Imperial (146 page)

He was twenty-two and had already worked at Óptica Sola for four years.

I asked him why he chose that particular place of labor, and he replied: That was my only option.

There are several
maquiladoras
at Los Pinos, I said.

My girlfriend also works here. I met her during her break. She has worked at Óptica Sola for three years.

How much longer do you expect to stay?

Not very long, since the chemicals burn your skin.

I myself could see no traces of skin burns, but Lázaro was dark. At any rate, I asked him: Do you have marks?

Not very often. What happens is that your hands start to burn. The skin gets irritated. You have to wash your hands in really hot water to get the chemicals off. They give you a cream that is very cold, so your hands feel worse.

Do the chemicals cause health problems for any ladies with babies?

When you take the lenses out of the molds, sometimes they stick, and then the chemicals get on the women’s clothing. When they go home to hug their kids, the chemicals get on the children’s skin.

I found this slow-speaking, girlishly handsome, dark boy believable. He had no reason to say one thing or the other to me.

When you’re intoxicated the skin gets red, he continued. It especially affects lightskinned people. It’s like a rash. If there’s no further contact with the chemicals, it lasts about five days.

Does it happen often?

Just one week ago, a guy who had worked there only three days broke out with a rash, so his boss moved him to another area. When his skin cleared up, his boss moved him back. So he quit. You can’t complain since you have your thirty-day contract.

But you’re all right?

Fortunately, I’m not so affected. Nor is my girlfriend. She is lightskinned but only in contact with the chemicals ten percent of the time. She opens the molds.

Any union at the plant?

No.

What exactly do you do at Óptica Sola?

I fill the molds with chemicals, I can’t tell you which.
²⁷⁶

How does it go?

First you fill the mold; then you put it in the oven. It’s a big tray. You fill the little trays and put them on the big tray which holds forty-four molds. It takes about one minute. I fill six thousand pieces a day. The chemicals come in a big vat from the lab. I direct the pressurized tube into the molds. There are different lines. Each line is thirty-five people and a manager. There are eight lines.

Sergio Rivera Gómez had said:
In the maquiladoras, they have air-conditioning and lot of advantages.
So I asked Lázaro: Inside, is it air-conditioned, clean, bright?

It’s all based on what makes the product comfortable, not on the worker, said Lázaro in his calm slow way. A lot of times when it’s hot outside they’ll turn on the air conditioners so that you’re shivering.

Who owns Óptica Sola?

I think Brazilians.

Are the managers nice with you?

Well, no, they’re not actually that nice, since the one thing that concerns them is the quality of the product, not the employee. For example, if you’re ten minutes late, they can fill out a report against you. After three reports, you get suspended three days to a week, or they just fire you. I was suspended once for three days because they changed the way I was supposed to fill the molds, but they didn’t tell my coworker or me, so I filled three thousand molds wrong.

You don’t get trained, he went on. When you show up for your shift, you watch and learn from your coworkers. When you start, you have two days to learn. You get suspended if you don’t learn.

I take it that many women work there?

The workforce is mostly female, and most of these women have children.

So the management doesn’t mind if the ladies get pregnant and have babies?

No. They get maternity leave.

As I said, I found him calmly credible, and this last remark made him all the more so. He was capable of praising the company as well as blaming it.

Yes, he was still calm then, but he got anxious when I asked whether I could meet any of these chemically affected people he’d mentioned, whose disfigurements I never saw with my own eyes; whatever harm, if any, this factory may be doing its workers is certainly not blatant; for on more than one hot afternoon at shift-change time, Terrie and I approached the vast white facade of Óptica Sola on smoggy Insurgentes, with the steep dirt-hill where Lázaro lived behind us; here came that long white wall with gates and fence-bars set in it, for all the world like the border itself—why not? Isn’t it another world? In my button camera video, a nasty guard—I mean an effective guard—neutralizes my attempt to sneak through the gate to the plant itself, which is set far, far back, like an American embassy within its vast perimeter. Farther down the vast wall, other guards lounge in their pillboxes; behind them the parking lot’s cars now bustle and twinkle with end-of-shift activity. Workers of all shapes and sizes, mainly women, most often but by no means always young, dark and light, fat and thin, just like Señor A.’s operatives; in the video they look happy but tired; they flip their wrists and smooth their hair. It was at this point that Terrie hunted down for me a lady with interesting blotches on her face and arms, but she turned out to be suffering from postpartum allergic rash. Three women let us photograph them and promised to drink tequila with us, but on the appointed day they must have slipped out another exit gate; I don’t think it was because Terrie and I smelled.

Lázaro was going to bring us to one of his chemically injured friends if we gave him time. When we went back to Colonia Villa Cruz, we had to search a good half-hour among other concrete shanties which were variously dust-grey in the ocher hills (we Aztecs prefer to live on hills, not on the ocean, a Tijuana private detective once said); and when we finally found Lázaro’s house, he himself was absent and his uncle avoided every question. (Journalistic emendation: The place was very silent; all the same, perhaps Lázaro was inside.—These guys do not go out of the house, the dapper reporter with
La Frontera
had insisted. The ticket for one person for a movie is more than one day of minimum wage! If you want to go with your wife or your children, it’s too much.—On the other hand, very likely Lázaro was with his girlfriend.) The uncle wouldn’t say when he was back; he didn’t know anything; he wouldn’t know anything. We left him standing at the doorway, through which I could see a greasy concrete floor with a mattress on it.

“THEY ROB THE PEOPLE OF THEIR BENEFITS”

On Juárez Street in Mexicali, not very far from the Nuevo Pacífico Hotel but closer still to Daniel Ávila’s store, there stands a jukebox bar called Pancho’s. Here I’d met Marí, the assembler of medical masks; for Pancho’s is where women from the
maquiladoras
go on Friday nights in hopes of picking up a dose of happiness.—It’s like clockwork, said José López from Jalisco, who introduced me to the place.—Only the faces change. And you know, Bill, there aren’t enough men to go around, so some girls always get left out, no matter how quick they hurry here straight from work without even changing out of their sweaty uniforms.

So you try your luck?

Well, I do know the place. The waitress she kind of knows me.

We pushed open the swinging doors and it was very loud with lumbering couples, the feeling somewhat rough but not unfriendly; and beneath the emerald and salmon lights I presently spied the gleam of a particular bottle, the shining of a certain straw which led like the handle of the Big Dipper up through the darkness into a woman’s mouth; she was a woman whom the waitress said would talk for money, and she never did give me her name, although I was permitted to photograph her in the end.

She’s afraid, José translated. Everybody’s afraid.

She was haggard, chunky, blonde and anxious; but she might have been anxious merely to be chosen for a dance. The squat, distorted shapes of cowboys reminded me of dancing bears; prostitutes and
maquiladora
girls swayed heavily in their gleeful clutches.

I’ve been working here for a year and a half, she said. You can’t complain or raise hell or they’ll fire you.

How many
maquiladoras
have you worked in?

Oh! It’s been a long time. I started when I was eighteen years old. One of ’em, they closed down without paying me after I worked for three years. The company property, the coolers, fans and the rest, we divided them and sold them.

So they didn’t pay your wages when they closed?

The wages were paid, but bonuses and vacation pay were not.

Are the
maquiladoras
good or bad?

They’re all right. They’re the way we survive.

Is it true that they’re disappearing?

Yes. A lot of them close down and don’t give the people what they deserve.

She gulped her drink, then said in a louder, angrier voice: They just come to a border city, take so much money, rob the people of their benefits, and set up shop in another border city . . .

Who’s more unfair to the
maquiladora
workers, Mexicans or foreigners?

The Mexican bosses! When they ask me to stay and work overtime, I do. But when I need anything from them, for instance if there’s someone sick in my family and I have to go home, they get mad.

She had reported to her
maquiladora
for two years now at ninety pesos a day, five days a week, six hundred pesos a week (which doesn’t add up, but Marí’s attempt to multiply twenty times fifty reminds us that many
maquiladora
workers can scarcely read, much less calculate), six-thirty in the morning to three in the afternoon, with one half-hour break, “making parts for a new car.”

Four girls sat at a table, giggling over drinks. A battleship-shaped old girl, rejected by one cowboy, stood by the bathroom wiggling her fat buttocks and snuggling up against her next prospect. It did not seem to be such a bad life. How was I to judge? What ought to be acceptable? What minimum standard can we hold a system to? How relative is everything? In Tijuana’s Colonia Merida, whose smallish concrete houses, wrought-iron fences and whitewashed brick walls are all seasoned with graffiti and dust, I once went searching for
maquiladora
workers, but failed because, in the politely pointed words of a store proprietor,
this is a professional place.
By American standards, Colonia Merida did not seem so grand, and my failure to distinguish the grandness offended that storekeeper’s class smugness. As for these tired-looking women at Pancho’s bar, who brightened up when they were asked to dance, that crude dance floor, those couples loud and happy, wasn’t this good enough? In underfed Kinshasa and besieged Sarajevo I had
known;
I had felt the wrongness of existence in those places, where most people I met were sad, angry or fearful. But at Pancho’s bar nobody seemed sad; and the sad story which the
maquiladora
blonde was telling me seemed less than real, both to her and to me; I wanted to stay open-minded; I wouldn’t condemn the
maquiladoras
without evidence; didn’t everybody grouse about work? In one of his discussions of alienated labor, Marx reminds us that how the worker
feels
in the process of creating the product is immaterial to the value of that product;
to go to the slaughter is always the same sacrifice for the ox; this is no reason for beef to have a constant value.
Therefore, why not create productive conditions of
real freedom, whose activity is precisely labor?

I am skeptical that any such “freedom” can exist when labor is compulsory, but obviously the more the labor experience approaches the sacrificial experience of the ox, the worse.

Standing up all day, the woman remarked, I get blisters on my feet. When you sit down they get on your case . . . Some people faint because their air-conditioning isn’t enough.

She had never been compelled to take part in any bloody-tampon parade, but
they check you,
not every month but upon hiring. New workers had to provide urine specimens.—They don’t wanna have anyone pregnant, she said.
²⁷⁷

I asked whether she thought that was fair, and she said: A pregnant woman wants to work. She wants to get money for her baby. She wants medical insurance. We women with a baby in our body, we have a right to work.

She added: If you miss work for going to the doctor, you get suspended for one or two days or they fire you.

Near the end she dully said: I fell going into work and the company doctor said it’s nothing even though my feet are swollen.

THIRTEEN HUNDRED MORE

I sat subtracting numbers.
Playboy
was going to pay me sixteen grand plus four grand in expenses for my research into
maquiladoras,
always assuming that they published it. So there was twenty grand. After my agent took her fifteen percent of the sixteen grand, and I paid Mr. D. (whom I liked more and more) for his confidential private-eye report, and I paid Mr. W. for the button camera and its appurtenances, that got me down to nine thousand one hundred. Ten days of my loyal, underpaid driver-translator Terrie made it a round eight thousand. A hundred-dollar plane ticket for me, then hotel rooms for Terrie and me, gas and meals, well, I’d better figure on a hundred twenty a day, especially given hungry new friends and old, so there went two thousand and forty more; and José López from Jalisco would certainly need two hundred, and the button camera had already cost me two hundred more in various miracle devices, absolutely, so now I was down to five thousand five hundred and sixty. (Fortunately, I didn’t yet know about the four hundred dollars in hardware and software upgrades which the button camera would necessitate, nor about the eight-hundred-dollar computer doctor’s bill to which these upgrades gracefully led.) Meanwhile, getting inside the
maquiladoras,
not to mention Lázaro’s house, was less easy than I’d expected. We did try and try, all the way from Insurgentes up to the concrete-cube-clad hills of Matamoros. I think what José López said to me in Pancho’s bar in Mexicali was true: They really
were
afraid. Those two young women at Óptica Sola; the haggard blonde who was desperate for money but in the end didn’t dare to shoot off a roll for me from a disposable camera; Lázaro, who likewise passed up good money, I really believe not out of indolence but fear; 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; I have been very occasionally cheated and misdirected over the years; but never in Imperial 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 . . .