Irasema Coronado

Introduction: Toward Social Justice at the U.S.-Mexico Border

Many eyes now focus on the U.S.-Mexico Border, once a frontier conceptualized as being at the margins of national political life. The U.S. Southwest, formerly a part of northern Mexico, is a place of much movement: people cross back and forth to shop, visit, and work; goods move under a new trade regime, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), that went into effect on January 1, 1994; pollution and contamination enter air and water with no respect for national boundaries. Movies like the Academy-Award winning Traffic sear the imaginations of both Mexican and U.S. (“American”) nationals with the greed, corruption, and sickness of post-modern societies.

Whither the Environmental Nongovernmental Organizations on Multiple Regions of the US–Mexico Border?

Abstract The purpose of this paper is to analyze what has happened to the US–Mexico border regions environmental nongovernmental organization (ENGO) sector and to understand how it fared over time by interviewing leaders of these groups in multiple regions on the border. ENGOs gained saliency and momentum during the NAFTA negotiations and were able to address environmental problems on the border. Almost 20 years later, some ENGOs no longer exist due to funding, structural and leadership challenges. However, as this research indicates, committed people still provide environmental leadership on the multiple sites along the border, not necessarily through ENGOs, but in other capacities.

Migration and Discrimination: Contradictory Discourses Regarding Repatriations in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, Mexico

This chapter focuses on the deportation process of people of Mexican origin that have resided in the United States for years. American immigration policy conflates undocumented migrant workers with criminal aliens, thereby using blunt force of American immigration policy. The chapter details the human rights crises of American immigration deportation policy. Case studies illuminate the problem from an individual perspective that renders individuals as “stateless” persons in Mexico’s northern border cities.

Conclusions: Toward Social Justice in the North American Community

This activist, after decades of devoting his life to organizing at the northern Mexico border, is getting impatient with outsiders. An activist in the southwestern United States could echo the same dismay. We are pleased that readers had the motivation and patience to reach this point in our book. However, we worry about the many outsiders who have no interest in knowing the border and are impatient about understanding it.

Human Rights and Human Wrongs

The vision of social justice is best put into practice among those with an ideological commitment that frames their work. We see all too few activists of this kind, both on global and local bases. Rather we see people impelled to organize across borders for material reasons; the most prominent among them are business people. Union support is typically driven with this kind of thinking as well, although we saw in the last chapter that the cross-border activists and even labor day celebrants infuse their rituals and events with religious symbolism and meanings. Material incentives also impel those who organize around poverty, whether it is impoverished participants who need resources or, alas, the “poverty pimps” who use circumstances to raise funds for their nonprofit organizations. Recall from chapter two, the three incentives that drive organizers to organize: material, purposive, and solidary. The latter, solidary, is a reminder of the personal element that motivates people to join organizations and to sustain their involvement.

Institutional Shrouds: National Sovereignty and Environmental NGOs

The bad blood and distrust that President Fox mentions are indeed obstacles to cross-border cooperation. In border communities, where there is interaction every day of the week, the words of Vicente Fox resonate differently to borderlanders, who in many instances have deep-rooted trusting (and untrusting) relationships with people on the other side of the border. Unlike people at the respective centers of power who deal with bilateral issues from a distance, border people are actively engaged in the binational arena in all aspects of daily life, whether it is for good or bad. Examples of trusting and non-trusting relationships abound on the border. For example, maids from Ciudad Juarez who cross to clean houses and take care of young children or others’ elderly parents and enter people’s homes and lives obviously have trusting relationships with those who employ them. There are people in El Paso who avoid going to Ciudad Juarez because they are afraid of crime and distrustful of authorities. There are El Pasoans who, despite the fact that they were born in Ciudad Juarez, now report that they “haven’t been there in years.” Some El Pasoans report going to doctors in Ciudad Juarez “porque le tengo mas confianza a los doctores” (I trust the doctors more). Cultural affinities and the ability to speak to someone who speaks your language are important factors for deepening trust and understanding.

Collaboration at Borders: The Two Faces of Personalism

Personalism is alive and well in the business, public, and nonprofit worlds of Mexico and the United States. The timing and cues in both places may be different, and people who are open and sensitive to these alternatives do communicate successfully. The graduate-trained cross-border accountant who shared his insights with us is the quintessential borderlander. His family is from central Mexico, but he was born in El Paso, the family returned to Mexico for a few years, and then returned to El Paso. He describes himself as Americanized, and his peers Anglicized his first name, but he is a fluent speaker of both Spanish and English. Now his business cards list his Spanish first name. His perceptions of personal relationships and their timing in Mexico are widely shared at the border, although many “Americans” seem to mute attention to personal issues in the United States. Personal relationships are relevant to collaboration in the civic, business and public worlds of both countries and especially at the border, as framed and detailed further in this chapter.

Political Institutions, NGOs, and Accountability in the Borderlands

Mexico’s labor laws offer generous benefits for pregnancy and maternity leave for those in the formal economy. Women are to receive paid leave for 12 weeks, and half of their salary for another 60 days within the first year after birth. Yet maquikdoras routinely screen for pregnancy. Under a new institution created through NAFTA, the secretary of the U.S. National Administrative Office (NAO), Irasema Garza, consulted with her Mexican counterpart and hearings about a formal complaint were held at the border, from which the epigraph above was taken. Mexico did not send representatives. A 1998 NAO report indicated that Mexico violated its own laws and the International Labour Organization Convention 111.1 In Ciudad Juarez, year 2001, after the U.S. economic downturn led to layoffs in the maquilas, the word on the streets was that the first to be downsized are the women with swelling bellies.

Cross-Border Trade: An Institutional Model for Labor Unions and NGOs?

In chapter five, we examine business, commerce, and labor at the border. Here too, we find official machinery and institutions that facilitate business and commercial flows. Large-scale capital investments and the possibility of expanded market niches and profits facilitate this movement. The same cannot be said for labor and labor unions, mostly steeped in national rather than cross-national solidarities. Competition also underlies these relationships, both among business and labor.