William Langewiesche , The Border theatlantic.com , theatlantic.com
[ While looking for something else entirely, I stumbled on this other old article I remember well, on the US / Mexico bordr. Langewiesche is quite a writer, I'm going to have to do a complete survey sometime. Excerpt from Part Two: ]
FAR to the East, after hundreds of miles of virtual wilderness, the border once again becomes a place punctuated by urban desperation. This is the sweltering coastal plain known as the Lower Rio Grande Valley. On the Mexican side, life is dominated by the presence of large maquiladoras. Reynosa, which lies on the Rio Grande, is a flat industrial city of perhaps three hundred thousand people, about seventy miles from the Gulf of Mexico. To get there from Texas, you cross the Rio Grande, passing a mile of trucks waiting to clear Mexican customs. Colonia Roma is one of the districts where the maquila workers live. It sprawls across a swampy lowland beyond the Pemex refinery -- a large and desolate slum, strewn with trash, where vegetation does not survive. The shacks are made of scraps discarded from the factories. Children wear rags and go barefoot. Here and there a Coke sign is hammered to a wall, indicating a small grocery, a place perhaps with electric power. A paved road passes beside the neighborhood, on higher ground, and crawls with buses blowing smoke. During the shift changes at the maquiladoras, workers stream between the shacks and balance on planks across mud and sewage. The women dress in pressed skirts and blouses; they look like office workers from a better neighborhood in a better city. Many go into debt to achieve this effect. Life is expensive in Mexico, since inflation has outpaced wages. The average maquila worker in Reynosa has to work forty-five minutes for a quart of milk or a pound of chicken, two hours for a bottle of shampoo, three and a half hours for two boxes of cornflakes or a toddler's used sweater, twenty hours for sneakers, 125 hours for a double mattress.
Drainage in Colonia Roma is poor. The district flooded the week before I got there, and residents perched with their belongings on their beds while they waited for the water to subside. This seemed hardly noteworthy to the family I went to see. They lived in a single-room plywood house that was just about taken up by two iron beds pushed together. On subsequent visits I counted eight people there; I'm sure more called it home. The oldest was a toothless Indian grandmother who questioned me about my religious beliefs. I was cautious: she wanted to talk about God's grace and the afterlife. The youngest resident was a girl of perhaps five who seemed ill. I talked to a man in his twenties who had been working for three years at Zenith, which employs up to ten thousand workers in Reynosa. He was small, thin, and discouraged.
I asked, "How is the job?"
He answered, "Good." But his eyes were furtive.
"Good?"
"Little good. The problem is there is no money."
"And the union?"
"It can't protect us."
"How long will you stay?" I asked.
"I don't think about it."
The shack smelled of lard and garbage. Chairs hung from nails on the walls because there was no room for them on the floor. A pair of prized cowboy boots stood under one bed, by a stack of clothes. The kitchen consisted of a camp stove, a water jug, and an insulated box. There was a kerosene lantern, and a transistor radio. The buzzing of flies mixed with the shouts of children outside. Smoke from a refuse fire drifted by the open door. The yard was a mess of cinder-block rubble imbedded in mud.
Seen from a distance -- say, in a photograph -- such poverty evokes powerful feelings. Seen close up, however, it can seem unreal. It is bewildering that people whom you can touch, who share the same air with you, can be suffering in conditions so different from your own. I have experienced this before, in Africa, in the midst of starvation.
We carry our own world with us, and it is numbing. |
