The Mike Allen Question

From the Moment she started at Planta Maytag III in December 2004, Laura Flora’s financial circumstances turned bleak. She had earned much more during her peripatetic travels through tobacco fields and orange groves in the United States. In fact, Veracruzanos could sometimes earn an even better wage harvesting limes or picking chiles back in their rural villages than they did at the border. Flora felt demeaned by the low wages Maytag paid and found the work tedious and the factory culture oppressive and demoralizing. Yet she stayed. As a single mother, Flora lived on the razor’s edge of survival, but she had something her friends back in Tierra Blanca did not: steady work. Back in Veracruz, work ebbed and flowed with the weather, the seasons, and the rhythms of rural life. At the border, work was unrelenting, driven by the demands of global competition, time-discipline, and the ravenous consumer market to the north. It was the sheer volume of available jobs for unskilled workers—and the promise of overtime—that lured people like Flora to Reynosa. Based on income figures in 2004, about 50 million people in her country, 47 percent of the population, lived in poverty. With overtime Flora could cross the poverty threshold to move into the nonpoor half. The border was also where Flora, who turned 41 the week she began at Maytag, thought she could be a better parent. She had failed to sneak her three young girls into the United States in September, and now they were stuck in a place where they knew no one. But at least they would be together, unlike when Flora was in the United States with her two older children. And here in modernizing Reynosa, her daughters—if not herself—had a much better chance at getting ahead than they had had in Veracruz. “The education is better here, a lot better,” Flora reflected over a glass of sweet lemonade on a hot July afternoon in 2007. Her boyfriend, Arturo Mireles Guzman, agreed. The girls needed a technical profession, in his view.