Assembly Lines: Maquiladoras, Poverty, and the Environment in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands, 1966-1972

Harvey, Sean P

doi:https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-et8e-c994

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Assembly Lines: Maquiladoras, Poverty, and the Environment in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands, 1966-1972

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This project uses the political and environmental history of maquiladoras—duty-free assembly plants along the U.S.-Mexico border—to offer new insights into two pivotal moments in the history of the U.S political economy: the poverty eradication plans of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society and the neoliberal growth models of the late twentieth century. Although many historians consider the conservative ascendancy of the 1980s as antithetical to mid-century liberalism, the major argument of this book manuscript is that Great Society programs along the border laid the groundwork for neoliberal policies toward labor, trade, and the environment and precipitated a rearrangement in national political coalitions in the early 1970s. Federal planners thought that the U.S.-Mexico borderlands were a laboratory for experimenting with different solutions for rural poverty and environmental destruction. The primary case study for my project is the Commission for Border Development and Friendship (CODAF). CODAF was a bilateral planning agency founded in 1966 by Mexican President Gustavo Diaz Ordaz and U.S. President Lyndon Johnson. Johnson charged Ambassador Raymond Telles with improving the standard of living in the geographically isolated and impoverished U.S-Mexico borderlands through regional planning programs in areas such as education, housing, and economic development. After witnessing the economic success of maquiladoras in Mexico’s Programa Nacional Fronterizo, Telles and other American policymakers in the U.S. Southwest imagined an expansion of these factories into the United States. Maquiladoras are offshore assembly sites that overcame the border region’s paucity of natural resources by importing the necessary components to build profitable consumer items, like televisions. The plan to build American maquiladoras was part of a far-reaching program for the social, economic, and environmental betterment of the borderlands region, but they quickly became symbols of how the new globalized economies of the United States and Mexico polluted environments and exploited workers. This project demonstrates that the U.S.-Mexico border was at the heart of debates over the future of the American economy during the 1960s. These debates illuminate how the Democratic Party’s vision for the country’s economic future ignored the discrimination that hindered the economic and political advancement of ethnic Mexicans in the borderlands and beyond. This claim is significant in three main ways. First, this case study demonstrates a larger continuity between mid-century liberalism and late-twentieth century conservatism through the Great Society’s use of market-based programs to alleviate poverty. Second, it uncovers how Texas and the U.S.-Mexico borderlands played a pivotal role in the way that mid-century liberals understood poverty and economic growth. Last, it shows that the United States cooperated with and emulated Mexico in order to overcome the problems of poverty and environmental destruction on the U.S. side of the border.

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