Hojas, Blackberries, and the Tortilla King

On a Blistering morning in July 2007, four middle-aged men, already quite drunk, stood shaded under the eaves of a long, white stucco building. The building, which was derelict, sat in the middle of Agua Dulce in semitropical northern Veracruz. Our guide, Orlinda Garcia, asked the four men where we could find an hoja (husk) processing plant. Mayor Javier Gonzalez and Treasurer José Cruz stood with us as well. Gonzalez’s sky-blue municipal office was just a few hundred feet away, on the other side of the vacant town plaza. The adjacent plaza was littered with rusty rides and empty prize booths from a traveling summer carnival that had recently ended. “This is it!” a man in a Pittsburgh Pirates cap shouted. He pointed to a concealed entrance. Part of the wavy clay tile roof was missing and had been replaced with corrugated metal sheets. Plastic bags and bottles specked the ground outside. A slick, red PRI campaign banner hung on an electric pole next to the building with a candidate’s portrait. “Fiel a ti” (Loyal to you), the banner read. The plain building stretched alongside a wide, bumpy road—deserted except for a few chickens. It did not look like the site of a profitable foreign-trade operation. A young encargada (supervisor) named Marisol greeted us from behind a black metal gate. We asked her if we could see inside the facility. “The patron is not here,” she said. “I cannot let you in.” She was apologetic but firm. In a pink blouse, capri pants, and faux gem-studded flip-flops, she appeared to be dressed more for a Saturday of shopping in Monterrey than managing an export business in this half-ghost town in far-flung Veracruz. “The boss is very particular, and he doesn’t allow people from the outside to see the operation.” Another neatly dressed young woman looked at us while she embroidered some clothing in a chair behind Marisol. She sat next to a pile of plastic bags swollen with corn husks (called hojas or totomoxtle).

“The End is HERE”

On the Last day there would be a potluck and a drawing for some free appliances and $100 in cash. It was clear, though, that those still around in September 2004 could hardly wait for this drawn-out shuttering finally to be over. Crews were taking down the lighting, removing tables and cabinets, and gathering screws and air gun bits to toss in the garbage. “I don’t know if they are going to start with fresh tools down there in Reynosa or what the deal is,” Tracy Warner said. The crews also asked workers to remove photographs and newspaper clippings from their workstations. “They are dismantling it all around us, like they can’t wait for us to get out of there.” The lawn outside, usually covered in pop cans, plastic wrappers, and cigarette butts, was cleaned up and sprayed green by Chem Lawn. Management was trying to sell the old place. Warner’s imminent layoff was part of a sea-change in Illinois in the first years of the new millennium. The pace of the hollowing out of manufacturing in the fourth-largest manufacturing state in the country had been unprecedented. From June 2000 to November 2003, Illinois lost more than 100 manufacturing jobs a day, or one out of every six. Gone were over 150,000 jobs in a state of 12,500,000. In Rockford, the machine-tool industry wilted, and unemployment spiked at over 11 percent. In Harvard, located near the Wisconsin border, Motorola closed its cellphone plant. Developers wanted to turn the site into the world’s largest indoor water park. In Peoria, Decatur, and Kankakee, laid-off workers applied for jobs at Walmarts and Home Depots that would pay them maybe half their former wage. In suburban Chicago, Winzeler Gear went from making 2 million gears a month with fifty-five workers to making 16 million a month with thirty-five employees. A robot the size of a minivan increased the factory’s output while also eliminating human labor. Even with the productivity boost, the owner doubted the company would be able to stay competitive.

“Sin Maíz, No Hay País”

After Three Years of living in the shadows of the United States, Laura Flora Oliveros returned to Mexico in 2004 to reunite with her daughters and her parents in Tierra Blanca, Veracruz. Erika, her youngest, had just turned five and was now strong enough, Flora hoped, to make the arduous border crossing. If everything worked as planned, Flora’s entire family—four generations of them—would be together in central Florida in a couple of weeks. On her second voyage north, Flora’s intuition told her that something was not right. Flora was attuned to the news of rapes and disappearances of hundreds of female migrants and maquila workers at the border, which a United Nations mission had been investigating. Her three daughters dismissed her concerns and begged her to go through with it. Just before the dusk river crossing, and over the girls’ protests, Flora abandoned the trip, forfeiting, for the second time in three years, all her savings to a coyote. “I felt awful about not making the crossing, but I had a foreboding thought. It frustrated all of my plans. My daughters didn’t sense the danger. They were happy, saying ‘Let’s go, Mom! Let’s go!’ ” Right or not, her decision left Flora, her three girls, and her parents penniless, 1,300 miles from her older children in Florida, José and Deysy, and a new grandchild she had yet to hold. They each had a change of clothing and nothing else, stuck at the border with hundreds of thousands of other migrants, who came mostly from Veracruz. Reynosa had become one of the world’s premier meeting places for southern labor and northern capital, the archetypical neoliberal city. And yet nobody outside of the booming city itself seemed to know about it aside from the Veracruzanos who flowed into its slums. In the decade after the 1994 free trade agreement, rural Mexicans headed north in unprecedented numbers. Much of it was internal to Mexico. The channel from Veracruz to Tamaulipas—Reynosa being the main destination—became the busiest internal pathway in the country.

Unrest in the Magic Valley

One Evening in May 1967, in the parched border city of Mission, Texas, Ed Krueger had worked into the early evening on a painting and was late to the demonstration at the railroad crossing. He arrived there at 8:45 p.m. with his wife, Tina; his 18-year-old son, David; and Doug Adair, a young journalist writing for the magazine El Malcriado: The Voice of the Farm Worker. Just a few union members and bystanders were at the crossing when they arrived. Krueger, 36, a lanky and clean-cut minister, had been working with Local 2 of the United Farm Workers Organizing Committee (UFW) and had expected to see thirty or forty striking farmworkers and activists protesting the “scab melons” passing by on the next train. But they weren’t there, and Krueger was worried. They parked 75 feet south of the railroad crossing, on the west side of Conway Street. Krueger and his wife grabbed some hamburgers and sodas and leaned on their bumper to eat with their son. Adair went to talk to a reporter on the north side of the crossing. Joining Krueger was Magdaleno Dimas, an itinerant 29-year-old farmworker. A Mexico-born U.S. citizen, Dimas had a dragon tattoo on his right arm, a rose on his left, and an edgy zeal for the strike. They were waiting for a freight train carrying tens of thousands of recently harvested cantaloupes and honeydews loaded into thirty or so refrigerated cars. The melons had just been cut at La Casita ranch in Rio Grande City, thirty miles west of Mission. After a switch down-valley in Harlingen, the ranch’s melons would head north to San Antonio. La Casita, owned by a California company, operated nearly year round and employed 300 to 500 laborers on 2,700 acres of melons, peppers, carrots, cabbage, celery, and lettuce. The southern boundary of its well-ordered fruit and vegetable fields was the snaking Rio Grande River. All that separated La Casita from Mexico was a short swim across the slow-moving, greenish river that irrigated its fields.

Treading Water in the Great Recession

In April 2010 George Carney found himself stacking and banding wooden boards to be made into roof and barn trusses. His new workplace was Roberts and Dybdahl, a lumberyard in Milan, Illinois. Carney was paired with a partner, an automated cutting machine with five enormous shark-toothed saw blades that bit loudly into lumber and dropped boards onto the tray below. Now 51, Carney was using his body to earn a living again, even if the job paid only $9 an hour, a shade above the Illinois minimum. The first week he put in 60 hours. “It was a hard job. It was perfect for me.” On April 29, his ninth day on the job, Carney’s life changed forever, again. Two days after an unremarkable Occupational Safety and Health Administration inspection, a two-by-six shot out of the saws like “a ball out of pitching machine.” Its long side smacked right into Carney’s skull, and in an instant his world went dark. In the previous year Carney had been bartending while he lived in his son’s extra bedroom in Matherville, Illinois. He served “fancy, high falutin” drinks at the Oak View Country Club starting in late May 2009, after being unemployed for a couple of months. Members liked Carney because he would remember their names and favorite drink. The “whisky-beer man” learned to make cosmopolitans, martinis, manhattans, and other country club mixes. “I always told myself I was shy, but everyone tells me I’m not. I feel uncomfortable with it, but I seem to be fairly sociable.” In August he added a day job at Milan Lanes, a bowling alley and bar, and was working almost every day. Still, it was a “pretty low point” to be a working-age man living in his son’s extra room. It was a role-reversal that neither of them relished. “You don’t feel like you got anything,” Carney said of the year after leaving the Town Tavern. Then Carney’s father succumbed to cancer in March 2010.

Getting Back to Work in the ’Burg

Tracy Warner Began to worry after she got a rejection letter from Pizza Hut a few weeks after graduating from Western. She hadn’t heard on some manager-level jobs at the Carl Sandburg Mall, but she expected at least some positive responses from the entry-level ones. “We wish you luck in finding a job worthy of your skills,” read the Pizza Hut letter. “What’s that?” Warner said, exasperated. “Either my skills suck, or I have too many skills. Which is it? ’Cause I’m kind of curious! It’s flattering to be overqualified but it doesn’t pay the bills.” Warner hadn’t expected a dream job to suddenly appear, but she had hoped for more than a quiet phone and a growing pile of rejection letters. She just needed something, anything, to get by. Several months into 2007, the newly minted and distinguished WIU graduate was still unemployed and uninsured. Although sworn off factory life, a desperate Warner applied to Farmland Foods. When Maytag shuttered in 2004, Farmland, a massive, loud, hog disassembly operation, became the largest employer in this part of western Illinois. With about 1,200 to 1,400 cutters and slicers and a $60 million payroll, the slaughterhouse employed a couple hundred more than BNSF, the largest employer in Galesburg. Like Mike Smith, Warner was just looking for a wage, any wage, with a “1” in front of it, and Farmland, on Monmouth’s northern edge, was close. It was so close, in fact, that on some days Warner could smell the tangy mix of rendered hog, hydrogen sulfide, methane, and whatever else made up that vile smell in her house, a mile to the south. Farmland was a last resort for former Maytag workers. The jobs there, involving tearing apart pig carcasses with razor-sharp knives and powerful pneumatic tools were, frankly, tougher than appliance work. Perhaps worst was the “sticker,” which slit the throats of about 1,000 shrieking animals each hour for about $12 an hour. That was one pig every four seconds, at about a penny per kill.

An American Classic in the Global Era

In April 1974, Admiral was absorbed into Rockwell International’s growing empire. The Vietnam War contractor was, according to the New York Times, on a “debt-financed acquisition binge that lasted almost a decade” as it spread its reach into aircraft, defense, aerospace, electronics, and appliances. Admiral, meanwhile, was still churning out televisions, radios, and home appliances at factories across the Midwest. Productive as it was, the little company couldn’t afford the massive capital outlays required to modernize, market, and survive in the increasingly brutal electronics and appliance businesses. Accustomed to the massive revenues and fat profits of big government contracts, Rockwell International trimmed employment at the plant, investing $25 million to automate the chest-freezer line. In 1975 Rockwell added a 60,000-square-foot microwave oven facility, and in 1978 it spent $12 million to retool the top-mount refrigerator line and erect the “Blue Goose,” a massive machine the length of a football field that spat out finished metal cabinets. In earlier times, investment meant more jobs. Under Rockwell’s rigorous ethic of scientific management, it usually meant fewer. Admiral accounted for about an eighth of Rockwell’s revenues. “We weren’t even peanuts to Rockwell,” Michael Patrick said. It was a new era for Appliance City. One afternoon in the mid-1970s, Dave Bevard was let out of work an hour and a half early. Production workers were instructed to gather in the vast parking lot across the street from the factory. Under a circus tent, a Rockwell representative and the Admiral plant manager told workers about the importance of the B-1 bomber to the nation’s defense, to Rockwell’s future, and, consequently, to Galesburg jobs. By this time Rockwell had production of the B-1 in over forty states, making itself the model practitioner of militaryindustrial growth. The plan was to use its nonmilitary production facilities in a lobbying campaign to maintain one of the most lucrative military contracts in history—around $10 billion at the time. Workers signed premade postcards for their congressman and went home early that day.

Little Detroit, El Cártel, and Aguamiel

The Second-Shifters Filed in slowly on a late Thursday afternoon. From the outside, the factory was a long (nearly a third of a mile), nondescript white box, baking silently in the desert sun of the Ramos Arizpe mountain valley. Inside, it was fairly dark and noisy, with long rows of metal-stamping machines, soldering stations, and assembly lines. Neat green pathways edged with yellow lines, stretching as far as the eye could see, marked the safe routes through. Full-sized and colorful cardboard cutouts of a smiling man and woman greeted workers, highlighting appropriate safety gear. The operators, an even mix of men and women, meandered down the green paths like high school students reluctantly heading to class. There were young men with sagging jeans and others with Def Leppard and Metallica T-shirts. One young man sported a fauxhawk. Another had a pony tail and looked slightly hungover. Many of the women wore tight-fitting jeans, some of them bejeweled. A large number appeared to be in their teens. The factory in Ramos Arizpe—a desiccated and spacious industrial valley just southwest of Monterrey, Nuevo León, and just north of Saltillo, Coahuila—was on a refrigerator continental divide. The Whirlpool, Maytag, and KitchenAid refrigerators they assembled here—including the side-by-side, which had been perfected and popularized by Galesburg’s Admiral plant fifty years earlier—flowed north. The hip and colorful Brastemp side-by-sides shipped south to Brazil. The enormous Whirlpool factory was only seven years old in 2013, but it paled in comparison to the massive Dodge Ram truck plant we visited on the other side of Saltillo. Planta Ensamble Saltillo had its own valley, rigorous security, and produced 220,000 trucks a year in nearly infinite combinations of engine sizes, body types, and colors. It sat next to a Chrysler engine factory and a DHL logistics center, which handled some of the highly complicated sequencing for the massive operation. From the back of an electric cart, we saw Dodge trucks start off as metal pieces, pressed out and shaped by hundreds of enormous robotic arms, jerking precisely from position to position, sending up sparks behind tall metal cages.

Chiles, Coyotes, and Vanilla

On the Road to Volador were tree-lined, rocky hills, as well as a fútbol field where a few kids kicked around a ball. A boy on a wobbly-wheeled bicycle navigated the dirt path next to the road, spinning his legs as fast as he could to keep up with our truck. Just outside of town, a group of ten women and girls were picking chile piquín on a steep slope above the road. As Josh and I spoke in English to prepare our questions, the women chattered in rapid-fire Spanish to one another, clearly welcoming the work interruption. They had stopped plucking the tiny red and orange chiles, which they collected in two-liter Coke bottles with the tops cut off. Before we could introduce ourselves, an older woman said in Spanish, “It sounds nice, like what we’ve heard on soap operas.” They said they had seen gringos from time to time in Papantla, the municipal seat, and at the pyramids of nearby El Tajin, the spectacular pre-Colombian archeological site. But they claimed during our trip in 2007 that we were the first gringos to visit tiny Volador. The rugged but fertile land around Volador was planted with corn, beans, papaya, chiles, bananas, oranges, mangoes, and other crops. It was more difficult land to farm than that of Agua Dulce. Volador was also more isolated, and it had fewer people. The main difference, though, was that Don Beto Cruz, an absentee landlord from Papantla, owned nearly all of the land surrounding the village. There was no ejido here. Locals traded their labor with Cruz for little plots of land to farm. Wage work in the fields earned about $8 a day, but it was irregular, maybe one or two days a week. Several of the fieldworkers were high school–aged girls earning summer money. Despite the blazing heat, they dressed in jeans or sweatpants and had layers on top to protect against the scratchy fieldwork and the sun. One of the girls wore a white-and-blue shirt that read, “Telesecundaria Mariano Matamoros.” The shirt featured a television with a smiley face inside.

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.