THE RIGHT TO STAY HOME How NACLA Reports Analyzed the Connection
By David Bacon
NACLA Report on the Americas
When it rains on downtown San Diego or its middle-class suburbs, the asphalt streets get shiny. The runoff is swiftly channeled down the storm drains, and spills out into the Pacific. On the hills of Tijuana, just a few miles south, rain creates a particularly sticky kind of mud called “barra.” Cars traveling down all the little dirt streets, where a million Tijuanecos live, are immobilized. If they start to move down a hill at all, even at a snail’s pace, they lose traction in the mud and slowly slide into another car, or a wall, or just a hole in the road. And there they sit until everything dries out again. In this border city, the factories are like lords of the earth. They occupy the high points, the tops of the mesas, while the neighborhoods of the workers spread down the slopes into the valley below. When it rains, the tens of thousands of workers who pour into the maquiladoras every day begin their trip to work with a long trek through the mud to the nearest paved road for a bus, or an even longer walk all the way to the factory. Most workers don’t have cars anyway. The difference between the one side of the border and the other is the difference between poverty and wealth. That differential inspired a building boom along the border, where 10 factories opened their doors each week during the first three months of the NAFTA era. Tijuana is the dark side of the Southern California economy, where much of the region’s industrial workforce lives on the south side of the border - the workers of the maquiladoras. Most mainstream coverage of Mexico focuses on the drug wars and the way the politics of the border play out in the U.S. The border is important, to be sure, but while the “hardening of the border” has an impact on people, the border region is a lot more complex. It is an arena of many social movements and struggles - maquila organizing, farm worker strikes, popular movements in border barrios, movements like the Frente Indigena de Organizaciones Binacionales. The border is more than a line people cross. For the past quarter century NACLA Reports has published over a dozen articles examining displacement, migration, labor and the criminalization of migrants. They all add to a framework that sees this as a system, not just a set of policies. And they ask a question - “Who gains and who pays?” - that uncovers the rules of this system. To gain justice and human rights for migrants and working people those rules have to be changed. Economic crises provoked by NAFTA and other economic reforms are uprooting and displacing Mexicans in the country’s most remote areas. While California farmworkers 20 and 30 years ago came from parts of Mexico with larger Spanish-speaking populations, migrants today increasingly come from indigenous communities in states like Oaxaca, Chiapas, and Guerrero. Domínguez says there are about 500,000 indigenous people from Oaxaca living in the United States, 300,000 in California alone. Meanwhile, a rising tide of anti-immigrant sentiment has demonized those migrants, leading to measures to deny them jobs, rights, or any pretense of equality with people living in the communities around them. Solutions to these dilemmas—from adopting rational and humane immigration policies to reducing the fear and hostility toward migrants—must begin with an examination of the way U.S. policies have both produced migration and criminalized migrants. The root problem with migration in the global economy is that it’s forced migration. A coalition for reform should fight for the right of people to choose when and how to migrate, including the derecho de no migrar—the right not to migrate, given viable alternatives. Corporations and those who benefit from current priorities might not support a more pro-migrant alternative, but millions of people would. Whether they live in Mexico or the United States, working people need the same things—secure jobs at a living wage, rights in their workplaces and communities, and the freedom to travel and seek a future for their families.
When it rains on downtown San Diego or its middle-class suburbs, the asphalt streets get shiny. The runoff is swiftly channeled down the storm drains, and spills out into the Pacific. On the hills of Tijuana, just a few miles south, rain creates a particularly sticky kind of mud called “barra.” Cars traveling down all the little dirt streets, where a million Tijuanecos live, are immobilized. If they start to move down a hill at all, even at a snail’s pace, they lose traction in the mud and slowly slide into another car, or a wall, or just a hole in the road. And there they sit until everything dries out again.
Economic crises provoked by NAFTA and other economic reforms are uprooting and displacing Mexicans in the country’s most remote areas. While California farmworkers 20 and 30 years ago came from parts of Mexico with larger Spanish-speaking populations, migrants today increasingly come from indigenous communities in states like Oaxaca, Chiapas, and Guerrero. Domínguez says there are about 500,000 indigenous people from Oaxaca living in the United States, 300,000 in California alone.