Mexican Lives
Judith Adler Hellman
The New Press
ISBN 1565841786
April 1995
Pgs. 63-112
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TWO WOMEN, TWO STRATEGIES

Josefina Valenzuela carries the map of the Metro in her head. On the day we talked in the kitchen of the apartment she cleans on Tuesday mornings, the subway system was comprised of nine lines with a total of 106 stops and another two lines under construction. I spread the Metro map on the kitchen table in front of me. Without looking, Josefina could tell me the stations and corresponding pictograms that would decorate any route I might select. She recited with pleasure the stops with Aztec names such as Pantitlán, Mixihuca, Cuitlahuac, or Tezozomoc, and those with evocative Spanish names such as Salto del Agua ( Waterfall ) or Indios Verdes ( Green Indians ). She also described the graphic symbols that identify each stop for the benefit of illiterate riders who can't read the station signs. "For La Merced," she explained, "you look for the symbol of six little fruits piled on a crate, which shows it is a market. For Lázaro Cárdenas you look for a locomotive, because the stop is named for the train station, which is named for the ex-president." Most important, Josefina could tell me exactly how to get from any point in the city to any other point. The itinerary she suggested was not always the most direct, but it was assuredly the cheapest way to make the journey.

This, Josefina explained, was one of her specialties. Anyone, she said, could go from San Pablo Xalpa just north of the Federal District to Coyoacán in the southern reaches of the capital by taking two peseros ( minivans ) at the outset, riding the length of one direct subway line, and then paying the fare on another two peseros to reach her final destination. But this, she emphasized, was a far more costly option than the one she would choose. Josefina's preferred route required that she change subway lines and go some distance east only to come west again. However, it cut out the extra minivan fares at both ends, and this represented a savings of more than two pesos in each direction. The subway ticket, at this point, still cost only thirty centavos or just under a dime and, of course, once inside the Metro, Josefina noted, "you can ride forever on a single fare."

Josefina has priced out every step of her travels around the city, just as she calculates her purchases and carefully budgets the time she needs to juggle the cleaning of two apartments each day, and three on Friday. She was lucky, she explained to me, because her work came on the basis of recommendations from her employers to their friends, and all of these people live within a few miles of one another in the southern zone of the city. The proximity of these houses and apartments permits Josefina to put in a full six hours in one place and then scurry over to another house to clean, cook, wash, mend-whatever is necessary-for another six hours.

Josefina lives in the heavily industrialized northwestern zone of the Valle de Mexico, just over the line that separates the Federal District from the State of Mexico. In this region, squatters' settlements crouch between major industrial complexes. Here the smoke from factories and the giant state-owned oil refinery in Atzcapotzalco mixes with the toxic waste produced by small-scale, family-based "informal" production of ceramic tiles and bricks baked in kilns fueled with old tires and sawdust soaked in kerosene. The boundary between Josefina's neighborhood and the Federal District is marked by the Rio de Los Remedios. Josefina can remember when this river was blue and sparkling; now it is black with sludge and contains such high levels of industrial waste that gas bubbles escaping from the lower strata make the surface water "boil" like a devil's cauldron. Occasionally the surface of the Rio de Los Remedios catches fire.

Josefina rises every day at 5: 30 A.M. and prepares Teresina, her twelve year-old, for school, mixing the girl a licuado of fruit and milk-one of the luxuries that Josefina works extra hard to provide. For her own breakfast Josefina prepares tortillas and beans, and she wraps more tortillas to take to work-although her employers often urge her to help herself to whatever leftovers she may find in the refrigerator. Thanks to her employers, Josefina eats a bit of meat several times a week. Most of her neighbors are lucky to eat meat, fish, or poultry even once a week.

Josefina sets out for work at six, sometimes a little later. Her departure time depends on the luck she enjoys any particular morning in getting to use the toilet and the water tap in the courtyard of the vecindad she shares with eight other families. She always hopes to be on her way by 6:15 to beat the flow of secondary-school students who generally set out at 6:30, jamming the few buses that travel the route between her barrio and the subway.

It infuriates Josefina that the government sells transport passes that are supposed to be good for unlimited access to the subway and municipal buses but then, doesn't provide nearly enough buses in the outlying districts. She describes to me the frustration she feels when, after waiting for ten or fifteen minutes at the stop as a small group gradually swells to a good-sized crowd, the bus finally arrives. Even at a distance Josefina knows if she has any hope of getting on. After 6:30 the bus is not merely full but is exploding with passengers, with several students standing on the back bumper and clinging to the top of the bus, another half dozen spilling out the door, and others seated on the open windowsills with their legs inside the bus and their torsos plastered against the outside of the vehicle. On mornings like this, Josefina is forced to spend extra money to take a pesero, or combi, one of the freelance private minivans that ply the same route to the subway, charging almost twice the fare charged for the bus.

Josefina's trip to work normally takes somewhere between one and a half to two hours, an average commuting time for working-class Mexicans, the vast majority of whom live in settlements on the periphery of the Federal District. Indeed, as a result of the 1985 earthquakes, which destroyed some of the oldest housing in the heart of the city and forced some of the poorest people out of the colonial buildings behind the Zócalo, where they had lived for generations, into the furthermost reaches of the Federal District and the State of Mexico, even more working-class Mexicans must commute three hours in each direction. For the millions of Mexicans like Josefina who put ,in a twelve- or thirteen-hour workday, the six hours spent traveling to and from work leaves them only four or five hours to eat and sleep. This is why, Josefina explains, she often sees folks asleep standing up on the bus. But Josefina tries never to doze on the bus, whether standing or sitting, especially at night. She is afraid she will be robbed of her day's wages, which she carries pinned into her skirt pocket under the red-and-white checkered apron she wears at work and at home.

When Josefina reaches the subway terminal she is greeted by the smell of donuts frying, tamales steaming in their banana leaf or corn husk wrappers, and simmering caldrons of atole, the sweet corn-meal drink that some of the commuters use to fortify themselves for the workday ahead. Eating from stands in the street is something Josefina views as a luxury beyond her budget, so she makes her way quickly past the food stalls. She then threads her way among the human carpet of peddlers who arrive at dawn to spread their wares in every open space of the broad esplanade in front of the station, as well as in the tunnels, on the pedestrian bridges, and in the corridors leading up to the turnstiles. Here she joins the hundreds of people who slowly inch toward the trains that leave the station at a rate of one every ninety seconds. The train pulls in, the doors open, the crowd surges forward completely filling the car in a matter of seconds, the doors close, the train pulls out, and another takes its place. At rush hour some cars on the most crowded lines are reserved for women and children, an arrangement Josefina much prefers. "It's bad enough," she says, "to be packed like cattle, without having your body smashed against the bodies of strange men who are grabbing a little feel here and there, when they are not actually picking your pocket!"

On her morning journey, Josefina is unlikely to encounter beggars, musicians, or peddlers, because the subway is too crowded for these people to make their way from car to car. When she returns in the evening, however, Josefina often picks up a bargain offered by those who hawk their merchandise up and down the aisles of the subway cars, and she always gives a few centavos to the blind. Josefina also digs into her pocket for the musicians, blind and sighted, who jump into the car and sing a spirited ranchera or a ballad accompanied by harmonica or guitar. She says she sees these people as less fortunate than herself and feels bound to give them something. "Besides," she says, "some of the músicos play and sing beautifully. I like to hear a nice song on the way home from a day of work. "

In terms of transport, Mondays and Thursdays are Josefina's most complicated days. I can barely keep track as I trace my finger on the map while she describes the trip from Cuatro Caminos to the Metro Portales, and from there in three peseros to Ixtapalapa, and then to Coyoacán for her afternoon shift. But for Josefina the calculations are straightforward:

Altogether I clean five places. Two I clean twice a week, and the other three I clean three times, which is why I have an extra house on Friday. On Monday I am running back and forth between the two farthest points. This is a problem because, to save time, I take three combis, which adds up to an extra peso and a half. But fortunately, these people pay well. I make nineteen pesos in the morning and the other señora pays me twenty pesos in the afternoon.

Josefina says that the people for whom she has worked the longest pay her the lowest wage (seventeen pesos) for the six hours she puts in. The wage was established years ago when she started working for them, and she finds it difficult to come right out and ask for more-especially when they have recommended her to their friends.

Tuesdays and Wednesdays I work in houses that are only a short bus ride apart, and these people all pay me twenty pesos for the six hours. Thursdays I am running again from Miguel Angel de Quevedo to Ixtapalapa. But then Fridays, I spend only three hours on each place, and I can walk from one to the other. In fact, one apartment is two floors above the other. The best part is that they pay me fifteen pesos, just for the three hours! Saturday I go back to the houses I cleaned on Tuesday.

On Saturday night, as on week nights, Josefina returns between 10:30 and 11 P.M. She stops at her mother's house to collect Teresina, who spends every day after school and all of Saturday with her grandmother. The two of them then walk straight to their room in the vecindad and remain indoors.

We have to stay inside because Friday and Saturday is when people get paid, so there are lots of borrachos running around drunk, shooting off pistols and picking fights. There are also people smoking marijuana and sniffing glue. It's not a good time to find yourself out on the street with a little girl of twelve.

On Sundays, Josefina cleans her own one-room house, washes and irons her own laundry, and prepares a meal for Teresina, her mother, and herself. Sometimes, to make a little extra money, she brings home some mending or ironing from the people she works for during the week. Once in a while, when she's feeling flush, she takes Teresina to the movies.

As we talk in the kitchen, Josefina has been preparing a large casserole of chiles rellenos, hot green peppers filled with ground beef, tomato, and onion. She now sets the ceramic pot on the stove to simmer, washes the counter and her hands, and turns her attention to a pile of shirts and blouses waiting to be ironed.

As she irons, she explains that her work today is a world away from the earliest employment she found as a new immigrant to the city. Josefina's family came to the city from Puebla in the 1950s, when they built a shack out of cardboard and hammered-out tin cans on open land to the west of the capital. After three years of primary education, Josefina left school to work for the five and ten centavo tips she could earn returning empty garbage cans from the curb to the doors of middle class houses. She next worked delivering tortillas, followed by a stint plucking chickens. At the age of eleven she was placed as a full-time, live-in servant in the home of a middle-class couple in Polanco, where her main responsibility was caring for an infant. As Josefina puts it, "In this house, every ugly thing that can happen to a servant girl happened to me."

The señora used to hit me if I made a mistake. I remember once I put a white sock in with the colored wash and it turned blue, and she really whalloped me for that. Sometimes her husband would yell at her and, when this happened, she would walk into the kitchen and slap me hard on the arm or the face and call me stupid. The señor was kinder to me, but when the señora wasn't around he would call out, "Joscfinita, come here, I need you," and then he would grab me and try to touch me.

Josefina spent three years in this position until, on a visit to her family during her annual week off, a neighbor promised to help her find work stitching seams in a trouser factory. After her years as a domestic servant, Joscfina experienced factory life as the ultimate form of personal liberation.

After the house in Polanco, it was like a dream to work in the factory. It was as if I had been in prison, and now I was released. There was a supervisor on the poor who watched over us at the machines. But after a while, I realized that he had hundreds of workers to watch, so he couldn't possibly be looking at me every minute. We had a contract, and this meant they couldn't beat you or fire you without a reason. And there were other young people all around, and the young men would say things to us to make us laugh and they would invite us to fiestas to dance. In fact that's where I met my ex husband. I was fifteen and he was sixteen.

I ask Josefina if she would prefer factory work to the kind of domestic service she does now. She responds that it is not an option she considers because she cannot afford to work in a factory.

Supporting myself, paying the rent, and providing food for my mother to cook for herself and Teresina when I am at work absorbs everything I earn. Five days a week I take home thirty-seven to forty pesos, and on Fridays, forty-five. That's around four minimum wages. The most I could earn in a factory would be one and a half minimum wages. We just wouldn't make it.

Josefina also points out that the kind of domestic service she performs now boars no resemblance to her experience as a live-in maid.

You have to consider what kind of person would hire an eleven-year-old child to mind an infant. When you think about it, you are not surprised that such people would beat that girl and lock her away in the house.

The people I work for today are different. It's nine years now that I have worked for Señorita Gloria, and the rest of the people are really all her friends and her friends' friends. They are modern and cultured people. I get all kinds of new ideas from talking to them or listening to them talk to each other. Most important, for them, I am not a "servant." I am an employee who cleans, someone who comes and goes and has a life apart from theirs. Of course, I am older now, too. But they address me as "usted," and they speak to me courteously. Best of all, Señora Isabel, whose house I clean on Wednesdays, spoke to her husband, Señor Guillermo, and he listed me as if I were one of the workers in his factory. This means that he makes payments for me so that now I am registered with Social Security and can go to the doctor or the hospital when I need to.

I ask Josefina how it is that, bringing home almost four minimum salaries, she is still forced to take in washing and mending to supplement her income. She explains that she can cover the basics with the wages she takes home from cleaning, but all the extras-schoolbooks, school uniforms, medicine, Saint's Day presents, and so on-come from the work she puts in on Sundays. Given that the cost of living is rising steadily, I try to get some sense of how Josefina plans for the future, how she copes with inflation. She tells me, "The only thing I can do is work harder. But I am in big trouble now because prices keep rising but there are still only twenty-four hours in a day."

At this point, Josefina laughs, puts down her iron, and looks over at me, shaking her head:

Right now I work six days a week, twelve hours a day, and when, for some reason, I have to get my hands on extra money, the only thing I can think of doing is to bring home laundry and wash and iron until two or three in the morning. But, at some point, even I have to go to sleep!

The problem is I don't see anything else I can do. For certain you can't sit around waiting for political parties or political leaders to rescue you, to change your life. You can only do that for yourself. And the only way you can do that is by working harder. The only way my life could change is if somehow I could find a way to work harder.

I ask Josefina if she thinks political activism can ever change a person's life, and I talk a bit about the popular mobilizations in which people like Lupe participate. She just looks at mc and shakes her head once more:

Yes, a neighbor of mine told me about the Asamblea de Barrios. But the way it works is that you have to go every day to demonstrations and meetings and sit-ins and alter you do this for a year or so, they put your name on a list and you get a house. I can't get involved in this kind of thing because I work every day and on Sunday I have to look after my own cooking and cleaning.

My comadrc says that if you join the party of Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas they can get you a house or a better job. But there, too, you have to go to all the demonstrations and you have to stand up and speak at meetings, and when they see that you are one of their people they place you in a job. Now, this is a very good deal for people who have no Job, because they have the time to attend all the events, and then they get a job or a house. But I already have a Job, so I can't participate the way you have to.

Although she lacks the time for political participation, Josefina says she has always voted in elections, and as each electoral campaign proceeds, she tries to avail herself of whatever give-aways the PRI is offering.

During the campaign the PRI always comes around and makes promises: they give you a free haircut, or they bring in a doctor to examine all the children, or they set up a registry in the market and everyone who wants to get married can get married for free, or they give you a shirt or a few pencils or a soda pop to make you vote for the PRI. The PRI knows how to be nice to people for a week or even two days before the elections. But then, after the elections, things are always worse than before.

I always used to vote for the PAN, which they say is the party of the rich and the priests. But I would vote for the panistas as my way of getting back at the PRI. In the last election, I voted for Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas because I think he is a sincere man like his father, Don Lázaro. But when he won the election, the priístas wouldn't allow him to take office because he wasn't one of them.

As Josefina describes to me the trickery and deceit-the stolen ballot boxes, the uncounted ballots, and all the maneuvers that cost her candidate the presidency-she folds the last of the starched white shirts she has ironed. Very solemnly, she asks me if I grasp that these practices are always part of Mexican elections. I reassure her that even abroad, people are aware of the electoral fraud that is practiced by the ruling party in Mexico. I tell her that the ~988 elections were especially well covered in the international press. She says, "that may be the case, but there's plenty that you'll never know, that they try to keep even us Mexicans from knowing."

You know the big oil refinery in Atzcapotzalco that the president shut down in March of '91 because of the pollution it created? They made a big deal out of it, and the president even won an award from some international organization because he closed the refinery. Well, guess what-it's not really shut down. I pass that refinery every morning on my way to the subway and I sec workers going in for the morning shift and a cloud of smoke hanging over the plant.

To tell you the truth, none of this surprises me, because I know that we live in a world of lies. If there is a terrible accident on the subway, you never read about it in the papers, because they don't allow the reporters to write about it. I once saw the police breaking the cameras of photographers who were shooting at the scene of an accident at the Metro station Etiopia. If they could have kept the earthquakes a secret from the world, they would have. This is why I have no confidence that the people in power tell us the truth. I see their lies with my own eyes.

At this point I realize that Josefina will have to rush through the rest of her chores to avoid being late for her afternoon job. I quickly ask her what name she would like me to use when I describe her life in my book. She says I should use her own name, and that I should put in her address as well. She laughs and says,

I live an honorable life and everything I've told you is the truth. I've got nothing to hide. So, there's no risk for me in anything I've said. I'm not like the priístas, you know. I've got nothing to hide.

10:00 A.M.: Conchita Gómez

At ten o'clock on Tuesday morning, Conchita Gómez is working , alongside three other women she refers to as her compañeras. They are clearing away the remaining crumbs and spilled milk from the breakfast they have fed to hundreds of children at the Mujeres en Lucha ( Women in Straggle ) breakfast program. Shortly they will begin to peel and slice the vegetables and cut the meat for the immense pot of pozole that they will prepare for lunch at the communal kitchen.

Conchita says that if anyone had told her ten years ago that her life would one day revolve around block committees, popular assemblies, women's commissions, and a communal kitchen, she could not have disputed this prediction: she simply would not have grasped what they were talking about. In fact, back then, she under stood so little of what collective activities entailed that she carefully avoided those who were involved. "I completely accepted," Conchita admits, "the notion that a woman has no business anywhere outside the walls of her house unless on her way to work, and then, only if absolutely necessary."

You have to understand, I was a very ignorant and repressed person. I was afraid to leave my house to go to the corner. I saw the women who were involved in the collective efforts at best as busybodies, or corn as women of questionable repute, and I criticized them and gossiped about them behind their backs. It was only the extremely precarious economic situation in which I found myself that brought me out of my house and into the organizations in which I am now active.

Conchita's political involvement has now become so intense that her day always begins at the Women in Struggle Cooperative and often ends in the same room at a meeting of one of the groups in which she is active-the women's committee, the cost-of-living commission, or the health committee. Conchita rises at six, splashes water on her face, and wakes her eldest daughter, Inez, who gets the younger children up and readies them for school. Conchita then walks the three blocks to the cooperative, where she prepares the milk, cookies, and sweets (caramel or marzipan) that the cooperative serves to the roughly four hundred children who turn up each morning. Conchita's status as a volunteer in the co operative entitles her to free lunch and dinner for her family- food that she carries home from the collective kitchen in two blue-and white speckled enamel pots. As long as she can assure her children of these three meals per day, Conchita tells me, she feels her time as a volunteer is well spent.

At the urging of the other compañeras, Conchita takes me outside to sit in the sun on two straight-backed chairs in front of the one-room structure that serves as kitchen, dining room, and meeting hall. We are at the top of the cerro, the hill, on which the eighty thousand inhabitants of San Miguel Teotongo have constructed their modest houses, and we are looking down on what Conchita refers to as the áreas verdes. These "green areas" look parched and brown and treeless to me, but they are clearly a source of pride to her. As Conchita's description of the organization of San Miguel Teotongo unfolds, it becomes evident that the green areas represent the triumph of a twenty year struggle of poor and powerless people against the combined forces of real estate speculators, political bosses, corrupt government agents, and an indifferent central administration.

Conchita, who is now in her late thirties, was brought to Mexico City as a child from a village in the state of Morelos. Even today, she remembers very clearly the beauty of her hometown near Cuautla. She describes how the adobe houses with thatched roofs were framed against the mountains and the intense green of the vegetation alter a rainfall. She remembers picking wildflowers in the fields, and she still recalls the yearly round of festivals culminating in the three-day celebration of the village's patron saint.

But Conchita also remembers that, as a child, she often ate only one meal a day, and that meal always consisted of tortillas and frijoles, or beans. Her father, Tomás, could not raise enough food to feed nine people on the six acres of land he received in the agrarian reform. When Conchita's mother, Luz, realized that she could no longer feed her family on the corn and beans Tomás produced on this tiny parcel-even in a year of abundant rainfall-she decided that, like millions of other peasants, they too had to set out for the capital.

In this period, Conchita's uncle worked as a custodian in a large greenhouse on the outskirts of the Federal District. It was in a corner of this structure that Conchita's parents and six brothers and sisters camped out for their first year in the city-circumstances in which they made do until their presence was discovered by the owner of the greenhouse. Next, the family moved to a ciudad perdida on open land near the road to Puebla. Here Tomás and Luz built a rough shelter from scrap wood and other materials they collected along the roadside. This crude dwelling was their home until Conchita's parents, working as street peddlers, finally put together the down payment for a house lot in San Miguel Teotongo, a community comprised largely of migrants from Teotongo, Oaxaca.

Luz and Tomás had no idea that they would become part of a broad mass movement when they handed their down payment to the fraccionador, the developer, who was selling house lots on the sterp slopes of a hill near the Mexico-Puebla highway. Like the thousands of other settlers who purchased their lots from Alfredo Castillo Neira in the early 1970s, Tomás and Luz believed that the land was Castillo's to sell.

In reality, the entire cerro was ejido property, that is, public land given in trust by the government to a group of landless peasants who had successfully petitioned for a land grant. Unfortunately for the peasants, the land they were granted lacked water and, therefore, was not arable. For this reason, it stood parched, barren, and empty. Without question, though, the legal rights to the terrain belonged neither to Alfredo Castillo Neira nor to the PRI-affiliated jefe, Candido Mendéz, with whom he was in league. Rather, it belonged to the ejido community called, ironically enough, Los Reyes La Paz. As it turned out, there would not be much "peace" for these "kings," or for anyone else over the next two decades, as the settlers in San Miguel Tectongo struggled to gain legal title to the land they had purchased in good faith.

Conchita says that mobilization for collective action soon became a permanent way of life in San Miguel, at least for an active minority of the settlers. Not only had unscrupulous speculators sold lots they did not own to credulous rural migrants, but it scan emerged that it wasn't even clear whether the hill on which the migrants had set about erecting permanent structures lay in the State of Mexico or across the line in the Federal District. Thus, along with the question of land deeds, the jurisdictional status of San Miguel became an issue of great importance, because the settlement's official location would determine which administrative entity should be petitioned and pressured to gain urban services for the expanding community. Under the circumstances, Conchita explained, much of the early organizational effort went into the push to gain recognition for San Miguel Teotongo as an urban zone within the Federal District-the administrative entity that had, by far, the greater resources.

Along with these questions of property rights and legal recognition, the settlers in San Miguel faced forms of exploitation so severe that Conchita says even the most timid and apolitical migrants like her parents were drawn into mass action. Not content with selling property they did not own, the speculator and his associates found that the physical isolation of the settlement and its lack of water gave them an opportunity to squeeze more money out of the lot owners. Employing his own force of armed thugs, Castillo imposed a monopoly on transportation, the supply of building materials, gas for heating and cooking, and even drinking water, which was trucked in and sold at vastly inflated prices. Conchita explains that Castillo was able to maintain this level of control because his henchmen ensured that only the buses and trucks he owned or licensed were permitted to ply the road that wound its way up the hillside of San Miguel.

To be sure, none of these problems was unique to San Miguel. On the contrary, these abuses are typical of the situation confronting millions of recent migrants and more permanent settlers in the lost cities in every corner of the Valle de Mexico and, indeed, in every major urban center throughout the republic. During the decades of mass emigration from the countryside, as the population of Mexico City grew by one thousand migrants a day, and the smaller cities tripled, quadrupled, and quintupled in size, ciudades perdidas sprang up in every square meter of unused land, whatever its status or ownership. Along the railroad right of way, under the high-tension pylons that crossed the city, in gullies and gulches and on the black lava rock of ancient volcanic flows, newcomers built their shacks and shanties wherever others did not already occupy the ground. And wherever the squatters settled, petty tyrants-caciquillos, "little caciques,"-appeared on the scene to charge them protection money, bully them into paying "rent," or sell them water, electricity, or other services the state would normally provide. The power of these caciqulllos was reinforced by the fact that they often pledged loyalty to the PRI and, if allowed by the state to dominate and exploit their small territory, they were committed to gathering the newcomers' votes for the official party.

In this respect, Conchita points out, the people of San Miguel wore no worse off than millions of other Mexicans. What set San Miguel apart from other shantytowns and lost cities was that, along with migrants fresh from the countryside, a sizable portion of the population was made up of factory workers. "A bunch of these people," Conchita says, "had been involved in union activity. They knew what it was to organize and because of this, it was more difficult for Castillo to frighten them." Moreover, by the time the Unión de Colonos, the Settlers' Union, was formed in 1975 to deal with Castillo's abuses, the organizers could also count on receiving technical and legal advice from a group of students from the Department of Economics of the National University-militant students who were determined to move their struggles for change off campus and into society.

Castillo's response to the threat to his control, Conchita notes, was typical of the way in which priístas operate. He countered the organization of settlers by forming his own "settlers' union" com plate with assemblies, committees, and the trappings of democratic participation. He even managed to buy off Manuel Urbano, one of the central figures in the Unión de Colonos, luring him into the pseudo union with promises of a share in the profits of his operations in San Miguel. In the end, however, the maneuver did not work. Conchita explains that "people were not fooled and, in any case, thc 'rcal' Scttlers' Union had alrcady takcn root in thc community. Even more important," she says, "is that watching Manuel Urbano, a man many people had respected, switch sides for personal gain taught everyone a lesson." After this incident, the Set tiers' Union was characterized by a decentralized structure and a lot of rotation in positions of responsibility.

Conchita says that when you start to think about the incredible number of battles fought and won by the union over the years you either feel triumphant or totally exhausted. She cautions me that some of the other compañeros who were active from the start might give me an even longer list. However, everyone would agree that the first undisputed success was the rent strike of 1974. The union managed to convince the settlers to refuse to make further payments to Castillo. Even Luz and Tomás joined the others in withholding their payments to the fraccionador.

After thc triumph of the rent strike, the mobilization for recognition of San Miguel as part of the Federal District became the union's main goal. Conchita thinks that this effort really represents a more impressive achievement than the strike. "The rent strike," she notes, "called on people not to do something-something that was convenient for everyone not to do.

Even my parents were willing to go along with not paying Castillo the money that, in any case, he didn't have coming to him. But the mobilization for recognition by the Federal District was some thing positive that you had to do, and you wouldn't believe how many mectings and marches and sit ins in government offices and delegations had to be sent before that effort came to anything.

The classification of San Miguel Teotongo as part of the Fcderal District was a key victory, Conchita explains, because it opcned the way to breaking Castillo's power. Once San Miguel gained the official status of an urban settlement within the district, the community could pressurc for the water, electricity, sewers, bus lines, schools, and clinics it needed. With these public works in place, the control that a cacique like Castillo exercised though his monopoly on services would be undermined.

It was important to challenge Castillo's power by every available means because, all through the 1970s, he continued to sell house lots to unsuspecting recent migrants. This, Conchita explains, is why the "Alternative Urban Project" was so crucial. In the mid-l970s the students helped the union draw up a plan for the development of the community. "There on the map, in grcen, were the 'áreas verdes.' These were sections of land that had not yet been sold off by Castillo." It was critical, Conchita says, to keep Castillo from selling these areas as house lots, otherwise no open spaces would remain for the use of the community as a whole. "How could we have the schools, clinics, recreational areas, bus shelters and other features that we hoped would soon be supplied by the Federal District, if there was no space left to put them in?"

Thus, even as the organizational attention of the Settlers' Union turned to the problem of mounting the marches, sit-ins, and demonstrations that are the standard and most effective means to pressure government agencies to provide public services, the struggle against Castillo continued by other means. Conchita recalls,

This was well before I became involved, but I still remember how the activists seized Castillo's water trucks and the gas tanks and the buses he owned and they held these vehicles and their drivers hostage for two weeks. In the end, Castillo conceded the victory to the union, and he was forced to bring his charges down to reasonable rates. He was frightened, too, because by this time the union had in place a system of "People's Courts" where usurers and rip-off artists of any description were tried for their of lenses.

These courts are still active and they are used to deal with anyone-pcsero drivers who overcharge, saloon keepers, drug dealers-anyone who threatens the well being of the community. As late as the early 19805, pesero drivers were still being kidnaped in San Miguel and held until they signed papers promising to drop their rates to a fair price.

The Settlers' Union was now on a roll. Ifs' members had wrestled successfully with the speculator and the politicians who sustained him, and they now found that the forms of organization that had served them in their struggles to gain legal title to their land and recognition for their community were also useful in pressing for services. One by one the appropriate government agencies were targeted and lobbied, and step by step the settlers in San Miguel gained the paved roads, water and power 1ines, public markets, municipal bus route, and schools and health services that turned this " lost city" into part of the formal grid of urban centers within the Federal District.

For Conchita the most remarkable aspect of the process she described to me is the way in which an organization founded by men and built by men was gradually taken over by women. "Look around," she said to me, "and you will see that it is really we women who are running the show now." Conchita thinks that women have become central to these struggles because their daily lives are affected so immediately by the lack of public services.

We all, men and women alike, suffer if the closest municipal bus line is a half hour walk down the hill to the highway. But it is hEc women who cook and clean and care for the children, so it is we who notice the lack of water or electricity or schools. It is also the women who are here in San Miguel Teotongo during the day to carry out the activities that everyone decides on at night.

Conchita's involvement began slowly, when her husband, Fernando, left for the United States. In the first few years after he emigrated, Fernando returned for a few weeks at Christmas, evcn though each visit home brought with it the problem of getting back across the border into the United States. Finally, Fernando no longer returned for an annual visit, although he continued to send money to Conchita. It was at this point that Conchita learned from a cousin who worked as a farmhand in Watsonville, California, that Fernando now had another wife and family on the other side. Fernando had never been happy about Conchita's participation in the Settlers' Union, an involvement that had developed during his long absences from home. He was particularly irritated by her increasing activity in the Women in Struggle Cooperative. For her part, Conchita explained her involvement to Fernando in strictly practical terms.

I told Fernando that the food I received for free from the cooperative was what we lived on, that we couldn't get by on what he sent us. But the truth is, the more I got to know them, the more I liked working with the other compañeras and compañeros. I liked the feeling of being able to count on people beside my own family, especially when-as it turned out in the end-I couldn't count on Fernando at all.

In fact, aparetfrom the food that she brings home from the cooperative, Conchita relies not on the occasional check Fernando sends to his children from California but on a business she has developed for herself in San Miguel Teotongo. Conchita specializes in lady's underwear, which she sells to her neighbors from a stock she keeps in the bedroom of' her two room house. In much the same fashion as Miguel, the fayuquero, Conchita travels downtown to the Tepito district in the center of Mexico City (a good hour and a half from San Miguel ) to purchase a stock of merchandise, which she then resells at a profit in this peripheral community. As she explained to me,

The bras and underpants usually come in packages of five or six. I pay something like three and a half pesos per item, and I sell them to my neighbors for five or six pesos. It's worth it for my customers to buy from me here because they can purchase just one bra or pair of panties at a time, and I let my customers make two or thrce payments on the item they buy. They can stretch their payments over a few weeks if they like. Most important, they can try on the underwear at my house, which is why they prefer to buy from me instead of in the street market.

Once every three weeks, Conchita purchases three dozen underpants and three dozen bras in assorted colors, styles, and sizes. "Something for everyone," she says. When I ask her if she has sizes big enough to fit someone like me, she laughs and then looks me over carefully and says,

You're not "big," you're tall. That's different from being big. You're tall because you're well-nourished. That's the difference between women here and norteamericanas or canadienses. We get to be fat because we go our whole life without eating proper food.

When I ask her if she thinks she can change this situation through the cooperative breakfast and lunch program she says,

The food cooperative is only a start. Ordinary people here in Mexico are not going to be well nourished until we have a government that works for everyone and not just for the rich. I had more hope when I thought that Cuauhtémoc would become our president. But although most Mexicans voted for him, the PRI just wouldn't turn over power to anyone else, so their candidate, Carlos Salinas, took office, just as if he had won the most votes.

Conchita explains that in order to concentrate on the issues closest to the real needs of the people of San Miguel, the Settlers' Union has a policy of maintaining a distance from all partisan politics, and, officially speaking, it remained scrupulously neutral in the elections of 1988. But it is hard for her to imagine anyone, among all of her neighbors, who did not vote for Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas. And when the returns came in for San Miguel Teotongo, the vote for Cárdenas was so overwhelming that here, as elsewhere in the Federal District~ the PRI conceded the defeat of its candidate. In fact, it was not in the cities but in the countryside that the electoral commission "caused the dead to rise." In the most isolated rural areas more votes were registered for the official party than there were people living in the electoral district.

San Migueleños were very active in protesting the electoral fraud, Conchita explains:

We participated in all the demonstrations in the Zócalo after the elections. The funny thing is that now the priístas have finally noticed San Miguel Teotongo and have started to respond to the demands we have been making all along. Last month the president himself came here with all his people, with flags and banners and streamers in the national colors-and, of course, the television crews-to announce that PRONASOL, his own special solidarity program, was finally going to dig us some real sewers.

Conchita and I arc still seated on the hill overlooking the open space, the 'green area" wherc Salinas made his speech-the same spot where, three years earlicr, Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas spokc to the largest crowd ever assembled in San Migucl. Conchita tells me that she worries about the effect that Salinas's speech had on the community.

I know that sonic of my neighbors wcrc taken in. They wcrc impressed by the flags and the loudspeakers and, above all, that the president had conic to our community. My comadre said to me, "Conchita, isn't it nice that the president is giving us thcsc things!" I tried to explain to her that it's our right to have potablc water and scwcrs and othcr services, that the government is supposed to give thcsc things to all citizens, not just to people living in fancy neighborhoods. But I don't know if she understood. I don't think she believed me.

GETTING BY IN THE BUSINESS WORLD

It is only noon, and the big meal that Mexicans normally enjoy at midday is still three hours away. But Ruben Ergas is hungry now because he has been going nonstop for almost seven hours. He has been in motion since 5:30, when his brother and business partner, Daniel, collected him from his house in the Lomas district. They next picked up their sister, Sarita, and the three headed for the lake in the center of Chapultepec Park. Here they stretched, warmed-up, and ran two five-kilometer circuits.

Ruben says that Sarita is the best runner of the thrce. She has the perfect build and the right mind-set for long distances. But all three run with enthusiasm and, at present, Sarita and Daniel have dedicated themselves to assisting Rubén in his training for the New York Marathon. Over the next six months, they will run in Chapultepec-sometimes around the lake, ~and sometimes straight uphill to Carlotta's Castle. Gradually they will increase their time and distance from twenty to seventy miles per week, until they peak in November just before the race. Then the thrce of them, their parents, spouses, and children will fly to New York and stay in the Plaza Hotel for a week of shopping, tourism, and training, culminating when Rubén crosses the finish line in Central Park.

The Ergas family is intenscly close, and Rubén says that he thinks this best explains why he is still in the textile business. ;'Any straight economic calculation I could have made after the opening of the economy in 1986 would have led me to get out, as fast as possible. But it's difficult to turn your back on a business that has been passed along to you by your father and grandfather."

Rubén's grandfather was the legendary Isaac Ergas who came to Mexico from Damascus in 1907. One family story has it that Isaac arrived in the New World unable to read or write, but knowing only how to sign his name and calculate numbers. Another version of this history says that he knew how to add but not subtract. Cousins of Rubén's from another branch of the family told me that Isasc spoke not a word of Spanish but knew Ladino, a Spanish dialect, dating from the fifteenth century, that became the lingua franca of the Sephardic Jews in North Africa and the Mediterranean. Rubén thinks that Isaac probably arrived in Mexico speaking only Arabic and some French. What everyone agrees upon is that Isaac left the Middle East on a boat that he thought would carry him to New York. Landing in the port of Veracru:z on the Gulf of Mexico was, from Rubén's point of view, only a happy accident.

When Isaac discovered his mistake, he regrouped, invested his scarce capital in a stock of clothing and set out to peddle his goods from Torreón in the north to Tehuantepec in the south. Ergas family legend recounts that Isaac sold shirts to the wife of Porfirio Díaz for an orphanage she patronized and, with the outbreak of the revolution, sold trousers to Pancho Villa's troops and lace dresses to the generals' ladies. In fact, it seems that Isasc sat out a good part of the revolution in Paris, returning only in the 1920s. By this time he was already prosperous enough to set up what was then Mexico's largest textile factory.

Isaac became and remained one of the leaders of the textile industry. He was among the first Mexican entrepreneurs to import machinery from Europe, and he became a pioneer in the use of synthetic fibers, moving rapidly from his traditional production of cotton cloth to acetate, polyester, and finally acrylics. By the time he died in 1976, at the age of ninety-six, he had developed enterprises that integrated every step of textile production from the spinning of thread, through the distribution of finished bolts of cloth to garment manufacturers.

Rubén explains that his own involvement in the family business began even before he entered primary school. Ruben's father, Jacobo, would bring his son to his textile plant where Rubén first learned his addition and subtraction counting spools of thread. Working afternoons after school, he learned every phase of the operation-production, sales, and bookkeeping-from the ground up. At the age of nineteen, after attending only two weeks-of university classes, Rubén dropped his formal studies to work full-time.

I have no specialized training other than what l've absorbed working all my life in this business. I think it was a good preparation for work and also for life. I plan to do the same for my sons They can study or train for any job they like. But from the age of thirteen or fourteen, I am going to insist that they come here to work after school. This is important not only because it will give them a career, if they decide to continue in this business, but also because it will teach them how to manage the fortune that has come from three generations of fathers and sons who have worked hard to create something. This is different from the kind of training a person gets in a university.

Until Mexico entered the GATT in 1986, Rubén, his father, and brother ran a textile factory that employed between seven hundred and eight hundred workers. Located north of Mexico City in the state of Querétaro, the operation was integrated to produce everything from the thread to the finished cloth. But the looms and other equipment were old, and a huge investment would have been required to modernize the operation to bring it up to internationally competitive standards. Rather than invest to update the factory, they sold out and, like Sergio Espinoza, began to import what they had previously produced.

I am seated in Rubén's office, which is only an alcove in what looks more like a giant warehouse than a downtown office building. The structure itself dates from the l920s and is located in an area that, before the earthquakes of 1985, would have been described as the old business district of Mexico City. Some of the upper stories of this and surrounding buildings were damaged by the quakes and now stand empty. The financial and corporate headquarters that once clustered in these buildings, making the area a kind of Mexican "midtown Manhattan," have moved elsewhere. But at strcet level, the sidewalks bustle with shoppers moving in and out of the retail and wholesale outlets that still make this neighborhood a center of popular commerce and a point of attraction for small merchants. It is here that Miguel comes to buy his electronic goods, and Conchita her stock of underwear.

As I look around the room at both unfinished and brightly dyed bolts of cotton, acrylic, polyester, denim, and worsted, Rubén describes to me the decision he made with his father and brother to get out of the production end of the textile trade. He explains the move in terms of the size and structure of his family's firm. The majority of textile producers, he notes, are family-owned companies. The textile industry in Mexico was dominated first by Spanish and French, and later by Lebanese, Syrian, and Jewish families. Whatever changes have been set in motion by government policies, these family-owned companies have generally responded with their own capital, not that of foreign investors. This has been the case as well for Rubén, Jacobo, and Daniel:

When we saw the total uncertainty of the period immediately ahead, we felt wc had to get our money out and find something else to do with our capital. Once we could see how things wcre going to shake down in the textile industry, we figured we would reinvest in something else and, maybe, go hark to manufacturing.

Like Sergio Espinoza, Ruben acknowledges that the protectionist policies in place in Mexico from the 1940s provided manufacturers like himself with high profits on articles of low quality. And, like Sergio, Rubén was shocked by thc suddenness and speed with which the policy was reversed Rubén says he was surprised not so much because of the impact of the opening of the economy on people like himself but rather because of the effect it had on employment. He says that he always thought that, whatever the cost, the government used protectionist policies to create jobs. He always understood this to be the keystone of the strategy to maintain social and political stability. This is why he was unprepared for the dramatic shift: tariff barriers were dropped, many domestic producers went under, factories closed, and workers were in the street. But even taking into account the loss of employment for hundreds of thousands of workers, Rubén believes that what he thinks of as a dose of bitter medicine was necessary to bring Mexican industry into a competitive position. He says,

How many people worked in the textile industry in Mexico? Maybe 170,000 in this period. And, of course, not all these 170,000 jobs were lost or will be lost. But in order to save the jobs of 170,000 textile workers arc you going to stick with a policy that means more costly clothing for seventy million Mexicans? That's the real question, because the fact is, before the government opened the economy, it was more expensive to buy a pair of jeans here in Mexico than on Fifth Avenue in New York.

But even as he accepts the need for an open, competitive policy, Rubén tells me that he is not entirely sanguine about the effects of the apertura. He says the opening served-on paper at least-to lower inflation and encourage the importation of high tech machinery.

But what you really find is that all kinds of goods are coming into Mexico to satisfy demands that range from computerized looms to Milky Ways. The problem for Salinas is to figure some way to control this, because the country is not producing enough to pay for all that it is consuming. What's more, we're still producing low quality goods at relatively high cost. This is something that can't be changed overnight. Hopefully, what's going on now is that industrialists are investing in ways that will eventually permit Mexican manufacturers to produce first-rate goods efficiently. But it's taking time-much longer, in fact, than the government thought it would.

"Personally speaking," Rubén says, "my father, brother, and I were not rocked by the apertura. We weren't worried about being left with nothing to do." He explains that the first, most obvious step for them to take was to sell their antiquated factory. Once they got their capital out of the factory, they were left with sufficient resources to focus on imports. They then extended large amounts of credit to people who, before the apertura, had been the customers for their own cloth, and they started to import from Asia what they used to produce, using the distribution network that they already had in place.

To give me an idea of how well the new import business is going, Rubén shows me the figures for the previous month when they imported US$3 million worth of goods from China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong: denim, polyester suiting, unfinished rayon, and dyed and printed rayon. Bolts of this particular shipment arc stacked against the walls around us. On average, Rubén says, they do about US$2 million of business each month. He explains that the key to their success has been that they have a streamlined, high-volume, low-cost operation.

Our overhead is very low. This building, as you see, is old. But we own it, so we have no rent to pay. We have a minimal staff and split most of the work among my brother, my father, and myself. We use our own money to extend credit to our clients. Thus, we calculate the cost of the article, plus the 20 percent duties we pay to import the cloth, plus 8 percent for the customs agent, and then we add in transportation costs.

Rubén explains that they take a very low mark-up and count on selling what they have imported within ninety days to get their money back.

Right now, there's a huge quantity of contraband coming in. But we import different things than the contrabandistas, precisely in order to sidestep that whole problem. We are importing very cheap cloth, and we much prefer to pay the import duties than to fool around trying to smuggle stuff into the country. At least that's our situation-that's how we work. I know my father would rather close the company and move into another line of activity than get involved in the kinds of payoffs that you have to make to import without paying the proper duties. It's risky and it's foolish.

Rubén says that they found it remarkably easy to establish the links they needed in Asia, although the family had no business connections there before 1986. "For us, doing business in Asia has been an amazing experience. We've really learned a lot."

Overall, the Asians have impressed us with their acumen, their energy, and their approach to business. Of course, this is not the case everywhere. There are times when we are trying to work out some kind of deal in China and we feel like we are talking to a wall. I mean, we find ourselves and the Chinese salespeople in a state of total mutual incomprehension. But in Hong Kong or Taiwan, you connect with people and they really come through. You send them a fax in the morning and that afternoon you have their reply. It's very easy to open a letter of credit, to establish a price, to close a deal. They keep their management costs really low because everyone in the operation seems to be walking around with all the detailed information in his head.

Comparing his experience dealing with businesses in the United States and in Asia, Rubén finds that U.S. firms are encumbered by multiple layers of bureaucracy and higher managerial expenses.

When you call the U.S., you dial and you get the receptionist, and then you get put on hold and then-buzz, zap!-you get transferred to the marketing department. You talk to one person, you want to confirm prices, and he says, "OK, but I'vc got to check with the director." You're back on hold. Then-buzz, zap!-you're transferred again to another department and have to begin your order all over again. No one has the authority or the information to make a decision on his own, to quote you a price on his own authority.

When you deal in Hong Kong or Taiwan, all the people you talk to seem to have all the information and authority they need. They don't have to check on prices and get back to you. They quote you a price and delivery date right away and then they stick by that commitment. Even when negotiating with the biggest Taiwanese and Hong Kong companies, you see the same thing. Everyone is sharp. Everyone knows what he's doing.

Given his current links to Asian suppliers, what worries Ruben most about the ongoing free trade negotiations with the United States and Canada is the possibility that the agreement will come to regulate Mexico's commerce with Asia. Since most Mexican textile producers are not moving immediately to modernize their operations, 80 to go percent of the textiles used in the Mexican garment industry are cheap imports from Asia. Ruben explains that the way the treaty has evolved, a garment manufactured in Mexico can be sold as a "North American-made garment" only if it is made with Mexican, Canadian, or U.S. materials from the yarn or thread on up. Thus, it will not be possible to bring bolts of cloth from Korea or Taiwan, cut and stitch a garment in Mexico, and export it duty-free to the United States or Canada under NAFTA.

In order to rescue the Mexican textile makers from being under sold by Asian competitors, our Chamber of Textile Industries pushed hard for this stipulation. The American negotiators went along because, for their own reasons, they also don't want to see Mexico used as a conduit for the damping of cheap Asian goods in the U.S. market. They don't want Asian goods to enter the U.S. as components in Mexican-finished products.

Rubén doesn't see this outcome of the trade negotiations as a bad thing in itself. But until NAFTA is signed and implemented, he finds himself in an unclear situation. Should he continue to build his import business, counting on being able to supply Mexican garment manufacturers with Asian cloth? Or should he return to manufacturing, positioning himself to profit when the doors of free trade finally swing wide open?

Rubén warns me that it is exceedingly difficult for anyone- even someone who started at age four counting spools of thread in his father's textile plant-to weigh all the options available in textiles and apparel. "Right now," he says, "it's hard to see how the negotiations for the treaty are going to work out because there are, literally, hundreds of different categories of goods to be defined just for the textile industry, not to mention all other sectors.

What's more, we also don't know how the American manufacturers will read their opportunities. Take the case of denim. Before 1986, when Mexican industry was protected, Mexican Jeans makers absorbed every last yard of denim produced in this country, whatever the quality and whatever the price. They had no choice, because the tariffs made it prohibitively expensive to import better material from abroad. Once the economy opened, the price of denim fell to less than half of what it had been, and a much better quality cloth started to arrive from the U.S.

Once the free trade agreement is in place, American firms like Burlington or Swift, companies that produce really good denim will bring quality material into Mexico duty-free. At that point, Mexican garment makers are going to demand high quality cloth. What's more, they'll move to automate their production because, once you're working with good fabric, it's a lot more efficient to turn most of the production over to machines. Then if Wrangler or Lee comes in, the Mexican consumer will begin to demand these brands, especially if these companies carry out a big publicity campaign geared to the Mexican market. At that stage, Mexican jeans makers who can't produce the quality of Wrangler or Lee, will have to look for another market to peddle their goods. But who's going to buy their stuff? Central Americans?

This, Rubén explains, is the irony of the present situation. If Mexican manufacturers want to export, they will have to produce a product as good as the American brands. Although Mexico has cheap labor, Mexican manufacturers will increasingly move toward the automated forms of production that arc used to make high quality textiles in the United States and Canada. In the end, only those Mexicans with enough capital to build large, highly automated, integrated textile operations are going to be able to produce for export. The others will cease operations because their quality is too low to compete with the United States and Canada in the higher end of the market, and Asian manfl6cturers can produce a lot more efficiently at the lower end.

All of this, Rubén explains, is pushing his family in the direction of returning to manufacturing. Rubén believes that the level of ease and success they have enjoyed with imports will not last because the mechanics of importing are becoming more complex and difficult every day. Previously a container shipment took three weeks. Now there are more delays and complications and more restrictions on imports. As new regulations are put in place, his family's company is in increasing danger of bring brought up on charges of "dumping" Asian goods.

When Rubén describes to me the logic that has propelled Jacobo, Daniel, and himself to invest in the construction of a new textile plant, he comes back to the theme of family and the three generations. He readily admits that the decision has as much to do with the memory of his grandfather as the careful analysis of market trends and the prospects for change under NAFTA. It turns out that I have arrived on the very day that the three of them are to fly north to the capital of Durango to close the deal on the purchase of land for the site of their new factory. It is evident that they are excited to be starting up again in textile production. The move to the open spaces of the northern desert will be a new frontier for the Ergas family, as it is for countless other Mexican manufacturers who are relocating outside the central Valle de Mexico and away from the increasingly congested border zone.

The Ergas family has decided to produce denim with their own management and financing, but with foreign technology. The plant will be built in Durango because it puts them geographically closer to the U.S. market. The factory will be six hours from the border, and when the new four-lane highway under construction is completed, travel times and transportation costs will drop even lower. A railroad hoe runs along the back boundary of the property, facilitating the arrival of the cotton fiber they will import directly from U.S. gins. Durango is also attractive to them because labor is relatively plentiful in this northern state. Moreover, although Durango lies in a desert region, the water table in the area is high, so the water that ~s essential to denim production can be tapped from shallow wells. Most important, the governor of the state, anxious to stimulate industrial development in this comparatively poor zone, has promised the Ergas family a range of facilities, tax breaks, and other incentives that make the location attractive.

We're starting at ground zero with this factory. We bought a piece of land on which we'll construct a thirty-thousand-square-meter plant, of which fourteen thousand square meters will be air-conditioned. The factory will be totally pollution-free because the air conditioning will filter out all dust and lint. The water we need for the production process will be purified and recycled. We're bringing state-of-the-art machinery from Switzerland, Germany, ]apan, and the U.,S We re working out a system that will depend less and less on human intervention and more on computers. When the factory is finally up and running, you're going to walk into the place am1 think that you're in Switzerland.

For Rubén, the difference between this new plant and the factories his family once owned is vast.

The factories that we used to ran were entirely geared to the domestic Mexican market and were conceived to turn out cheap goods. We were cost-cutting at every stage. Obviously, today you can't proceed like that because the market for second-class fabric has disappeared.

Rubén hopes that the new plant will also be a model of successful labor relations. He tells me that no one in his family has had any serious labor troubles since the late 19305, when the workers seized and occupied his grandfather's factory at the height of the labor militancy that marked the administration of Lázaro Cárdenas. In recent years, his dealings with the union have been particularly smooth. The trick, Rubén says, is to follow the federal labor law to the letter and to pay precisely the sums stipulated in the contract.

Rubén says that they intend to develop the new enterprise in three stages. At first they will have three hundred workers producing cloth. Next, they will bring in more machinery and automate more of the process. In the final stage, with roughly nine hundred workers, they will also manufacture jeans and other denim wear. Right now, Rubén explains, there are quotas in place on jean exports to the United States. But Ruben figures that by the time he is ready to produce jeans these quotas will have disappeared with the signing of NAFTA.

For now, Ruben says, his focus is on buying the land, constructing the plant, and purchasing the machinery. At this point his family is not looking for foreign partners, but will bring in technicians and experts in denim from the United States and have them train the workers and run the day-to-day operation of the factory. Once the family moves to the production of denim clothing, they will look for U.S. partners because marketing jeans requires specialized knowledge.

As Ruben explains to me the strategy his family hopes to pursue in their new enterprise, he is gathering his papers for the trip to Durango, responding to a series of telephone calls, reading the fax messages that have arrived during our talk, consulting with Daniel, who has the car waiting to take them to the airport, and eating a sandwich. He says to me,

I keep thinking it's a lot easier to run the New York Marathon than start up a business life this one. You may not know how long the race will take to ran, but at least you know where the finish line is.

1 P.M.: Bernardo Navarro

When Bernardo Navarro describes the ineptitude of the government planners whose policies he holds responsible for the destruction of whole sectors of the Mexican electronics industry, he struggles for the right words and switches to English, perhaps to distance himself a bit from the emotions he feels. This is a painful topic for Bernardo, who counts among President Salinas's closest advisers several boyhood friends, school chums and present-day close acquaintances. "I know a lot of these guys," he says:

We all studied together at the one of the private universities, the Universidad Anahuac. Some of these are guys I've known all my life. And I know they are honest and well educated, unlike most of the politicians who were in power before Salinas came to office. But that doesn't mean that they knew the correct approach to restructuring the economy. The fact is, you don't build a skyscraper from the twentieth story down.

I am seated m the boardroom of Bernardo's corporate headquarters in Mexico City. On the walls surrounding me are framed photos, laminated certificates, and awards that chart Bernardo's progress as a leader of his industry, a course that culminated when he was elected head of the Chamber of Electronic Industries in the late 1980S. From that point on, whatever Bernardo's personal situation may have been, he has felt obliged to speak out publicly to denounce what he considers to be a string of ill-conceived, half-baked policy initiatives that have all but wiped out the consumer electronics sector of the industry and unnecessarily damaged the computer, telecommunications, and scientific electronics areas as well.

Bernardo's official responsibility has made him extremely sensitive to the inadequacies of the liberalization policies put into place by President Salinas-far more so than he would have been simply on his own account. With respect to his own firm, Bernardo explains, he had a clear strategy to rescue his enterprise from disaster.

Bernardo comes from a prosperous family of industrialists. His father grew rich in food processing and marketing, and Bernardo's parents were able to provide him with the most solid personal foundation. Growing up in the upper class Polanco district of Mexico City, Bernardo received a first-rate education at the best private schools. An American business associate of his father arranged for him to attend a year of junior high school in the United States to polish his English. Weekends and holidays wore spent at his father's food processing plant in a neighboring state, where he acquired a variety of skills ranging from the mechanical to the managerial. It was here, for example, that Bernardo says he learned to drive a truck when he was still so small that he had to sit on cushions to see over the steering wheel. Finally, Bernardo notes, his family and his privileged education gave him a wide circle of economically and politically influential contacts.

But Bernardo is quick to underscore what he considers the central fact of his biography. His father was a self-made man and he, too, was determined to succeed on his own. For this reason, Bernardo explains, he rejected the opportunities that awaited him in his father's business, turned his back on the family enterprise, and set out instead to answer a series of "help-wanted" ads. The Jobs he found through this channel carried him from one managerial position to another, from accounting, to sales, to personnel work in an assortment of industries: mining, rubber, and finally, electronics. But the dominant theme for Bernardo was always personal independence:

My parents gave me the means to do things, but I wanted to start from scratch. I looked for work on my own and was determined to live on what I earned. It wasn't easy, because my father had a lot of money, my father-in-law had a lot of money, but when I started out, I was lust a poor employee in a large firm.

Thus, unlike Ruben, whose personal and business lives are totally intertwined and tied to his extended family, Bernardo has rejected family links-in business, if not in his personal life-and has relied, instead, on a very different kind of survival plan. His strategy is based on specialization and foreign partnership.

Bernardo manufactures consumer electronics, a field that has been smashed by the opening of the economy. However, his business occupies a specialized niche in this area. His production is geared to the performance market: he turns out cartridges, microphones, speakers, amplifiers, and recorders so refined that-he assures me-outfitted with his equipment, I could launch myself in a career as a rock star, whatever the actual characteristics and quality of my singing voice might be. He explains,

I gear my production to a low-volume, highly specialized market where I don't have to face too much competition. I have an advantage because I have technical knowhow that not everyone shares. Obviously, this is not a strategy that can work for everyone, but it works well for me.

Thus, compared to most of the other manufacturers in his industry, Bernardo's enterprise was rooted in relatively solid ground when the Mexican economy was thrown open to international competition. Making specialized goods that no one else in Mexico, and only eleven other companies in the world produce, gives Bernardo a reasonable chance to compete in a global market.

Moreover, Bernardo enjoys another, even greater advantage over many others in the electronics field. When the apertura was announced in 1986 he found himself in a position already reinforced by foreign contacts and capital. More than a dozen years earlier he had sought and found Japanese partners. Working through a Chicago-based "facilitator"-a U.S. businessman who specializes in brokering such relationships-Bernardo hooked up with a large performance-equipment manufacturer who provided him with technology in return for the opportunity to establish a base in Mexico. This Japanese company was one of the most important manufacturers of transducers, the device that changes mechanical vibrations into electronic beams. Its owners were seeking to gain a foothold in Mexico, a goal they accomplished when Bernardo sold them a 49 percent share in his company. Thus, unlike Sergio Espinoza or Rubén Ergas, or so rnany members of his own association, Bernardo did not need to halt production or to suddenly start seeking foreign investors or outlets for his product when the economy opened. These connections were already in place.

In describing to me the nature of his interaction with his foreign partners, Bernardo explains:

To this day, this has been an excellent relationship, better than many marriages. In sixteen years we have not had a single serious disagreement. We have our facilitator, Mr. Samuel, who lived many years in Japan. He brought us together, brokered the original agreement, and still works with us as an intermediary. When I have a problem with my Japanese counterpart or his partners, I call Mr. Samuel and tell him "look, these guys are doing something I don't like." I yell and carry on, and probably when he talks with the Japanese he translates this as something like "Bernardo is a little troubled because you have not sent tRis or done that." Cod knows what they say back to him. But when he calls me, he is completely calm and constructive, as if this was exactly how the Japanese responded. We developed this system, and it's worked and we've been very successful with it.

Of course Bernardo was not completely immune to the dramatic effects of the opening. Like others, he was forced to make a series of adjustments in his operation. Bernardo had to convert a work force that had been manufacturing complete products from parts he produced in Mexico into an assembly operation using components shipped to him by his Japanese partners.

Much of what we used to produce we arc now importing from other plants around the world that arc owned by the Japanese parent company. It used to be that no matter how much it cost, we produced the pans in Mexico. But that was when we were protected. I used to employ 180 people and now it is down to 80 or go.

When Bernardo explains these changes to me, he insists that in whole areas of this operation he is not showing a profit. He is carrying on, he says, in order to retain his employees.

I want to keep my girls working because it has been very expensive to train these girls and I don't want to lose them. So, in order to pay their salaries, I take on some assembly jobs. About thirty or forty of my girls are really nonproductive far mc, but I don't have the heart to tell them all, "goodbye, go away." These people have worked for mc a long time, so I have a certain commitment to them, in spite of the restructuring we are undergoing.

I should also say that these girls arc excellent workers. All my people here work faster and produce better-quality goods than their counterparts in Japan. It is something my Japanese partners always comment on when they visit my plant. The Japanese engineers come here and talc photos of little modifications that the girls have invented, that they've created out of a hair pin or a paper clip. They arc always finding ways to improve the process. They're flexible and innovative, and that's why I hate to put them out of a Job.

Bernardo allows that the assembly work also provides an advantage in that it permits him to offer new products to his clients. "Using my sales force, I am able to approach my customers with a broader line. In fact," he says, "we've been able to grow and profit from the introduction of these new items that we only assemble from parts.

Having made these short and middle-term adjustments, Bernardo finds that five years after the opening of the economy, he is in good shape to face an uncertain but in some respects promising future. However, while Bernardo was relatively well positioned with his Japanese partners to launch an increasingly internationalized operation, this clearly was not the case for most of the members of the industry he represents. And this is the problem that preoccupies him as we speak in his boardroom:

Becoming active in my industry's association really required the reversal of the attitudes I had built over a lifetime. I was a businessman, the son of a businessman, and I was accustomed to viewing other guys in my field as "the competition. " It's a great honor to be chosen by the others to represent their interests, but it meant I had to learn to think m terms of the nerds of the most vulnerable branches of my industry, not simply in terms of my own entrepreneurial survival.

Bernardo says that when the government summarily announced the opening of the borders, "it is not an exaggeration to say that there were grown men who cried. I mean we literally wept to consider the situation in which we found ourselves. Believe me, I spent many sleepless nights."

"There was no way to plan for the opening because we had no warning," Bernardo tells me. Not only did the regime move without consulting the official representative organizations of industry and business, but these chambers and associations weren't even given advance notice of what was to come. "Can you imagine," Bernardo says to me,

One Sunday I am waterskiing near Cuernavaca on Lakc Tequesquitengo with my friend, who is a minister in the government, and our sons, who are also big buddies. Of course, he knows that I am serving as the head of the chamber and I'm. responsible to a large membership of electronics manufacturers. He doesn't say one word to me about the changes that arc in store. The next morning I have to read in the newspaper that tariffs on finished electronic goods from Asia have been dropped to 20 percent.

The problem, in Bernardo's view, is a lack of experience on the part of the relatively young corps of advisers who surround the president.

I have built my connections in Asia for a long time, and I understand how things work in Asia. But Salinas's guys have no hands-on experience with the Asians. They just want to follow what it says in the textbooks: you know, you have to open the borders because that's what the formula tells you to do.

The tragedy, as Bernardo sees it, is that the planners never really thought through the consequences of their policies. Moreover, they didn't want to consult the people who would be affected because they figured that these industrialists "would just scream."

Well, we would have screamed. But we also would have been able to offer some suggestions on how to phase in an open economy without destroying a whole industry. With a little more discussion and planning, the borders could have been opened, the economy could have been streamlined, and so many domestic industrialists would not have been ruined.

Bernardo insists the apertura was so poorly planned that it was not only small firms that were affected. The multinational electronic giant, Phillips, used to have three thousand workers in its Mexican operation, all supplied by local Mexican producers. With the opening, Phillips shut its Mexico City factory, moved to the border region, and started up a maquila, an assembly plant, that put together parts brought into Mexico from the United States and elsewhere around the world. "As I see it," Bcrnardo says, "we lost Phillips for Mexico, or at least we lost Phillips as part of the integrated, industrial base of Mexico. "

Bernardo is also critical of what he calls the "triumphalism" of Salinas's economic planners:

They keep proclaiming in triumph that "we arc over the hump," that we have put the debt crisis behind us. I hate when I open the newspaper and I read interviews where they arc announcing that we arc over the hump. This claim has no basis in reality. A debt crisis is over when you've paid off your debt.

Another thing that worries mc is that their figures don't check with mine. I'm not talking about the personal tabs I keep, but the figures we have on production through the Chamber of Electronics. When the sixty-eight presidents of various chambers of industries sit down togcther at CONCAMIN and we report to one another on our sectors, and fifty-nine of the sixty-eight say their industry is in terrible shape, you don't expect to hear the political guys proclaiming that everything is great and we arc over the hump.

Bernardo says he appreciates that the positive guys is intended to inspire confidence on the part of both domestic and foreign investors. But he feels that the exaggerated assessments often have a dampening effect:

Sometimes I don't know who these guys think they're kidding. I go to a meeting where we have five Japanese executives, some Mexican businessmen, and two guys from the government. Things don't go especially well, and at the end of the meeting, the Japanese-very polite, as always-get up and say, "very well, we'll try again next year," and they walk out. But when we I leave the meeting, the government guys give a press conference saying that things went great and that Japanese capital is flaming into Mexico so fast you can't count it, and that we can expect, I don't know how many billions of dollars of investment during the next year.

I ask myself: Was I at another meeting? No, I was at the same meeting and that's not what I heard, because that's not what the Japanese said. The fact is, Japanese capital is not coming into Mexico, it's flowing into Europe or it's going elsewhere in Asia, to Singapore or the Philippines. That's what's really going on.

While all of these problems-the policymakers' shortsighted ness, their triumphalism, their lack of candor-trouble Bernardo, he is most worried about the effect of the apertura on employment, and he sees the shutdown of so many factories as destabilizing. "If we take the twenty five thousand jobs that were lost in the electronics industry plus all the jobs that have been lost in other domestic manufacturing sectors," he explains, "this adds up to a very large number of people with nothing to eat." Bernardo says he finds this extremely dangerous. He tells me, "this is why you see so many socialist parties that have a following in Mexico."

I ask Bernardo where he thinks those who lost their jobs in the apertura have gone. Like Sergio Espinoza, Bernardo assumes that they are the same masses of people he sees peddling goods on the streets and subways. However, Bernardo markets a specialized product and, unlike Sergio, does not have to compete directly with street peddlers who undersell him. Nonetheless, Bernardo also views the informal sector as clear evidence of the policy failures of the regime and a great burden to people like himself:

The informal economy is a drain on all legitimate businessmen, because it is growing rapidly and it uses all the infrastructure that the formal economy provides, without contributing taxes or fees to support that system of services. And this underground economy is not limited to street vendors. We have whole "micro-industries," little family-based workshops, that are not registered with anybody and ran purely on power tapped illegally off high-tension wires.

Although Bernardo is proud of the inventive genius of his own workers when they improve the production process with hairpins and paper clips, he is a bit more ambivalent when he talks to me about the capacity for innovation displayed by the informal sector workshops. "If you ride out about ten kilometers on the road to Puebla," he says, "you'll see thousands of wires that people have hooked up to the energy grid that brings power into Mexico City." These people, Bernardo explains, use the electricity to run their sewing machines and power tools, and they produce all kinds of goods on small family assembly lines. The goods are then marketed on the streets by the informal sector "sales force.'' In Bernardo's view, the failure of Salinas's planners to anticipate the growth of the informal sector or offer alternatives to the people who fill its ranks is evidence of the confusion of técnicos who draw their economic solutions from textbooks without considering the "real life" outcomes of their programs.

At this stage I can only ask Bernardo what programs he would par into place if he were directing economic planning for Mexico. Without hesitation he replies that he has no short-term solution to the problems that have created the informal sector. But his vision of a broad economic strategy is clear enough: he sees his own experience with his Japanese investors as a model for the kind of partnership that would be a workable response to Mexico's need for capital and advanced technology. The answer, he thinks, is neither exaggerated protection nor a complete free for all. The trick is to find the right balance between an open economy and protection of the country's own citizens. In terms of specific policies, the ideal, he believes, is for the government to encourage joint ventures between Mexican and foreign entrepreneurs.

Bernardo is not, he assures me, an economic nationalist. "You have to remember," he says, "that business has no nationality."

I would rather open a factory near my home, in a country that I know because it is easier and logical for me to start up a business in Mexico than abroad. But if tomorrow someone tells me about an attractive investment in Japan well, I don't know, I might invest. I wouldn't have any problem investing money in the United States or Canada. I have seen where some Mexican has opened a factory in Taiwan. Others have invested in Spain and France. I admit, when I first see this I ask myself, "Why is this guy investing in other countries instead of Mexico?" Well, the answer is because he has business opportunities there, and that's the way business reacts. And to try to think otherwise is absolute nonsense.

I ask Bernardo if he includes nonproductive investment in the same category. Does he approve of the Mexicans of his social class who have exported their capital, putting it into Swiss bank accounts or foreign real estate? He replies,

For me this is not an unpatriotic act. I think it's normal that a guy who has made some money and feels that his patrimony is insecure in his country will want to protect at least part of his patrimony so that he can count on it in any emergency. If you want to provide your family with some comfort in life, you have to be sure that you have at least enough to put bread on the table in the future.

I'm not talking now about some of the notorious people who stole money from Mexico and stashed it away in secret bank accounts abroad. That's another story. That's stealing and that should be punished. But I don't see anything wrong with taking care of your patrimony. We all do that. You have to protect your money in whatever way you can.

To be sure, Bernardo's belief in the absolute right of those with money to protect their resources is tempered by some sense of social obligation:

If you live in Mexico and you make money in Mexico you should give something back to this country. But if someone crazy comes into office who wants to talc everything away from you, confiscate property, nationalize the banks, impose extortionate taxes, make you give up what you've earned, well, that's another story.

This, Bernardo insists, is what happened in Mexico under the presidencies of Luis Echeverría (1970-1976) and José López Portillo (1976-1982) in what business people often refer to as the "tragic twelve years." Bernardo recalls:

It's not easy to forget when someone steps on your toe. I remember when suddenly all U.S. dollar accounts could only be paid out in Mexican pesos at a new exchange rate established by the government. The government stole from us what was ours! And this was not the only thing that happened to our money. They tell you, "we're not going to raise taxes," and the next day you open the newspaper and taxes arc way up.

Bernardo insists that middle-aged industrial executives and entrepreneurs like himself have gone through "fifteen years of lies."

These experiences have left a scar, and I think it is overly optimistic to think that because we have a guy like Salinas in power who seems to be nice, everyone's going to forget about what happened before. That's not what's going to happen. Business is not conducted that way.