For the rest of his life, Richard Bolin would claim authorship of the maquiladora, an accomplishment that led Bolin to co-found the World Export Processing Zones Association in 1978 as an international lobbying group for export-manufacturing. Yet, ultimately the deciding factor happened at the federal level. Facing the cancellation of the Bracero guest worker program in 1964, a threatened cotton economy in the Rio Grande valley, and a populace increasingly displeased by the failures of agrarian reform, Mexico’s ruling party feared an impending economic crisis at the border. In the 1960s, perhaps in consideration of Bolin’s policy recommendations, Mexico’s Secretary of Industry and Commerce, Octavio Campos Salas, embarked on a tour of export-manufacturing sites in Hong Kong and Singapore.1Jefferson Cowie, Capital Moves: RCA’s Seventy-Year Quest for Cheap Labor. (New York: W.W. Norton, 2001), 133. According to Richard Bolin2Samuel Schmidt. “Entrevista con Richard Bolin,” En busca de la decision: la industria maquiladora en Ciudad Juárez, 222., Campos Salas returned from his trip “totally convinced” that Mexico ought to implement a similar model in the border region. Shortly thereafter, Campos Salas traveled to Ciudad Juárez in 1965 to announce a new federal program (later christened as the Programa de Industrialización Fronteriza) that would invite U.S. manufacturers to relocate sections of their manufacturing processes in border cities, beginning with Ciudad Juárez3Luchan por Lograr la Industrialización,” El Fronterizo, May 18, 1965; Lawrence Douglas Taylor Hansen. “The Origins of the Maquila Industry in Mexico,” Comercio Exterior 53, No. 11 (2003): 8.. The maquiladora had been born.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, U.S., European, and Japanese manufacturers trickled into Ciudad Juárez and surrounding border cities to take advantage of the new terms offered by the federal government. Yet, in their pursuit of flexible labor conditions, these manufacturers also sought a deeper level of control over labor. To secure this, they sought early contract negotiations with Mexico’s official trade unions, referred to locally as charro unions, which quickly acquired a reputation for siding with management over workers. Likewise, although the maquiladoras promised to employ many former Braceros, transnational firms arrived seeking a specific demographic: young, “docile” girls. Chasing a loose mythology of feminine docility—one that sweatshops and SEZs would mimic throughout the world—maquiladoras ensured that women constituted the majority of their labor force, a tendency that only shifted at the end of the century.
Despite these “controls,” the maquiladora industry proved itself to be incredibly volatile and subject to its neighbor’s economic fluctuations. In the early 1970s, the sector was still politically weak, its labor conditions were abhorrent, and despite promises from Charro unions, labor upheavals emerged periodically. Then in 1974, the effects of the U.S. economic recession sent shockwaves to border cities, and maquiladoras began laying off thousands of workers and shuttering their doors. Some even imagined that the industry was coming to an end. Yet soon enough the U.S. economy stabilized, and in 1976, Mexico’s economy crashed, followed by a significant devaluation of the peso. Then beginning in 1982, Mexico saw its largest devaluation yet, followed by a wave of IMF-imposed austerity measures, and the beginning of what historians have come to call Mexico’s “lost decade,” which ironically inaugurated the maquiladora’s golden age.
In the 1980s, the maquiladora entered a continuous period of exponential growth, radically restructuring the physical landscape of border cities. New maquiladoras sprung up throughout the region, preying on an increasingly desperate workforce and doling out wages that were now “competitively” lower than export processing zones in East Asia. Colonias, or poorly integrated shanty towns, grew alongside these factories, as economic migrants to Mexico’s border cities built impromptu living quarters on urban outskirts, many seeking employment in the maquilas. By the time the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was implemented in 1994, offering U.S. and Canadian firms unprecedented access to Mexico’s labor markets, the maquiladora had already established a foothold as the central economic motor of Mexico’s border cities.