying to get to the other side. The funny thing is that I didn't come here thinking I would work in the United States. I came to Tijuana to find a job in the assembly plants. I came because I had a cousin who was already working ehre in a factory. But after I'd lived and worked in Tijuana a few years I got the picture: you can work hard and get paid in pesos, or you can work hard and get paid in dollars. You can work here and get paid by the day, or work there and get paid by the hour. And even someone like me who comes straight from a little village in Michoacán can figure out which is better.
It wasn't difficult to find that first job. Dolores [her cousin] recommended me and all I needed to show was a birth certificate. They didn't even ask to see my primary school certificate. I started work the same morning.
What was difficult was the work itself, or at least the conditions in which we had to work. I had always liked to sew, and we were very proud of the Singer we had in our home in the village -the kind you crank with your feet. But this work was nothing like the sewing I knew. In the maquila, you sewed the same piece over and over. For months I did nothing but zippers. Hundreds of thousands of zippers. Later I did nothing but pockets. At night when I lay down to sleep I would close my eyes, and, I swear, I would see pockets.
We couldn't go to the bathroom when we needed to, and we could only eat lunch in the twenty minutes when the supervisors said we could take a lunch break. It was like being a little kid in school. In fact, we used to joke that this why the maquila owners always want to know if you completed primary school. It's not because you need to know how to read or write in order to sew zippers. You just need to know how to sit still in you chair when, in reality, you have to leave the room to pess.
When I was sewing all day, my back ached, my kidneys ached, and my feet swelled up for lack of circulation. But with the microassembly [her next job] what started to go was my eyesight. I had all the other aches and pains, but now my vision started to go blurry. At that point I just said no. I have to feed my kids and I've got to have a job that gives me the right to go to the Social Security hospital. But I was only twenty-seven years old and, I though, I've got to hang onto my eyesight.
More than half the workers in any factory are likely to leave in the course of a year, and in some factories, the rotation is a lot higher. Each time I left a job, I'd just find a friend or neighbor who was working in a maquila and I'd get her to recommend me at that plant. Mostly the people who hire you just want to examine you to make sure you're not pregnant, and they want to see your birth certificate to make sure that you're not underage or overage.
I didn't stay long enough in one place to get involved. That's the way it is in this industry: the maquilas come and go, and we also come and go. I can't even tell you if the unions in the plants where I worked -the ones that were unionized- were good or bad. I wasn't around long enough to find out.
[Adelita received a border-crossing card at one of these jobs] The pass allows you to cross over to the other side in order to spend money, but they don't want you to come over to earn money. So you have to convince them that you're doing one when you're really doing the other. [Her friend Graciela figured out how to do it, by dressing up]. Graciela guided me through every step. First she found me two jobs with friends of her señoras, and then she lent me the clothing I would need to cross. I worked my hands with lotion for a week until all the redness was gone. I polished my nails and I bought a ring for each hand: one looked like a ruby and the other looked like a sapphire.
At first I felt nervous, but now the border crossing is routine for me. On the mornings we go to work, the migra [INS] almost never even ask to see our papers. They look at our hands, the way we're dressed, and they figure us for the kind of middle-class ladies who have maids in their homes in Tijuana, and plenty of time to spend in the shopping malls of Avenue H in Chula Vista [California].
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2. Smuggling People Across the Border, 1980s
Pedro P., interview, in Judith Hellman, Mexican Lives (NY: The New Press, 1994), 171-184.
Pedro is a coyote, or a pollero, who smuggles immigrants across the border. He dresses inconspiciously, so that if he's caught, no one will know he's the leader.
The migra is going to catch you from time to time. It's inevitable. It happens to everyone -to me, perhaps, less than to others because I've been very lucky and I don't take too many chances.
Once, however, I was with my pollos [chickens: the people being smuggled] and the gringos decided -I don't know why- that I had to be the coyote for the whole group. I think one of the agents recognized me as someone he'd picked up before. My clients were sent back to Mexico, but I was put up in the San Diego city jail.
The next day I was transferred to the Federal Penitentiary in Pecos, Texas. This is the place where they take coyotes, drug smugglers, and contrabandistas. But I can tell you one kind of person you don't find serving time in Pecos. That's the Americans who employ the illegals. These guys are smart, and the pass along the risk to "labor contractors" who vouch for the workers, saying that their papers are all "in order." Its the contractors who end up in Pecos charged with falsification of documents and transport of illegal aliens.
To tell you the truth, I would rather spend a month with the gringos in Pecos than one day in a Mexican jail. Other coyotes have told me some bad stories and beatings and other stuff that went on when they were in custory in the U.S., But, in my case, the only thing I suffered was worry for my wife and my kids, who didn't know what had become of me and had nothing to live on while I was gone.
The stories you hear about coyotes who rob the pollos, who collude with asaltapollos, the bandits who assault the pollos while they're in no man's land -all these things really do happen. You hear about coyotes who rape the women they have promised to deliver safely to the other side, or who abandon people who have broken a leg or twisted an ankle jumping over the fence. These stories are true. But it is only a few pollos who do these things. This is a business like any other; you're going to find all kinds of people, good and bad, doing this work.
My business is based on trust, on the recommendations of people I have passed to the other side. Folks come to me because I have a reputation for skill and reliability. I work with very competent people in San Ysidro -guys in whom the pollos can have confidence. People thing of me as someone who is serious, who doesn't take stupid chances.
With the migra [INS], it's always a game of cat and mouse. You study their moves, you figure out how many men and what kind of equipment they're using that night. And you rely on the fact that they know that they can't stop everyone who decides to cross on a given day. The trick is not to be one of the people they catch that day.
The migra knows all the regular overland routes that we can use, and they patrol these with horses and helicopters. So we just have to invent new routes. To do this work, you have to believe that there's got to be one last way the migra hasn't thought of yet. The other thing to remember is that the people we guide are very needy. They're very desperate. So they'll put up with a lot to reach Los Angeles.
Once past San Clemente, we can relax, especially as we get closer to East Los Angeles, where everyone speaks Spanish and looks like us. My job is to deliver the client safe and sound to an address in East L.A. Then I collect my $300 and leave. If, three minutes later, the guy I just dropped off sticks his head out the door to put out the garbage and is grabbed by the migra, that's not my problem. I just bring him there. Staying out of the way of the migra afterwards –that's his problem.
It's true that I can take in thousands of dollars in a week –sometimes a thousand in a single night. But I also have my expenses. At the end of the day, I make a lot of money, but I have some big hidden costs. The federal judicial police, the state judicial police, the municipal police –you name it– they come around as often as once a week to shake me down. They know more or less what I make, so they want as much as a thousand dollars a pop. And, believe me, they get a lot more than that from the drug runners.
Of course, I'm often afraid. Everyone who does this kind of work is afriad. I'm scared of the police on this side and the migra on the other, and the bandits who attack you in between. The worst thing is the bandits, because they carry knives and guns, and they go after you when you're on your way back from San Ysidro [California] and you have all the money you earned that night in your show.
[Pedro is Catholic and attends mass regularly; his wife is an evangelical and worries and prays about him.] As for my children, they're too young to worry. The oldest boy is ten. They don't really understand what I do for a living. But Jaime's [his partner] kids are older, and his wife tells them that their father works in a saloon and that's why he comes home so late and why they can't visit daddy at work.
[Pedro has worked as a day laborer, a construction worker, and cab driver. In the U.S. he has been a dishwasher, busboy, waiter, janitor, checkout cashier, custiodian, bricklayer, plasterer, bar bouncer and agricultural worker, picking cherries, apples, grapes, peaches, strawberries, oranges, grapefruits, tomatoes, lettuce, and squash] I continue to work as a pollero because it is the only job I can get in Mexico where I can make really good money. My problem is that I don't want to live on the other side. I don't want to bring up my kids in the United States. I want them to live here, in their own country, where they can feel proud of who they are.
But, I'll tell you what my dream is. My dream is to get papers: to get a real green card, not a fake. Then I could work in construction on the other side, and live here in Tijuana with my family. I'd like to operate the heavy equipment. I know how, and you make great money doing that in the U.S. I'd just go across every day to work, and then I'd come home to Tijuana at night. I could be really happy with that kind of life. Not just economically OK, but really happy, really content.
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3. María Puente, "So Close, Yet So Far: San Diego, Tijuana, 1989"María Puente, "So Close, Yet So Far: San Diego, Tijuana, 1989" San Diego Tribune, 111 July 1989.
Viewed from a jetliner, the cities of San Diego and Tijuana appear to blend with the nightfall into a carpet of lights tossed at the edge of the continent.
So much for the aerial perspective. The facts on the ground tell a different tale of two cities.
Unlike the eight other communities straddling the two thousand-mile border between the United States and Mexico, San Diego and Tijuana are not and never have been twin cities or even sister cities, notwithstanding the ceremonial rhetoric of politicians over the years.
Instead, the relationship between San Diego and Tijuana for the past century is best described as a long marriage, one that started out with warmth and intimacy in youth, then grew cold and distant with maturity. There have been long periods when they barely spoke to each other, the silences occasionally punctuated by bickeing and recrimination over broken plumbing and spilled sewage.
But now, as they face another century together, there are signs of reconciliation between San Diego and Tijuana. Romance, however, has nothing to do with it: pragmatic, bottom-line calculation does.
For instance, the two convention-and-tourism bureaus –e that each city benefits from the other's tourism– are holding joint meetings and working together on projects for the first time. Even the two city councils, for the first time in memory, have held joint meetings –a meaningless ceremony, perhaps, but the symbolism is important to the Mexicans.
Both San Diego city and county have established binational affairs offices –the first such offices along the entire U.S.-Mexico border– staffed by bicultural and bilingual officials. Public health officials from both sides are working on developing common procedures to cope with the mutual problems of disease control, public safety and trauma care.
Most important, the two cities are gradually recognizing their interdependence –their common economic interests in the tourism and maquiladora industries.
Tijuanans have always been aware of their dependence on San Diego. Now more San Diegans are becoming aware of their dependence. Tijuanans spend an estimated $950 million in San Diego every year, about two percent, a conservative estimate, of the annual $50 billion gross regional product is generated south of the border, according to economic statistics.
The two cities are increasingly aware that in the macroeconomy of the Pacific Rim, separation could weaken them both –and union could make them an economic powerhouse.
Superficially they are similar. Both are cities of recent immigrants, many of them ignorant of the early, common history of the two towns. Both cities are enjoying booming economies. Both are enjoying the benefits and suffering the problems of uncontrolled growth. Both have serious infrastructure problems. And both are deeply conservative.
But they are more different than alike in their conflicting social and cultural values, in their dissimilar political and government structures and in their distinctive ways of doing business.
"In the U.S., it's know-how; in Mexico, it's know-who," said one bicultural Tijuana businessman.
In the beginning, of course, there was no border. California was part of the vast Spanish colony when the communities that became the two cities first sprouted. Even years after the boundary was drawn following the Mexican War in 1848 –when the United States appropriated a huge portion of Mexican territory, including California– the border was as invisible on the ground as it still is from the air.
American and Mexican historians say San Diego and Tijuana both began as a collection of ranches served by the old Franciscan Misison San Diego de Alcalá. The early families –such as the Arguellos, the Estudillos, and the Bandinis– owned land in both communities, and moved back and forth often for fiestas and weddings.
"One member of one of the founding families used to get up at his place in Rosarito at 3 am evry Sunday so he could ride his horse along the beach to go to 8 am Mass at the mission," said Ted Proffitt, a historian who has just completed a doctoral dissertation on the history of Tijuana.
After the U.S.-Mexican War in 1848, the community that would become Tijuana was left on the Mexican side of the border, inaccessible from the rest of Mexico and dependent on San Diego for everything from food to spiritual sustenance. It was the beginning of Tijuana's isolation from Mexico and its satellite relationship to San Diego.
"San Diego was Tijuana's reason for existence and it defined itself by its relationship to San Diego," said Larry Herzog, a University of California San Diego professor of urban studies who has written a book about the two cities and the confrontation of two cultures at the border.
But, like some married couple, communities change and grow apart. After the turn of the century and the construction of the railroads, San Diego grew more rapidly and lost its Hispanic roots in the flood of Anglos from across the United States.
The flood grew even greater after World War I and the arrival of the U.S. Navy in San Diego harbor. New border-crossing restrictions also helped create distance between the two cities. And increasing nationalism came between the two countries, with the inevitable trickle-down effect on the two cities.
Then Prohibition came to the United States in 1920. Practically overnight, Tijuana became the red-light district of San Diego, the favorite port of call for rowdy sailors. American investors in Tijuana promoted it as the place where "the drinks never stop," while the prohibitionists damned it as the "road to hell." Thus was born the "Black Legend of Tijuana," as Tijuanans refer to their cities reputation as a sin capital. Meanwhile, San Diego began priding itself as a clean, all-American town.
Eventually, Prohibition was repealed, the casinos were closed, sexual mores changed in the United States, and even the sailors stayed home. Tijuana made efforts to clean up its image, and began promoting itself as a tourist attraction for families. But its tacky, trashy reputation persisted, even up to the present, according to observers in both cities.
"I saw a recent survey that showed there was an astonishingly high percentage of San Diegans who had never crossed the border and would never think of going to Tijuana, largely because of its image," said Miguel Cardenas, a graduate and top administrator at San Diego State University and a former high-ranking Baja California government official who was raised in Tijuana. "The reality of Tijuana has changed, but cultural and social attitudes have not caught up to economic changes."
Tijuanans, painfully aware of their dependency and subordinate position to San Diego, grew more resentful and defensive as their neighbor's indifference –tinged with contempt and condescension– increased from the 1940s through the mid-70s.
Herzog of UCSD sees the symbolism in the location of the two cities' downtowns.
"The center of Tijuana is right at the border because [transborder] trade is crucial to its existence, but San Diego's center is 17 miles to the north, the traditional direction of its growth," Herzog said...
Tijuanans accommodated themselves to San Diego, mostly because they had no choice. They learned English; few San Diegans bothered to learn Spanish, They read the San Diego newspapers; few San Diegans even knew the names of the Tijuana newspapers. They crossed the border daily or weekly to go shopping, for dinner and movies, for school or to go to their jobs; few San Diegans did the same...
Although Tijuana has long been an honorary member of the San Diego Association of Governments, no officials have ever attended a meeting – "tangible proof that Tijuana also deserves blame for the distance" between the cities, said Homero Reyes, a Mexican economist and government consultant.
Over the decades, some economic links remained between the two cities. Former Mayor Pete Wilson remembers George Scott, owner of the old Walker Scott department store downtown, telling him that about 20 percent of its charge accounts were held by Tijuanans...
There have always been families with roots on both sides of the border functioning as social links between the two sides even when there were few other exchanges, according to historian Juan Ortiz Figueroa of the Center for Historical Research in Tijuana.
"I had my first communion on that side and my confirmation on this side," says Elsa Saxod, head of the Office of Binational Affairs for San Diego, who grew up in both cities in the 1950s and 1960s. "Crossing the border was part of everyday life. We knew all the border guards. We didn't think of it as going to another country."
Many early Tijuanas were born in San Diego –making them U.S. citizens– because there were no hospitals in Tijuana. Most pioneer Tijuanans sent their children to school in San Diego, initially because there were no schools in Tijuana, but later so they could learn proper English, Ortiz explained.
But by the 1970s, most San Diego government and political officials had grown accustomed to not thinking about Tijuana except when problems arose –flooding, sewage, pollution, illegal immigration, drugs. Few spoke Spanish or even thought it was necessary to learn. Fewer still were familiar with the highly centralized nature of Mexican governmetn, or with the key officials in that government...
After the first peso devaluation in 1976, Tijuanans sharply reduced their shopping trips to San Diego –and it showed up in lower sales-tax revenues.
"That was an economic jolt that made San Diego wake up," said economist Reyes. "The seeds of awareness sprouted, and now they're blossoming, not necessarily because of friendship, but because of crisis."
Clement points out that media coverage of Tijuana has expanded as a result of increasing awareness between the two towns. Before 1975, he said, there were about 50 to 75 stories a year about Tijuana in the San Diego press. "Now there are about 50 to 75 a month," he said.
The binational affairs office, the increasing links between public health, tourism and education officials, the connections between musicians and artists, the binational families and the friendships between individuals –even the plans for U.S. and Mexican census officials to work together for the 1990 census– all these show San Diego and Tijuana moving together again...
But tho cities must interact more in planning for the future. Reyes said it's especially importatn that the two formulate a cohesive binational industrial policy –covering such issues as zoning, infrastructure and urbanization– to deal with the growing maquiladora assembly plants. There are more than four hundred plants in Tijuana already –many with twin plants in San Diego– and more are planned...
The Bilateral Commission on the Future of U.S.-Mexico Relations, in a report issued last year, recommended the two nations establish a joint border authority with the jurisdiction to handle binational infrastructure, environmental and trade issues.
As any glance at a recent newspaper would confirm, Mexico is changing rapidly. Democracy flowered in Baja California when an opposition party won a governorship for the first time in Mexico in sixty years. In June, the new administration of President Carlos Salinas de Gortari announced regulations to allow up to 100 percent foreign investment in Mexico in areas such as tourism. Consequently, increased American interest and investment in Mexico is virtually certain.
Will it be followed by progress on long-intractable problems such as drug trafficking and illegal immigration? Not, economist Norris Clement warned, if the United States moves to an increasingly militarized border in response to those problems.
Every step San Diego and Tijuana take toward each other could be followed by two steps backward due to matters beyond their control. This year's controversy over the planned U.S. ditch to stop cars carrying drugs or undocumented immigrants is just one example of the binational squabbles that could interfere with rapprochement between San Diego and Tijuana.
And, after all, there is a border, la línea, that separates them. There are differences that can't be talked away. San Diego and Tijuana will never be just like El Paso, Texas and Juárez or the other border communitied, where the Mexican city dominates in size and the American city has more Hispanic flavor in its culture and power structure.
But a successful marriage doesn't require individuals to merge or become exactly alike, only to adapt to each other to minimize discord and conflcit. That will be San Diego and Tijuana's task in the next one hundred years.