Today, thousands of maquiladora workers, many of them strangers to Tijuana, Mexicali, Juarez, Matamoros, wake up to find themselves without money in an inhospitable region far from home, where the cost of living is higher, and the padlocked doors of maquis are echoed by closures and failures all along the line. When Vicks VapoRub comes from a Mexican plant, and your cassette tape and VCR are assembled by an "Oaxaca" who can't read, and the big boys take their Learjets and martinis to Beijing, taking their little blue bottles and their Mylar and circuits with them, it becomes the duty of El Norte's businesses to take up the slack. If only burgers could be cooked in Africa and teleported! If only toilets would scrub themselves, pants stitch themselves, tuna can themselves, lawns mow themselves! If only robots would slice the throats of cows and grind them into sausage! If only tomatoes and oranges and apples, and cotton, and sugar cane, and peaches, and cherries could be harvested by monkeys! If only we had clones! If only wildcat construction projects would frame and roof and shingle themselves!
If only Mexico paid workers a decent wage.
In Iowa City, Omaha, Nutley, Waycross, Metairie, those who survive the northern passage can earn in an hour what it took a long day's work in radioactive chemical Mexican sludge to earn before. The green hills of eastern Arkansas are ripe with chicken plucking factories, and the woods are now alive with Mexican "Templos del Evangelio"--crazy backyard churches not unlike the Sonoita bible temple down the street from the legendary El Negro's compound. Signs that once said "Jesus or Hell" now say "Cristo o Muerte!" The Oaxacas ruse to the Arkansas hills to make a stand against the devious angels of Desolation.
Mexicans still behind the barbed wire continue to listen to fabulous tales of Los Estados Unidos. They watch drunk and disorderly teens vomit in the streets of Spring-Break-Atlan. They wait tables and mop floors while sailors scream and naked girls dangle from balconies. Topless gringas pout on their beaches, where they are not welcome unless they're sweeping up cigarette butts or carrying trays of Day-Glo liquor conconctions. They watch television, go to open-air twelfth-run movie houses where the tickets cost fifty centavos and the mosquitoes bite their necks. Radio is alive with propaganda: Eminem! N'Sync! Britney! Ja Rule! (They call him: Ha!) It's Radio Free Mexico, on every AM and FM dial! They buy castoff American clothes at the segundas, and by God, even the gringo trash is better than anything else they can buy!
Border dwellers, come from the hinterland, are twelve hundred miles away from home but five miles from the United States.
We gonna get it back.
Luis Alberto Urrea, The Devil's Highway