Maquiladora Production, Rising Expectations, and Alterglobalization Strategy

Abstract

Hailed by advocates as engines of job growth, the export factories in Mexico’s maquiladora zone often spur severe criticism in activist circles for worker exploitation and abuses. Yet how do workers themselves perceive their wages and working conditions? In this essay I draw from several years of cross-border advocacy and 130 interviews with maquiladora workers in Reynosa and Juarez, Mexico to describe workers’ perceptions. I demonstrate that workers’ views are dynamic and ambivalent, bound up with their migratory histories and cross-border reference groups. Specifically, workers tend to express contentment with their working conditions, while sharply condemning their wages. Next, I consider the implications of the growing ‘cross-border justice movement’ along the Mexico-US border. I argue that a deepening of transnational advocacy networks holds the most strategic promise as a ‘counterhegemonic’, progressive politics.