Imperial (144 page)

And I remember the two shy girls I interviewed during their lunch half-hour in front of Óptica Sola, not the main Óptica Sola on Insurgentes which Mr. D. had fingered for me and failed to enter, but a smaller, dirtier plant, more piquant with solvent-perfume, which stood upon the Otay Mesa, in the Nuevo Tijuana Industrial Park. The address was perfect: just off Industrial Avenue.

It’s good work, they informed me, and the best thing is the ambience inside. It’s very clean and it’s air-conditioned.

One girl, the twenty-year-old, had been there for two and a half years; she made ninety-nine pesos a day. Her companion, who had just reached the four-month mark and was a year older, got seventy-four pesos. So both of them were comparatively well off, the daily minimum wage in Tijuana being forty-two pesos, a wage which in a local reporter’s words
can’t sustain life.

I might mention that I had begun my engagement with this branch of Óptica Sola on my very best behavior, approaching the windowed booth at the gate whose security guard in his green uniform and sunglasses explained that I would need to get authorization and that unfortunately the sole person or agency who could authorize me (he actually made a phone call) was absent, he couldn’t predict for how long; it might be awhile, perhaps as soon as the end of the next Ice Age; he was trying to let me down easy. All the while he kept peering and scrutinizing. Now, as I interviewed the two laughingly reluctant girls (I never could have done it without Terrie, who had to wheedle them until she was nearly exhausted; I also had to pay them), we stood in such a way as to interpose the Óptica Sola shuttlebus between us and the gate, but the girls were getting nervous because the security guard had left his post to come peering and peering around the windshield of the bus; and, by the way, oh, what a smell! It was not an unpleasant smell, really. It took me back to my boyhood when I used to build model rockets in the basement, dabbing airplane glue onto this or that plastic part; I used to get flushed and my heart would race; I loved that smell in those days.

I asked them if there might be any smell inside the factory and they said they didn’t know. Then they said no, there wasn’t. Then they said that anyhow all factories had that smell.

Is anyone affected by the chemicals?

It depends on which area people work in. But they’re very careful with people’s security, said the longtime girl piously.

What do you think about that lead plant down the street?

The lead plant was, of course, Metales y Derivados, the one which Mr. D. had flagged for me in his three-thousand-dollar report. It lay in sight.

It has to be bad, they replied, since it smells.

And then the security guard craned his snakelike neck farther around the corner of the bus so that his head became a planetoid with twin sunglasses-lens-craters which I did not want to fall into, and I worried even more about those two girls getting dragged down by the gravitational attraction of that malignantly watchful head, so I ended the interview with my customary question:

Are
maquiladoras
good or bad for Mexicans?

For work they’re good, because we need work.

Translation:
Here there’s life.

THE BLACK COUGH

Although that pair almost certainly praised
maquiladoras
because the security guard’s presence compelled them to do so, the old man in the cowboy hat who’d sat beneath his shade tree in Colonia Azteca asserted his opinions under no such constraint; and I myself decline to condemn
maquiladoras
as a category. A dapper reporter with a Tijuana paper (he was the one who said that the minimum daily wage couldn’t sustain life) was sure that the climate of Baja California rendered
maquiladora
work superior to picking squash or watermelons out in the
campo,
and I’d certainly prefer to work in an air-conditioned office on a hundred-and-eighteen-degree day. Moreover,
maquiladora
wages generally exceeded pay for field work. A legal assessor for a federation of labor unions said to me: Sometimes you can make a little more money working in the
campo
than in the
maquiladoras,
especially with green onions. If the whole family goes and works, they can earn three or four hundred pesos a day. But they only work three or four days a week, and they earn no benefits.

Therefore, exploitation in the
campo
may be worse than exploitation in the
maquiladora.

I remember a long hot Sunday drive through the eastern farmlands of Mexicali Valley to Ejido Tabasco to inspect a certain barracks for campesinos whose boss, a Mexican like them, had
treated them like slaves.
Those were the words of my guide, the anthropologist-historian Yolanda Sánchez Ogás. Journalists had exposed the conditions here just a day or two ago, Yolanda said; evidently the foreman had fled with his workforce. The barracks, freshly deserted, seemed a ghastly enough place; I particularly remember a vista down a corridor which was open to the sun through a random series of rectangular holes whose anti-shadows in the hot darkness were unbearable to look at; and on either side (grimy plaster on the right, dirty brick on the left), sweltering windowless cells gaped through doorless doorways, the whole as bereft of any convenience or comfort as some ruined clay-city in the ancient Near East; in one cell there huddled expired votive candles for the Virgin of Guadalupe. The cooking facilities were feculent, as was the toilet. The grimly ugly
hardness
of the site was consonant with some atrocity. And yet who am I to say? I had only Yolanda’s word that something evil happened here. Had I come a week ago, I might have seen children playing, or shared a jovial meal with the campesinos, in which case I would have doubtless thought: Here there’s life.

Next door to this place stood the house of the newlyweds Elvira Alemán and Marco González. In my view-camera photograph, she stands with her lovely hands resting on him, one cupping his neck, the other on his breast, and she presses herself against him as he sits for me by the metal door, the doorknob level with her hand. They are young and beautiful together; in their faces as they gaze at me is a consciousness of each other, patient and in my uninformed opinion extremely loving. He looks a trifle weary of this last afternoon before he must return to work; and in the young wife’s delicate face there is something tenderly protective; although she stands behind him, she is his sentry. What does this portrait say about
maquiladoras
? Only that if life were terrible for them, they’d already look beaten down. Señor González worked in a
maquiladora
in Mexicali making lamps, earning lower wages than the Cucapah woman who’d told the tale of the bloody tampons. His bus ride to work lasted sometimes three hours each way, sometimes four. Yolanda, who was anticapitalist and therefore rather anti-American, thought him very stupid to be exploited in this way, but he seemed quite happy with his situation. The more determinedly he asserted his happiness against her pointed remarks, the more annoyed she became. But in truth he did seem better off than those campesinos must have been in the barracks next door; he had space, a house with windows, a nice wide view of Mexicali sunlight. (What did he think about that barracks? He’d never paid any attention, he said; he knew nothing about the lives of the people who’d lived there.)

Southwest of there and a year later, in the immense Valle de Pedregal development, dirt-colored houses in the dirt formed subdevelopments: Cases Exe, Cuesa Muestra
²⁷⁰
and God knows what else in the good old Pedregal Esmerelda, which might itself have been a sub- or superdevelopment; the storekeeper I asked neither knew nor cared. Almost everybody worked in
maquiladoras.
This cubescape went on as far as I could see, and it brought to life something that the dapper reporter in Tijuana had said: You have many
maquiladora
industries that have a lot of vacancies. They
want
people! Tijuana grows by about a hundred thousand people per year.
²⁷¹
It’s been that way for at least five years. The
maquiladoras
are good for many people because it’s sure work. They come here having nothing at all and the first job they have is a
maquiladora
job. When they enter a
maquiladora,
they have all the social securities that Mexican law permits. First the man comes from a southern state. When he finds a job, he brings with him his family, and the population grows—with one salary. They come to a little wooden house, and they have to rent, without water, without light.

Pedregal was better than those
colonias
in the hills of Tijuana. Here people frequently owned their houses, which were more often than not made of respectable cinderblock; here I saw evidence of electricity, and some of the windows even framed little air conditioners.

Here came a young couple, obviously in a hurry to get to bed for their Sunday afternoon tumble, but they were nice enough to give me a moment; the man, who was older, stood on the wide dirt street with his arm around the shoulders of his dark pretty girl, who made remote controls in the Korema
maquiladora;
I never found any such place but anyhow that was how she spelled it. Her task was to
pack the finished things,
she said. It had been two months now since she’d started there; she wanted to stay.

Would it be good work for all your life?

Yes.

Why do some people work in
maquiladoras
and some become campesinos? Which do you prefer?

She gave me the classic Mexicali answer: The
maquiladora
is more tranquil.

Tranquillity was what they prized in Mexicali. Year after year, that was the word of praise and aspiration I most often heard there. (I rarely heard it in Tijuana.)

And on another dirt street in Pedregal, a man who was lacking teeth conveyed an impression of immense happiness; his own cinderblock house-cube cost a hundred and fifty thousand pesos, which he was now paying off in trifling installments; he worked the night shift in a
maquiladora;
during the day he worked on his house.

His job consisted of placing computer cabinets into a paint-sprayer machine—black paint, obviously, for the man was black around his fingernails, black in his nose; sometimes he even coughed black, he said. He had worked at the
maquiladora
two months and thought it a very good job; he had no fear that he would ever get sick.

“BECAUSE SONY OWNED EVERYTHING”

For all I knew he really
did
have a good job. If I could only see that he did, I’d gladly give his
maquiladora
a testimonial. If I could only get authorization!

Well, if the
maquiladoras
had had their way, I would never have seen the inside of a single one. Oh, yes; I tried Kimberly-Clark of Mexico, Maquiladora Waste Recovery de Tijuana-Tecate (eternally busy recovering waste, evidently), Kraft Foods of Mexico (no answer), Puntomex Internacional-Maquiladora, whose first and third listed numbers were wrong and whose second number never answered, Ace Industries, which also never answered, Amcor de Mexico, always busy, Automobile Softgoods Manufacturing, an unusual case because someone actually replied; this gentleman, whose name was Rodolfo Gonzales, explained that any visit would be out of the question without press accreditation, so we offered to show him ours the instant we met him, but that wasn’t good enough; we had to fax it, which we did, but the number was wrong, so we telephoned him again from the stationery store because he was about to go home for the weekend; he instructed us to fax it to San Diego, which might easily have delayed the resolution by a week; finally he relented and we faxed it to a very special number which I will gladly reveal to you: 622-4290; but now, when the afore-mentioned Rodolfo Gonzales, representative of Automobile Softgoods Manufacturing, discovered that the sponsor of this adventure was
Playboy
magazine, he announced that any meeting, visit or rendezvous with us (no matter that Terrie was an excellent Mormon girl) could hold no conceivable interest for Automobile Softgoods Manufacturing. Fortunately, there was still Foam Fabrication Mexico to call, even though they didn’t answer, neither at 627-2376 nor even at 627-2188; as for Fashion Clothing, its functionary referred us to the pleasure of Señor William Chow, who coincidentally proved unavailable.

If I were a racist, I’d shout: Those lazy Mexicans! If I were a bureaucrat, I’d conclude: I need to upgrade my contact information. If I were a leftist troublemaker, I’d say: It’s a conspiracy!—Well, who am I? Why do I tend to conflate these blind alleys and refusals with the sharpnosed peering of security guards? If there was a signature experience in this regard, it occurred on the day that Terrie’s car, whose underside was at that time nearly virginal with respect to the depredations exacted upon it by Tijuana’s so-called speed bumps, was creeping through and adding to traffic on that hot and polluted day; we sought a certain Parque Industrial where Metales y Derivados was supposed to be; and some moments after passing an archway’d wall in the dirt, with dirt inside it, we turned up into Colonia El Lago, continuing upward in the direction of Matamoros, and then at the summit, like fortresses lording it over that smog-greyed valley of grey walls, American fast food restaurants, and here and there, unseen from our eyrie but well remembered, a private security agency upstairs from a stationery store or a restaurant, not to mention the highly visible long wide ugly roofs of manufacturing plants, the heat and dust, the white shinings of walls and dull grey shimmerings of roofs—oh, down there it was grey more than white—stood the
white, white maquiladoras
! Sony in particular was radiantly what it was, in opposition to all that grubby indistinctness below. I remember that my late President Reagan used to speak fondly of America as
a city on a hill;
this must have been exactly what it looked like. How landscaped and grand it was! Never mind the family clinic; there was green grass! I swear to you that I was thinking of the happy, pretty girl who worked at Korema, not of the man with the black cough, when two young women wearing company badges emerged from the company gate and set foot on that beautifully paved street. I murmured to dear Terrie, who, as usual, put them instantly at ease; and with smiles they agreed to be photographed; but just as I raised the camera to my eye, a security guard rushed out to proclaim that taking photographs was prohibited
everywhere,
even across the street in that littered vacant lot, because in his words,
Sony owned everything.
Exasperated, I apologized to the two ladies, who proceeded pensively on their way, but Cerberus wasn’t finished with me; he demanded my identification, which I strangely refused to give him. In retrospect, I suppose he was only being kind; he didn’t want to expose me to any uneasy doubts about the truth of that verity
here there’s life.