Imperial (142 page)

What was it about this now-twice-told anecdote of the tampon parade which most offended me? I suppose that it was the violation of dignity. The massive drug testing in American workplaces angers me enough as it is; I see all too well the culture of bullying and cravenness that it leads to. Repeated pregnancy testing as a condition of continued employment is worse; the humiliations of the tampon parade remind me of the anal search to which functionaries of my government once treated me, simply because I was hitchhiking; that was more than twenty years ago now, and I will never forget it. As Emerson wrote,
could not a nation of friends even devise better ways?
To institutionalize such invasiveness with monthly replications would be an easy achievement of the reprehensible.

It really wasn’t my concern, because I live over here on Northside, where inexpensive Mexican-assembled products arrive by magic; but I did start wondering how bad it really was in the
maquiladoras. They are very closed,
said everybody, which increased my suspicions. One day Terrie and I breezed into a large feedlot in the Mexicali Valley and the office girl invited me to take any photos I yearned for; all that she asked was that I close whichever gates I opened, so that the stock didn’t get loose. A cowboy posed for me; I wandered into another office after closing time, and the man there, who never even asked my name, looked up all the statistics I wanted. On that same day, we had visited a glass factory where our welcome was decidedly different. We would need to apply in advance for authorization, said the man for whom the receptionist had rung. This application must be in writing, delivered by post; and the chances of its being accepted sounded equivalent to those of my being elected President of Mexico. The man was, moreover, inquisitive in that unpleasant fashion of FBI agents. He wanted identification, which for some reason I declined to show him. His clever little eyes never stopped trying to see through me. He was an exemplar of monotonous diligence. He showed no hurry to eject us from the factory; he was perfectly willing to undress our motives for as long as we liked. This must be how one guards trade secrets.

Whenever somebody with a badge tells me not to do something, my inclination is to do it, so I must thank the glass factory’s sentinel for encouraging me to peek into a few
maquiladoras,
with or without permission. Of course I’d respect their little trade secrets, excepting a certain ingredient called exploitation.

My high school friend Chuck is a private eye. I asked him how I should proceed. Since his line of work had more to do with trolling databases and standing outside subway stations with the odd suspect’s photo hidden in a newspaper, he referred me to his colleagues, Mr. W. and Mr. D.

THE SIXTEEN-HUNDRED-DOLLAR BUTTON

Mr. W.’s profession was to make bug sweeps as mandated for government contractors, to enter the field on surveillance missions, and to assemble covert packages for people such as myself. He was a helpful man who enjoyed his toys, and I ended up liking him. Nothing fancy, I said; accordingly, he recommended a certain “cigarette pack” digital video recorder which could store up to eight hours of video. That would relieve me of five or six hundred dollars. The only question was what to plug into it. There was the cell phone camera, of course, not to mention the pen camera and the button camera. I was receptive, so to speak, to the idea of the cell phone camera since Mexicali stripper-prostitutes had begun to carry those, which meant that some factory girls might, too (Capitalist Axiom Number 807: Call girls set the fashion), but it was bulky; worse yet, it needed to be accidentally-on-purpose laid down on a counter with the antenna pointing at its subject; it did not function in a breast-pocket. So that tool would be in imminent danger of confiscation. As for the pen camera, Mr. W. confessed that it looked flashy. It came in a matched set, in case someone wished to borrow the operative’s pen; two pens in one pocket, aside from creating a fifty-percent opportunity for disaster, would further endanger my agent by asserting an inappropriate class statement of abundance. How could it have been otherwise? The items on Mr. W.’s list, being expensive, were for use by the rich against the poor, or by the rich against each other, with the result that flashiness (I mean corporate elegance) was decidedly appropriate. But how could a
maquiladora
worker wear one of his products without attracting attention? Consider the brooch camera, at a price of twelve hundred dollars, and if I were interested in investigating the possible sexual exploitation of Mexican factory women, an issue which had so pervaded common knowledge or at least mythology that Tijuanos used to refer to female
maquiladora
workers as
maquilarañas,
literally factory spiders—“spider” is slang for a prostitute—a woman would be a good choice to film the groping of women, so at first I liked the idea of the brooch-camera, especially because, so Mr. W. now informed me, the process required not only a digital video receiver but also a power supply, which consisted of a four-pack or even an eight-pack of triple-A batteries, so why not find, as Mr. W. recommended, a big-breasted woman to stash all this hardware in her brooch? Sad to say, this item was less appropriate for assembly line workers than for diplomats’ wives. When finally I hinted that I might find myself in a blue-collar setting, Mr. W. recommended the jean jacket camera for my consideration, but how inconspicuous would that be on a hundred-and-fifteen-degree day in Mexicali? Besides, what if these
maquiladora
workers wore uniforms? What if factory conveyor belts made longsleeved garments dangerous? Back to the button camera. Incidentally, Mr. W. advised me that
the pen mike works real well,
but I now possessed enough complications without adding sound.

What if I didn’t like the button camera? For in this market-driven economy of ours, customer satisfaction is what we agonize over. What if
Playboy,
whose expense check would buy the button camera, regretted that I hadn’t bought a vibrator camera instead? Mr. W. and I were both in the same mercantile pickle; we needed to please. But what was not to like?—
It’s sweet,
said Mr. W. of this new item; he himself was about to purchase three of them for the office. It came with four matching buttons, which I was supposed to sew onto each garment for which the device was used. On the other hand, the baseball-cap camera required a gizmo-concealing hat clip, which in Mr. W.’s considered opinion looked
weird.
The eyeglasses-case camera was plain and effective; presumably the power supply could go inside it; but what if my spies eschewed glasses or breast-pockets? A similar argument told against the eyeglasses-strap camera. I forgot to tell you that both of these would have required my agent to gracefully wear a wire down the back of her neck. No price too high for beauty, my father used to say, shaking his head.—The cigarette-pack camera tempted me momentarily, but it turned out that it held no cigarettes, which exposed its operative to the same risks as the pen camera. The briefcase camera would definitely drop jaws on the assembly line; the wireless watch camera was out of stock. All right, so I would buy a button camera.

How would I rig it? An athletic bandage and foil would be my friends, instructed Mr. W., and I shouldn’t forget the safety pins. He reminded me: If she’s well endowed, fix it underneath the breast.

And what if
I
use it? I wanted to know.

The small of the back is okay for a man, but direct line of sight from receiver to transmitter is best for anything wirelesss, due to the water content of the human body. Of course since the button camera is wired, this won’t be a problem.

Can I move when the camera is on?

Your video should be stable if the camera is still or slow.

And how much time will the button camera give me?

One hour, said Mr. W.

Enough; I selected the button camera; I bought it; I became another of Mr. W.’s customers. Doubtless it had been assembled in some Chinese
maquiladora.

By the time everything was all over (and even then it wasn’t over), I’d spent sixteen hundred cool green dollars, and it took two more weeks and two hundred dollars more before I got the button camera to work. Ah, the fortunes of war! Now I could understand why the Pentagon sometimes paid six hundred dollars for a toilet seat.

THREE THOUSAND MORE

As for Mr. D., in Chuck’s words,
he infiltrates factories for a living.

I called him up; he was skiing or swimming or something.

Their security is horrible, he explained to me. What you do is you come up with a product you wanna produce. Then you tell their local Chamber of Commerce, and you go in.

He opined that there was worse exploitation in small Mexican industries than in the
maquiladoras,
especially since the latters’ facilities are newer.—
Maquiladoras
have created a base of power for Mexican women, he insisted, and I think he was right. He said: The real scandal is the murder of women in Ciudad Juárez.

He did remark that he’d heard a story about a Chinese plant in Tijuana which involved
women from China who were locked in, never let out except to work.
He couldn’t say whether this factory was still in operation; and indeed, nobody I met in Tijuana knew anything about this.—Here you have an example of Chinese labor being even cheaper than in Mexicali! he chuckled.

Seven or eight years ago he’d found
maquiladoras
sorting U.S. mail in Mexico.
All these girls out there
were photo-imaging misdelivered mail for corporations despite a federal order not to do it.
US postal workers were upset that their jobs were out-sourced down there;
but he thought that
the privacy concerns are overblown.
He was a real card, was Mr. D.

He’d also found Texas motor vehicle records being processed down in Juárez. So I figured that his offer to fly down to Tijuana for two days and three grand might provide me with the knowledge as to where exactly to focus my button camera. He promised me
four or five baddies.
He was a free spirit, too; I liked that about him. He enjoyed playing the guitar.

“YOU WILL NEED A GOOD PRETEXT TO GET IN”

And so at sunset I lay on my bed in a Tijuana hotel room which smelled like pipe smoke and body odor, reading Mr. D.’s report, which began:
We were assigned to conduct an investigation in order to locate maquiladoras in the Tijuana, Mexico region that were abusive to both people and nature.
The sky was paling and the one bare bulb, which illuminated a portion of the ceiling molding quite nicely, could no longer reach my bed, which, after all, was meant to be used for activities pertaining to darkness, so I let my gaze leave the pages of Mr. D.’s report, whose type and whose paper were now nearly the same shade, and I listened to the bells of the cathedral, whose twin towers and whose image of the Virgin of Guadalupe were almost identical with their counterparts on Avenida Reforma in Mexicali; and then I got the white plastic chair which was spattered with brown stains, moved it directly beneath the lightbulb, listened to drumbeats, traffic and barking dogs, then read a little farther into Mr. D.’s report.

Metales y Derivados,
read one heading.
This is a shut down battery manufacturing facility that was on four acres and is located in the Ciudad Industrial Nueva Tijuana, above the Ejido Chilpancingo, . . . which was once a fairly clean residential neighborhood . . .
[
and
]
is now a fetid, polluted barrio . . . Some estimate that up to 40% of the people in this plant have become ill from the pollution,
which would have cost seven million American dollars to clean up, so it stayed the way it was.
In February of 2004, a Mexican judge issued an arrest warrant for the owner of this plant, Jose Kahn, of the New Frontier Trading Co. He and his [son] both live in San Diego County,
and their addresses and telephone numbers followed.—You’ll love this! Mr. D. had instructed me regarding the latter information.

So that sounded promising.

Then a page later, under the heading
Plants With Bad Reputations,
I was first informed of the existence of Óptica Sola, a
maquiladora
which
manufactures all kinds of lenses and is on a pollution watch list (we will check them out further to see if they sell to Lenscrafters or other huge U.S. chains). The production line is predominantly women and the floor and ground below are reportedly contaminated. You will need a good pretext to get in, and as we didn’t have anything ready, we were unsuccessful.

What might it mean to be a
Plant With a Bad Reputation
? Dear reader, would
you
like to have one? I am sure that I would not, even if I had earned it. And Óptica Sola is, let’s assume, an adorable company.

Please consider
Plants With Bad Reputations
to be a phrase with entirely less validity than the initial complaint which lures a grand jury into a secret investigation. But since my self-assigned duties demanded that I investigate a few
maquiladoras,
why not report on Óptica Sola?

According to the Secretaría de Medio Ambiente y Recursos Naturales, which is to say the environmental agency of Mexico, Plants I, II and III of a certain Óptica Sola emit contaminants, but this is no evidence of wrongdoing; why, my old high school chemistry textbook insists that a locality’s degree of sulphuric acid use is an index of its level of civilization!

A certain “former head” of the Secretaría de Protección al Ambiente Del Estado who now worked in Mexicali and agreed to be interviewed by another private eye on my payroll, a Mr. Adam Raskin (it cost me an extra eight thousand dollars to hire him and his colleagues, but I want you to admire me),
was willing
(runs Mr. Raskin’s report)
to make “informal” comments regarding our subject companies, as best as he could recall, from when he was at the state agency . . . Regarding ÓPTICA SOLA,
the “former head”
remembered that there “are files . . . had some problems.” Óptica Sola participated in a state program of “autoregulacion [self regulation],” but [he] did not expound on that further.
No, I don’t think I would assign Óptica Sola a
Bad Reputation
based on
some problems.