Blood, Sweat & Trade Secrets

The Tampon Parade

Once upon a time, in a concrete house on the west bank of the Río Hardy, on one of those 110-degree, humid afternoons that in Southeast Asia would have imparted an air of Buddhist dreaminess to everything but that in Mexico expressed itself in simple torpidity, a woman from the Cucapah reservation, who traveled by slow bus five days out of every seven to the maquiladora in Mexicali where she assembled unknown components for the better than average wage of $100 a week, informed me that before she'd given birth to those four children who now sprawled on the dirt--one of them sleeping, two of them playing, the eldest slowly fighting the flies over his can of soda pop--she had worked in a different maquiladora managed entirely by men and staffed mostly with single young women like her. In this establishment, the name of which she'd forgotten, every female on the line was required to bring in a bloody tampon each month for inspection. No tampon or no blood and she'd get fired. My driver-interpreter, a young Mormon named Terrie Petree, was skeptical. She said Mexican women usually wore pads, not tampons, and besides, how difficult would it be to borrow a neighbor's bloody tampon or procure a splash of chicken blood? All the same, I knew of a book that seconded the indictment, an angry little book whose certitude glared as inescapably as Imperial sunshine. Its author was none other than Ramón Eduardo Ruiz, whose exaggerations about the feculence of the New River my own laboratory samples had underwhelmingly verified. His tract ends thus: "A healthy and prosperous American economy will not forever endure if the mass of Mexicans to the south, many of whom labor for greedy American employers, live in Third World dependency." Se±or Ruiz had been apprised that a certain maquiladora in Ciudad Juárez compelled its female employees to bring in bloody tampons each month for the first three months on the job.

What was it about this now twice-told anecdote of the tampon parade that most offended me? I suppose it was the violation of dignity. The massive drug testing in American workplaces angers me enough; I see all too well the culture of bullying and cravenness it leads to. Repeated pregnancy testing as a condition of continued employment is worse; the humiliations of the tampon parade reminded me of the anal search to which I was once subjected by functionaries of my government; that was more than 20 years ago now, and I will never forget it. As Emerson wrote, "Could not a nation of friends even devise better ways?" To institutionalize such invasiveness with monthly replications would be an easy achievement of the reprehensible.

It really wasn't my concern, because I live over here on Northside, where inexpensive Mexican-assembled products arrive by magic, but I did start wondering how bad it really was in the maquiladoras. "They are very closed," said everybody, which increased my suspicions. One day Terrie and I breezed into a large feedlot in the Mexicali Valley, and the office girl invited me to take any photos I yearned for; all she asked was that I close whichever gates I opened so that the stock wouldn't get loose. A cowboy posed for me. I wandered into another office after closing time, and the man there, who never even asked my name, looked up all the statistics I wanted. On that same day we had visited a glass factory where our welcome was decidedly different. We would need to apply in advance for authorization, said the man for whom the receptionist had rung. This application must be in writing and delivered by post, and the chances of its being accepted sounded equivalent to those of my being elected president of Mexico. The man was, moreover, inquisitive in that unpleasant fashion of FBI agents. He wanted identification, which for some reason I declined to show him. His clever little eyes never stopped trying to see through me. He was an exemplar of monotonous diligence. He showed no hurry to eject us from the factory; he was perfectly willing to undress our motives for as long as we liked. This must be how one guards trade secrets.

Whenever somebody with a badge tells me not to do something, my inclination is to do it, so I must thank the glass factory's sentinel for encouraging me to peek into a few maquiladoras, with or without permission. Of course I'd respect their little trade secrets, excepting a certain ingredient called exploitation.

My high school friend Chuck is a private eye. I asked him how I should proceed. Since his line of work has more to do with trolling databases and standing outside subway stations with the odd suspect's photo hidden in a newspaper, he referred me to his colleagues Mr. W., for surveillance equipment, and Mr. D., who was described to me in Chuck's words: "He infiltrates factories for a living."

I called Mr. D; he was skiing or swimming or something. "Their security is horrible," he explained to me. "What you do is you come up with a product you wanna produce. Then you tell their local chamber of commerce, and you go in."

He opined that there was worse exploitation in small Mexican industries than in the maquiladoras, especially since the latter's facilities were newer. "Maquiladoras have created a base of power for Mexican women," he insisted. "The real scandal is the murder of women in Ciudad Juárez."

He did remark that he'd heard a story about a Chinese plant in Tijuana that involved "women from China who were locked in and never let out except to work." He couldn't say whether this factory was still in operation, and indeed nobody I met in Tijuana knew anything about this. He chuckled, "Here you have an example of Chinese labor being even cheaper than Mexicali labor!"

Seven or eight years ago he'd found maquiladoras where U.S. mail was being sorted in Mexico. "All these girls out there" were photo imaging misdelivered mail for corporations despite a federal order not to do it. "U.S. postal workers were upset that their jobs were outsourced down there," said Mr. D., but he believed "the privacy concerns are overblown." He was a real card, Mr. D.

He'd also found Texas motor-vehicles records being processed down in Juárez, so I figured his offer to fly down to Tijuana for two days and three grand might provide me with the knowledge about where exactly to focus my newly acquired but untested button camera. He promised me "four or five baddies." He was a free spirit, Mr. D.; I liked that about him. He enjoyed playing the guitar.

And so two weeks later, I lay on my bed at sunset in a Tijuana hotel room that smelled like pipe smoke and body odor, reading Mr. D.'s report, which begins: "We were assigned to conduct an investigation in order to locate maquiladoras in the Tijuana, Mexico region that were abusive to both people and nature." The sky was paling, and the one bare bulb, which illuminated a portion of the ceiling molding quite nicely, could no longer reach my bed, which after all was meant to be used for activities pertaining to darkness. So I let my gaze leave the pages of Mr. D.'s report, whose type and whose paper were now nearly the same shade, and I listened to the bells of the cathedral, whose twin towers and image of the Virgin of Guadalupe were almost identical to their counterparts on Avenida Reforma in Mexicali. Then I got the white plastic chair, which was spattered with brown stains, moved it directly beneath the lightbulb, listened to drumbeats, traffic and barking dogs, and then read a little further into Mr. D.'s report.

"Metales y Derivados," read one heading. "This is a shut-down battery manufacturing facility that was on four acres and is located in the Ciudad Industrial Nueva Tijuana, above the ejido Chil-pancingo...which was once a fairly clean residential neighborhood...[and] is now a fetid, polluted barrio.... Some claim that up to 40 percent of the people in this area have become ill from the pollution at this plant," which would have cost $7 million American to clean up, so it stayed the way it was.

"In 1995 a Mexican judge issued an arrest warrant for the owner of this plant, Jose Kahn, of the New Frontier Trading Co. He and his son both live in San Diego County"; their addresses and telephone numbers followed--"You'll love this!" Mr. D. added, regarding the latter information.

So that sounded promising.

A page later, under the heading

"Plants With Bad Reputations," I was first informed of the existence of Optica Sola, a maquiladora that "manufactures all kinds of lenses and is on a pollution watch list.... The production line is predominantly women, and the floor and ground below are reportedly contaminated.... You need a good pretext to get in, and as we didn't have anything ready we were unsuccessful." (Amelia Simpson of the Environmental Health Coalition, a nonprofit group based in San Diego, was unaware of any such list or of contamination at Optica Sola.)

Evidently, security was better than Mr. D. had thought.

Here there's Life

This project was proving to be more difficult than I had expected. To be human is to complain, so I had anticipated an infinitude of criticisms, sob stories and denunciations, but far more emblematic was the old man in the cowboy hat who had once assembled electronic components for a maquiladora down on the street called Boulevard Insurgentes, which lay below us in the smog.

"I am sure that you've had many experiences in your life," I began.

"Well, naturally. We're old," he said, nodding to his amigo.

Private detective Se±or A., whom you will meet in due course, once told me that some factories begin illegally in the basements of large houses in order to avoid taxes; if they last long enough, the owners build overt factories. And I wondered whether the tales of the maquiladoras had begun in this stealthy way or whether they came heralded by trumpets. That was why I asked the man in the cowboy hat, "Do you remember what it was like before the maquiladoras?"

"When we got here there were already a lot of them in Tijuana."

"Where do you come from?"

"Durango, 20 years ago."

He kept saying, "Well, here there's life. There's work! There are lots of maquiladoras."

Since he had come 20 years ago, all he knew about the age of his own neighborhood--which already had concrete sidewalks and shade trees and was called Colonia Azteca--was that it must be at least 20 years old. "Maquiladoras brought life," he repeated, smiling with his big false teeth.

I interviewed two shy girls during their lunch half hour in front of Optica Sola, not the main Optica Sola on Insurgentes, which Mr. D. had fingered for me and failed to enter, but a smaller, dirtier plant, more piquant with solvent perfume and which stood upon the Otay Mesa in the New Tijuana Industrial Park. The address was perfect: just off Industrial Avenue.

"It's good work," they informed me, "and the best thing is the ambience inside. It's very clean, and it's air-conditioned."

One girl, a 20-year-old, had been there for two and a half years; she made 99 pesos a day, equivalent to less than $10. Her companion, who had just reached the four-month mark and was a year older, earned 74 pesos. So both of them were comparatively well-off, the daily minimum wage in Tijuana being 45.24 pesos, a wage that, in a local reporter's words, "can't sustain life."

I might mention that I had begun my engagement with this branch of Optica Sola on my very best behavior, approaching the windowed booth at the gate, whose security guard in his green uniform and sunglasses explained that I would need to get authorization and that unfortunately the sole person or agency who could authorize me (he actually made a phone call) was absent, for how long he couldn't predict; it might be awhile, perhaps as soon as the end of the next Ice Age. He was trying to let me down easy. All the while he kept peering and scrutinizing. Now, as I interviewed the two laughingly reluctant girls, we stood in such a way as to interpose the Optica Sola shuttle bus between us and the gate, but the girls were getting nervous because the security guard had left his post to come peering and peering around the windshield of the bus--and, by the way, oh, what a smell! It was not an unpleasant smell, really. It took me back to my boyhood, when I used to build model rockets in the basement, dabbing airplane glue onto this or that plastic part; I used to get flushed, and my heart would race. I loved that smell in those days.

I asked them if there was any smell inside the factory, and they said they didn't know. Then they said no, there wasn't. Then they said that anyhow all factories had that smell.

"Is anyone affected by the chemicals?"

"It depends on which area people work in, but they're very careful with people's security," said the longtime girl piously.

The security guard craned his snakelike neck further around the comer of the bus, so I ended the interview with my customary question.

"Are maquiladoras good or bad for Mexicans?"

"For work they're good, because we need work."

Translation: Here there's life.

The Black Cough

A legal assessor for a federation of labor unions was sure the climate of Baja California rendered maquiladora work superior to picking squash or watermelons out in the campo, and I'd certainly prefer to work in an air-conditioned building on a 118-degree day. Moreover, he said, maquiladora wages generally exceeded pay for field work: "Sometimes you can make a little more money working in the campo than in the maquiladoras, especially with green onions. If the whole family goes and works, they can earn 300 or 400 pesos a day. But they work only three or four days a week, and they earn no benefits."

Therefore, exploitation in the campo may be worse than exploitation in the maquiladora.

In the immense Valle Pedregal development in Mexicali, dirt-colored houses in the dirt form subdevelopments: Casa Exe, Casa Muestra and God knows what else; the storekeeper I spoke with neither knew about them nor cared. Almost everybody worked in maquiladoras. This cubescape went on as far as I could see, and it brought to life something a dapper reporter with a Tijuana paper (the one who said the minimum daily wage couldn't sustain life) had said: "You have many maquiladora industries that have a lot of vacancies. They want people! Tijuana grows by about a hundred thousand people per year. It's been that way for at least five years. The maquiladora is good for many people because it's sure work. They come here having nothing at all, and the first job they have is a maquiladora job. When they enter a maquiladora, they have all the social securities that Mexican law permits. First the man comes from a southern state. When he finds a job, he brings with him his family, and the population grows--with one salary. They come to a little wooden house, and they have to rent, without water, without light."

Pedregal was a step above those colonias in the hills of Tijuana. Here people frequently owned their houses, which were more often than not made of respectable cinder block; here I saw evidence of electricity, and some of the windows even framed little air conditioners. And here came a young couple, obviously in a hurry to get to bed for their Sunday afternoon tumble, but they were nice enough to give me a moment. The man, who was older, stood on the wide dirt street with his arm around the shoulders of his dark, pretty girl, who said she made remote controls in the Korema maquiladora (I never found (continued on page 164)Vollmann(continued from page 108) any such place). Her task was to "pack the finished things," she said. It had been two months since she'd started there; she wanted to stay.

"Would it be good work for all your life?" I asked.

"Yes."

"Why do some people work in maquiladoras and some become campesinos? Which do you prefer?"

She gave me the classic Mexicali answer: "The maquiladora is more tranquil."

Tranquility was what they prized in Mexicali. I have been there many times, and year after year that was the word of praise and aspiration I most often heard there, though I rarely heard it in Tijuana.

On another dirt street in Pedregal, a man who lacked teeth conveyed an impression of immense happiness; his own cinder-block house cube cost 150,000 pesos, which he was now paying off in trifling installments. He worked the night shift in a maquiladora; during the day he worked on his house.

His job consisted of placing computer cabinets into a paint-sprayer machine--black paint obviously, for the man was black around his fingernails, black in his nose; sometimes he even coughed black, he said. He had worked at the maquiladora for two months and thought it a very good job. He had no fear that he would ever get sick.

Sony Owns Everything

For all I knew, he really did have a good job. If I could only see that he did, I would gladly give his maquiladora a testimonial. If I could only get authorization!

Well, if the maquiladoras had had their way, I would never have seen the inside of a single one. Oh, yes, I tried Kimberly-Clark of Mexico; Maquiladora Waste Recovery of Mexico (eternally busy recovering waste, evidently); Kraft Foods of Mexico (no answer); Puntomex International, whose first and third listed numbers were wrong and whose second number was never answered; Ace Industries, which also never answered; and Amcor of Mexico, always busy. Fortunately, there was still Foam Fabricators to call, even though it didn't answer at either number; as for Fashion Clothing, its functionary referred us to the pleasure of Se±or William Chow, who coincidentally proved unavailable.

If I were a racist I'd shout, "Those lazy Mexicans!" If I were a bureaucrat I'd conclude I needed to upgrade my contact information. If I were a leftist troublemaker I'd say, "It's a conspiracy!" Well, who am I? Why do I tend to conflate these blind alleys and refusals with the sharp-nosed peering of security guards?

On a hot and polluted day, Terrie and I were driving in Tijuana, seeking a certain industrial park where Metales y Derivados was supposed to be. (Summation of the NAFTA report, February 11, 2002: "The level of lead contaminants found on the site is 551 times greater than that recommended by the EPA...for the restoration of contaminated residences. At a one-mile distance from the plant, the level of lead contamination could still be more than 55 times higher than the highest level based on EPA norms. The Metales y Derivados site is located just 600 meters from Colonia Chilpancingo, home to more than 10,000 residents.")

After passing an archwayed wall in the dirt, with dirt inside it, we turned up into Colonia El Lago, continuing upward in the direction of Matamoros. At the summit, like fortresses lording it over that smog-grayed valley of gray walls, were American fast-food restaurants, not to mention the long, wide, ugly roofs of manufacturing plants, the heat and dust, the white shining of walls and the dull gray shimmering of roofs--oh, down there it was gray more than white. But at the summit stood the white, white maquiladoras! Sony in particular was radiant. I remember my late President Reagan used to speak fondly of America as a "city upon a hill"; this must have been exactly what it looked like. How landscaped and grand it was! Never mind the family clinic--there was green grass! I swear to you I was thinking of the happy, pretty girl who worked at Korema, not of the man with the black cough, when two young women wearing company badges emerged from the company gate and set foot on that beautifully paved street. I murmured to dear Terrie, who as usual put them instantly at ease, and with smiles they agreed to be photographed. But just as I raised the camera to my eye, a security guard rushed out to proclaim that taking photographs was prohibited everywhere, even across the street in that littered vacant lot, because, in his words, "Sony owned everything." Exasperated, I apologized to the two ladies, who proceeded pensively on their way, but Cerberus wasn't finished with me. He demanded my identification, which, again, I strangely refused to give him. In retrospect I suppose he was only being kind; he didn't want to expose me to any uneasy doubts about the truth of that verity Here there's life.

The Hole

Up in the New Tijuana Industrial Park, which didn't actually appear so new anymore (sparks, heaps of metal, a stink, pallets next to peeling painted sheds), red buses waited outside a maquiladora. A man advised me to go to the delegation where maquiladoras are registered. But official channels are rarely one's best connection to bad news, which may sometimes be a synonym for truth. So let's take a spin up and down that central strip of factories along Bellas Artes; let's ask at Frialsa Frigorificos; oh, and here's a satellite Tyco plant, this one flying the American flag.

And then, right on the mesa's edge, the ruin of Metales y Derivados unmistakably stood; as we got closer there was a salty, rancid smell. A sign on the fence warned of danger, but a convenient hole invited us to enter, and in we went. Our eyes began to sting. Mr. D. had said he felt sick the day he strolled about this monument to human selfishness, which in its own way felt as eerie as an Indian cliff dwelling, or even more so, since it was poisonous--not that I'd ever believe any stories about anyone getting contaminated. The sharp flapping of black tarps in the wind was the only sound.

We gazed at those corroded drums under the tarps, and after a long time Terrie said, "My mouth tastes as if I've been sucking on a penny."

"I'm sorry you haven't reproduced," I told her. "And I'm glad I already have."

Under the heaving tarps, squarish skeletons of lead looked nightmarish, but nightmares can't hurt you. I admired the view of the canyon below, which crawled with houses and shanties. Sunflowers grew near the mountains of old batteries.

Inside the great shed, which felt like the focal point just as the restored gas chamber feels like the focal point of Auschwitz (and isn't this simile overwrought, even unfair? But I have visited Auschwitz, and I remember the heavy darkness of the gas chamber, much heavier than here, to be sure, but that memory visited me unbidden as I stood there feeling sick in several ways, wondering how many children down there in Chilpancingo were enjoying the benefits of lead poisoning. Metales y Derivados felt like a wicked, dangerous (continued on page 178)Vollmann(continued from page 164) place, I can tell you), several huge, rusty drumlike apparatuses were trained like cannons at the barrio below. What were they, those red-crusted hulks? They had wheel gears on them. I stared at them with my burning eyes; I smelled the sour-metal smell. And those square pits in the concrete floor, those pipes going down, down into the reddish earth, what did they signify?

Across the street, well within range of that rotten-metal smell, two men sat eating their lunch. I asked if I could photograph them, and they said I could but they'd get in trouble if they failed to don their protective gear first. So they laid down their sandwiches, dressed up like astronauts and stood behind the sign that read Peligroso, meaning dangerous. Meanwhile a black rat silently rushed past another drum. They were supposed to be cleaning this place up for the Rimsa company, in a contract with the Mexican government. Later I met their foreman, who identified himself only as Jaime and who said, "The first thing our government did was try to work with the owners. But it was going to cost so much that the owners left for the U.S."

"How will Rimsa clean it up?"

"We're bringing big dump trucks. They'll take it to the U.S."

"How do you feel about this place?"

"For me it's a criminal act. Mexico opened its door to American people, and the only interest is to make money."

How many times have I heard this indictment? The year before we bombed Kosovo, an old Serbian woman shouted at me, "You Americans have no souls! You're only about money. But in heaven we'll all be equal." And now the same accusation rose up against us from smog and grimy white sprawl on grubby gray-green Mexican hills.

The sickness of capitalism, the American sickness, is what Marx labels "the cash nexus." My own theory, which is not particularly Marxist, is that each place has its own sickness. Mexicans and Serbs are no healthier than we. If the cold American mercantile sickness seeds the Mexican borderland with such maquiladoras as Metales y Derivados, what's the Mexican sickness that allows them to flourish? I'd say it's this: In Mexico, people cut corners and do what's easiest even when it's not what's best. That man in Pedregal ignored the admonition of his own black cough.

Se±or A.

Getting inside the maquiladoras was not as easy as I had thought. Looking back on it, we tried and tried, all the way from Insurgentes up to the concrete-cube-clad hills of Matamoros. I think what Jose Lopez said to me in Pancho's bar in Mexicali was true: They really were afraid. Those two young women at Optica Sola, all the people in Tijuana who spoke to us through closed doors--which reminded Terrie of her Mormon mission in Spain. In Mexico I have been lied to about subterranean Chinese tunnels, and I have been occasionally cheated and misdirected over the years, but never have I felt so walled off by silence as I did when researching the maquiladoras. Without the button camera, it would have been almost hopeless. Thank God I had Terrie to enlist both social grace and feminine charm on my side.

It was high time for another private detective. I had looked him up in the Tijuana yellow pages, and Terrie had called him, so I already knew how much he would cost.

This bored, rumpled-looking man was another of those individuals whose sensational stories lose much luster once the deposit has been paid, but the only way to ascertain that is to pay the deposit. Among other things, he assured me of the following: There's a lot of trafficking going on by boat near Ensenada, trafficking in Chinese. One Chinese is worth about $10,000. It's rumored that some of the Chinese are transported in metal containers. It's very dangerous. People who live on the coast of Ensenada will say they see line after line of Chinese on the beach. Needless to say, government officials never find anything. So far, Senor A. was probably telling the literal truth, but the next thing he said was, "I know there is a maquiladora here with connections to the sale of Chinese. Someone has already paid the $10,000. They work it off. Four or five years ago, it took seven or eight years to work it off, maybe through prostitution. But most of them go to the U.S. What I think is that there are maquiladoras with a connection; they bring a Chinese over long enough to train Mexican workers, then he moves."

When I heard this I thought to myself, Se±or A. is my man! And I could already see myself lurking outside some maquiladora's gates at midnight while my button camera flawlessly recorded the unloading of another truckload of Chinese slaves. Well, well. Where would we be without our illusions?

"I have fat, skinny, tall, short employees," he boasted, and I was in awe. I thought, Wait until Chuck hears how wisely I've chosen!

Perla's First Reconnaissance

Actually, Se±or A. proved to be worth his weight in pesos, thanks to the pearl he extracted from his treasure-house of fat, skinny, tall and short operatives--and she literally was a pearl, except when she signed a different name on my receipt.

Bubbly, chunky, her hair dyed orange-red, Perla was a woman of a certain age. She cheerfully sacrificed one of her buttons for the sake of that camera. Then we practiced in Se±or A.'s office. I was making pretty good button-camera videos by then, so I felt hopeful again; oh, yes, I was certainly confident. And Perla was, as Mr. W. had advised that my operative be, well-endowed. All the same, after various experiments we finally chose to place the digital video receiver and power pack against the small of her back. Terrie would lift up Perla's shirt and power her on and off, while I would do my part by averting my eyes and Se±or A. would gaze boredly into space from behind his desk, which displayed the following items: a huge owl, a Statue of Liberty, a golf ball, a plastic globe and a long lens. I remember there was another office next to his sanctum; the door was always slightly ajar, and on my various visits to Se±or A. I would sometimes hear the faint creaking of a swivel chair. Who was this individual? Nobody ever mentioned him in Se±or A.'s office, so I confined myself to making postmortem speculations about him with Terrie. How much did he know or see of Perla's wiring up? Perhaps I should have hired Se±or A. to find out.

For what it is worth, Perla was the first Mexican I ever met who said outright, "The maquiladoras are bad."

When she was ready I told her I would make her a Playboy Centerfold. She giggled, and Se±or A. assured me, "I've had clients even more disgusting than you."

At any rate, Perla, who was very outspoken and whom I came to admire and trust, told me that 10 or 12 years ago the employees of Matsushita were "all 18- to 25-year-olds in miniskirts." She knew one girl who had worked there and used to visit her, so she'd seen for herself. She knew someone who was fired on her 25th birthday, maybe or maybe not for that reason. Matsushita, which made electronic components for its Japanese parent company, accordingly seemed like an excellent investigation target.

So Terrie wired Perla up one last time, and we set out for Matsushita determined to ascertain the existence or nonexistence of a workforce in white tennis shoes and miniskirts, 18 to 25, not fat.

Following Perla's directions (over our two working days she seemed to know the whereabouts of every maquiladora on earth), we wound up the hill, then back down past Robinson and Robinson, into the valley of dirt and factory cubes. The first time Perla went into Matsushita (while Terrie and I waited outside another white stucco wall with fenced inserts--she was rereading A Moveable Feast, and I was worrying about what to do if Perla got into trouble), the dear old button camera didn't record a thing. We went to a fast-food restaurant, and I bought giant sodas for the members of my spy team while they retired to the ladies' room to rewire Perla and make more practice videos. In the end they decided to have her carry the digital video receiver in her little purse, prestidigitating the wire into the wire of her cell phone, and this device raised our industrial espionage to an entirely new level. Back to Matsushita she went, returning almost immediately, cheerily swinging her arm, her hair blowing in the breeze, so the next morning early, when maquiladoras hired, we wired her up again and sped off to Matsushita, parking not quite in front, since we were discreet individuals, and then for one hour, 11 minutes and 46 seconds Terrie reread more of A Moveable Feast while I entertained myself with the spymaster's stress of wondering whether Perla's batteries would run out. For variety's sake I sometimes gazed at an installation of barred windows within a courtyard of cheerful green shrubs whose fortifications consisted of barred gate segments in tracks that slid apart or together by electronic command; the climax came near the end of the hour, when a corrugated-cardboard truck entered. This barred gate kept me from learning dreary secrets. Were they secrets only of sickness and death? Or were they secrets that might have made me illicitly rich--trade secrets, I mean? Answering that was what button cameras were for.

Now here came Perla with a big smile on her face; Matsushita had hired her. She'd make 870 pesos a week!

In the covert video, we watched the wide street sway with a womanly stride and white storage tanks get closer and closer, then veer away; it is wonderful how briskly Perla walks! Her videos are blurrier than mine because a strand of white thread from her clothing got stuck on the lens beneath the false button and nobody noticed. The long, white wall of the maquiladora on her left, cars on her right, all swaying back and forth, more gracefully, in my male opinion, than my own videos do, and presently white wall gives way to black-barred metal fence not unlike the border wall but lower and cleaner; after five minutes and seven seconds the security booth swims into view. Perla obligingly gives a view through the fence from a number of angles. Then the bored belly and upraised hand of the security guard fill part of that magical rectangular world.

Halfway through minute six we see a silhouette run its hands across its head by the fence bars, and then the security guard picks up the phone. Perla paces, providing us with one view after the next of the security guard. He gestures to us with kindly paternalism, flipping his head from side to side and moving his lips. He does not seem to be a bad man. What if the only reason my experiences with maquiladora guards had been so unpleasant was the simple fact of my own existence?

And now, shortly before minute 10, Perla penetrates Matsushita--Kyushu Matsushita maquiladora, I mean, whose representative, Antonio Trevino, had previously informed Terrie in no encouraging tone that no visit could occur until we'd called Fred in San Diego--and a courtyard swims toward us, slightly off level, with a lovely blackish-green fan shape of a tree to the right. Then that flicks away as we trudge down an arid concrete space with a wall on our left. One of this wall's numbered doors is open, and we abruptly flick inside, with long white incandescent tubes almost horizontal above us and human beings passing with great business. The right-hand wall contains glossy dark rectangular windows that reflect the incandescent lights; on the left are whitish open rooms. Perla turns left. We see a row of what might be pool tables; slowing her step, Perla nears them; they are ordinary long tables with metal chairs along them.

Brave Perla ventures into another empty room, and from the quick, choppy quality I can tell she is not supposed to be here. Then she returns to the hall of windows, one of which she approaches until her silhouetted reflection is pierced by the horizontal spears of many reflected light tubes. What lies within this window's world?

At minute 12, second 55, we see the holy of holies: the production floor. Perla's silhouette looms over everything like the Virgin of Guadalupe. Far below her shoulders, human silhouettes move in and out of receding rows of mechanical bays, everything dwindling infinitely like the perspective in two opposed mirrors. A woman nears and gazes at us, but we cannot see much about her except that she is a woman. Then suddenly a pointing, brawny fist intersects the frame: Perla is being sent about her business! Dutifully, the camera goes down the hall, into another room where no cameras are supposed to be, past a double row of clean metal lockers, then out to the main corridor again. Here's another window; once more the production line fills the world. More figures flash by us. Perla's silhouette raises its phony résumé folder in simulated bewilderment. The button camera swerves back into the room of many tables. We are now making significant inroads into minute 15. Perla's spectacles magnify themselves into hugeness as they arc past us. Then another young woman, pretty and slender, passes us and offers us her back, two tables down. It is time to fill out job applications.

Fifteen seconds before the commencement of minute 22, the other woman turns around, rises and brings her application to Perla's table, evidently requesting help; her face is silhouetted, but she is even more evidently well-proportioned than Perla. More people pass in and out. A plump woman whose badge flaps on her chest comes to fill up our world, extending a hand and a paper. This is the first inside employee we have seen clearly, and she does not in the least fit our indictment's profile.

At 26:37 Perla offers us a view of her application, which I suppose might be capable of some kind of digital enhancement so we could actually see what it says. Ten minutes later it has been completed (the slender woman is still struggling), and the button camera rears up to lead us back down the hall of glossy black windows. At 36:47 two pretty, slender young women in blue smocks, presumably employees, pass by; to me, they do seem to fit the profile. Perla enters another room where more young women and one man are sitting at tables, filling out papers. At 52:16 three young women in blue smocks rush by us in the hall of windows. A freeze-frame reveals one to be decidedly fat; the middle girl, blurred although she is, would not seem to be conventionally pretty. More peeks through the tinted windows show more blurred figures. Then at 53:27 two closed double doors sport red-and-yellow warning signs, but Perla wisely leaves those alone (an alarm might have sounded) and provides us with an interior view of an immaculate, even rather plush, ladies' room. I feel pleased with Matsushita. The camera ascends stairs, passes down an empty corridor to more of the double doors with red-and-yellow warning signs, gives us a long view of a notice board, swivels furtively to reveal workers in an open doorway (we can't make out their shapes distinctly), swivels past a well-stacked girl in worker blue and then brings us back into one more window-framed view of the production line, which looks as clean and modern as any science-fiction spaceship.

At 57:47 we see two of these workers more clearly than before. It remains difficult to say whether they are men or women, but from the way they stand lounging and chatting they are probably men (whom we will see more identifiably a little later). In the background a pale-clad female figure is definitely not wearing a miniskirt. Then the camera swivels back down the hall, where another applicant approaches us with a folder in her hand. She is beautiful, but the problem is that all Mexican women are beautiful.

At 1:03:05 Perla scores her great coup, breezing her way directly into the production area. A big-breasted, dark-faced female figure approaches us beneath the row of white light tubes. On our right the mysterious production bays now resemble nothing so much as banks of Las Vegas slot machines. At 1:03:15 we glimpse a line of blue-clad female workers, who are, in the words of two women I later asked, not obese but normal. None of them wears a miniskirt. A plump-bottomed woman walks away from us. Then the camera pans to another line of women; they again seem not obese but normal. The closest of the women at 1:03:35 might be stocky; some are wearing miniskirts.

Perla shut down her wire and reported: "It's totally changed, even the way they treat the people, the age, the pregnancy test. There are people in there who are pretty big. They even have music playing in the halls. But also there are several different Matsushitas."

As for me, I was happy. As far as we could tell in a one-hour video, Matsushita seemed fine. And the button camera had finally proved itself.

The Price of A Mask

We waited for the flat-voiced girl with glasses to come. She worked at Fluid-master now, from 6:30 in the morning to 3:20 in the afternoon; she had only two 15-minute breaks. The flat-voiced girl with glasses was named Lourdes. Before I met her I'd already met her chest X-rays and her case file. There was something ugly about her personality, I thought. Terrie didn't think so; Terrie thought her brave, and she was, but her bravery came from some bitter, brutalized place. I felt disliked and suspected by her. I sometimes have the same feeling when I interview a rape victim.

We were sitting in the car in La Jolla Industrial Park. Terrie and Perla were wiring Lourdes for another button camera, which was going to fail, and when Lourdes came out of Fluidmaster the security guard seemed to be searching her body, at which point I was almost ready to vomit from anxiety. My rule in these adventures is to take full responsibility for the people working for me, and I was wondering how I was going to get Lourdes out of this, and what would happen to me, when she waved cheerfully to the security guard and strolled back to the car. That is what I mean when I say she was brave.

I asked what had happened to her at Formosa, her previous maquiladora, and she said wearily, "I got pneumonia and also tuberculosis. I assembled radio speakers."

"Why did you get sick?"

"It may have been the glue," she said, which had toxic chemicals in it.

"How do you know it was from the glue?"

"Because it was what everyone was breathing in all the time."

"And what did the glue smell like?"

"I'm not sure how to say it, but it was strong and ugly. It burned the throat."

"How many years did you work at Formosa?"

"Two years, eight months."

"When you brought in the X-rays, what did they say?"

"They didn't care. They sent me some insurance."

"And how are you feeling now?"

"Okay. I had a treatment. Pills and a spray."

"Are the maquiladoras good or bad for Mexico?"

"Well," said Lourdes, "more or less, the thing is--we have to work."

"So they're good?"

"More or less," she said, in what I believe to have been quiet fury.

"Can you tell me what happened after the doctor x-rayed you?"

"I went back to work after getting better and got sick all over again."

In the coarse yellow-brown envelopes of the Instituto Mexicano del Segurio Social lay those two X-rays, dated October 2002, that Perla claimed showed pneumonia and that I photographed. I have not yet had a doctor look at my negative, and even if pneumonia can be proven I see no further proof that the glue at Formosa either caused or exacerbated Lourdes's pneumonia. But here is one thing that somebody at Formosa ought to get barbecued in hell for, if what Perla and Lourdes both told me happened next did happen: When Lourdes recovered and returned she asked Formosa to give her a mask, and Formosa refused.

"And how is it now, working at Fluid-master?"

"It's really good. I do a lot of work with my hands. I sit at a table. It's comfortable. I sit and pack. What we make is the floating thing inside the toilet."

"Now it's done almost always"

What about the bloody tampon? Was that nothing but a myth? None of the people I interviewed in 2004 had ever heard of it in their workplace. The dapper reporter believed that "the maquiladoras were harder in the 1990s. That's what they told me." Se±or A. was sure they were no better now.

Once again I found Se±or A. very plausible. "The maquiladoras started the fashion of testing the blood and urine samples of women," he said. "Now it's done in Tijuana's industries almost always. But this is when you join, not every month."

German was a very dark, somber, weary man who was sitting in Se±or A.'s waiting room when we arrived. "Two years ago I worked in a battery factory," he said. "I was supposed to get off at four every day, and I usually didn't get off until seven."

"Was this factory affiliated with Metales y Derivados?"

"I'm not positive, but I know the company had a lot to do with liquids. The batteries were for wheelchairs."

"Where was this?"

"In an industrial area called Pacifico."

Slamming together the fingers of his big hands, he said, "I would work extra hours and not get paid. Also they don't wash all of the equipment. And they don't wash the clothes. They were very strict about making us wear goggles because we worked with sulfuric acid, but they weren't clean. I'm kind of embarrassed to say it, but I got married and I had to be sure that before I had sex with my wife I washed so that I didn't get the acid on her."

"Did you get sick?"

"They gave us pills for dizziness, and we often got dizzy."

"Was your wife for or against the decision to quit?"

He stretched his shirt and sniffed at himself. "I think she did want me to quit because it was affecting me, and the smell of acid was so strong I had to keep my clothes in a separate room. I used to break out on my arms and neck. And it affected my sleeping patterns. I slept only three or four hours."

I gazed into his dark, reddish-brown, broad and hopeless face, which was heavy with shadows and a mustache, and he said, "I've seen a lot of things, especially women shaped like this--he made the motion men make to indicate flaring breasts and hips--who keep getting more raises, and the bosses keep saying to them, 'We'll go out together.' I've been working in factories for 19 years. I don't really want to work in factories again. Maybe in a vegetable market."

"Are the maquiladoras good or bad for Mexico?"

"I live right now thanks to the factories. People say they provide jobs, but they generate a lot of contamination, a lot of trash. Now the factories just throw the trash down the street, even tires. I've had good luck with my jobs, but I've also had friends who after their six-month contract can't keep their work."

What is the secret?

What is the secret? There may be no secret--no horrid one, anyway. I credit myself with being an empathetic and experienced interviewer; therefore, much of what I believe to be true may actually be true. While the stories of German, Lourdes and the young woman who used to work at Matsushita can by no means be twisted into glowing encomiums to the maquiladoras, the tale of the bloody tampons and Se±or A.'s thriller-chiller about Chinese slaves can't be substantiated, either.

The plain truth is that most of the workers I met, not least the man with the black cough, expressed satisfaction with the factories in which they were employed. No, they were not particularly enthusiastic--who is?--and yes, they did often seem to be strangely unwilling to talk, which I interpreted, based on my prior experience in this region, as being predicated on distrust or fear, depending on the individual.

The maquiladoras are ripe for their own Cesar Chavez, whom many Mexicans have never heard of. Of course, if the concessions the new Chavistas could squeeze out of them were to become too cosdy, the maquiladoras would doubtless pull up stakes to move their operations to China, leaving behind poisonous holes in the ground.

That is one reason no revolution is imminent. The other is this: I mostly reject the Marxist notion of false consciousness. I believe that workers can think for themselves, and if they don't claim to be exploited, they probably aren't. At Mexhon on Insurgentes: Solicita Personal, work to start immediately; chances are some new arrival from the south will be thrilled, Se Solicita Personal at AMAG; Se Solicita Personal Feminina in Los Pinos Industrial Park--and the tall, white towers of a landscape more than boring and less than ghastly bewildered me. At three in the afternoon a stream of women poured out of Los Pinos; they assembled medical instruments, they said. They were smiling and giggling; they liked the work, they said.

A man was waiting for his wife to get off work at Philips plant number two. He stood on a shady part of the concrete sidewalk. When she came, young and pretty in her business clothes, they embraced, then walked hand in hand across Insurgentes and up the steep hillside toward their colonia.

I do think the maquiladoras sometimes show a shocking disregard for people's health. The subtle effects of chemical exposure over time and the generally low level of education among maquiladora laborers conspire as accomplices in the endangerment of human beings for the sake of a few extra pesos.

The maquiladoras are a necessary evil and perhaps not even as evil as I believe. But if their windows were less dark, if their gates were guarded less unilaterally, if button cameras became unnecessary as a means of verification, they would definitely be better places.

They Steal your Wages

The maquiladora where Magdalena Ayala Marquez had worked, Flor de Baja, made avocados into guacamole, which was shipped worldwide. Magdalena was a "big knife." She had to cut 27 avocados a minute for nine hours a day, Monday through Friday, from 6:30 in the morning until four P.M. (Compensation: 95 pesos a day. Breaks: one per day, at 10:30, for half an hour. One could go to the bathroom and drink water anytime.) She said that during the three months her employment lasted, her wrists became injured. She also said some people got arthritis and frostbite from working with ice in the cold room.

Said Magdalena, "They were putting invented people on the time sheets, so the real ones had to work harder. There were a hundred people working at Flor de Baja and 200 time sheets."

"Did any of the Americans know about this?"

She shrugged. "I don't know. I don't think so."

"So who is responsible for the bad conditions, the Americans or the Mexican middle management?"

"The local people are to blame, the people in the office. I've heard of thousands of dollars going into people's offices. They steal your wages, all your bonuses. But if you say something, you're going to get fired and blackballed."

"Well, it sounds like a very effective way to get rich."

"The people who do that get so much money out of the maquiladora they have the money to open their own business. I think also the American businessmen have to be blamed since they shouldn't leave this kind of business in others' hands knowing what goes on here. They should at least have someone keep an eye on it."

"In your opinion, was Flor de Baja among the best, the worst or in the middle?"

"It was a good maquiladora. It received several certificates. It was one of the best for productivity, but for the way the workers were treated it was one of the worst."

"Right now, which one is the worst?"

"They're all the same. They demand a lot of work, and if they fire you they don't give you what you're entitled to. When you demand your rights they blackball you." (Se±or A. independently told me that "in Tijuana, when an employee sues her maquiladora for her rights, her name is put on a list and circulated so she can't find work.")

"Have you been blackballed?"

"No, because the last time I was working for some other plant I made an agreement. I got a certain amount of money. It was less than I was entitled to, but I had the condition that I wouldn't be blackballed."

She was now working at another maquiladora, from 10 at night until six in the morning. "The schedule is the only thing I don't like," she said. "I make air-conditioning ducts at AMP Industrial Mexicana, which is owned by Americans. The wages are about the same."

Suddenly she said, "You can't demand your rights. They demand a lot of work from you. They'll just step on you and fire you. You can't form a union or they'll fire you quick. I know organizers who are blackballed to the point where they have to do construction work just to survive, although they have degrees. One man applied for a job just at the assembly line so they wouldn't investigate him, but the second day he came they found out he'd been a union organizer and they fired him."

"You know for a fact that they fired him for being a union organizer, or you just heard that was the reason?"

"I just heard...."

Why not end here, with one more instance of disputed fact? We'll each believe what we wish. This almost perfectly incomplete portrait of the maquiladoras ends, as every honest investigation should, in midair. It is ever so difficult to begin to comprehend maquiladoras as they are, with their chemicals, fences and secrets. As for the future, well, from Tijuana I remember a tiny square of mostly unbuilt freeway, high in the air, a souvenir of a broken bridge, and at the very end of it, lording it over empty space, a huge handmade cross with scraps of white plastic bag fluttering in the brown wind.

In our country, there's reality and there's superficial truth. --Se±or A., private detective, 2004

A sign on the fence warned of danger, but a convenient hole invited us to enter, and in we went.