The Human Costs of Mexican Development
Judith Adler Hellman
"Mexico in Crisis"
October 1997
ISBN 0841908958

Chapter 4
THE HUMAN COSTS OF MEXICAN DEVELOPMENT
The development strategy pursued since 1940 by those in power in Mexico led to a high rate of economic growth accompanied by social neglect and economic inequality. Per capita income may have reached one thousand dollars in 1976 and two thousand by 1980, but these figures are more a reflection of the enormous wealth amassed by a small group of industrialists, financiers, and commercial landowners than an improvement in the overall standard of living in Mexico. Over the last forty years the income of upper class and upper-middle-class Mexicans has grown steadily in both relative and absolute terms. But by the 1960s income inequality was as marked as in the period leading up to the revolution in 1910. The gap between rich and poor has continued to grow until today the wealthiest 10 percent of the Mexican population enjoys an income 52 times greater than the poorest 10 percent. One Mexican banker recently estimated that there are presently more than 200 Mexicans holding fortunes of at least $100 million. The increased affluence of these and other members of the upper class is reflected in the construction of palatial homes, private country clubs, golf courses, stables, exclusive new resort areas, condominiums by the sea, modern shopping plazas, and similarly extravagant projects. They travel abroad, shop abroad, and invest abroad.

However, at the same time that the growth of national income has produced greater luxury and ease for a small sector of Mexicans at the top of the economic ladder, the cost of living has risen steadily for all Mexicans. Official government figures showed inflation at 22 percent in 1974, 33 percent in 1980, and an estimated 100 percent by 1982. But, as inflation has driven prices up, workers and peasants have not experienced a corresponding increase in wages or income from the land they work. In terms of what their money will buy, peasants and workers find that they are poorer with each passing year. Indeed, even during the heady years of the oil boom from 1978 to 1981, notwithstanding government price controls, the consumer price index rose by 20 percent while real wages dropped by 2.4 percent. And, of course, this loss of purchasing power by peasants and working-class Mexicans is reflected in virtually any figure that indicates the breakdown by social class and income of consumption of essential goods and services. For example, half the food purchased in Mexico is consumed by the top 15 percent of the population while the poorest third get only 10 percent of the food.

TABLE 1
Consumer price index (1968 = 100)

Year: 1972 1973 1974 1975 1976 1977 1978
120.3 134.8 166.8 191.8 222.1 286.7 325.5
Source: Banco de México. Indicadores Económicos, Vol. 6, No.5. Abril 1978. p.48.

Thus the data on total national income, overall production, or even gross national product per capita reveal only a part of the picture. For a more complete understanding of what "development" has meant in Mexico, we need to go beyond the aggregate figures to look at the way in which income and social benefits are distributed across the total population; At this point we need to focus on those statistics that indicate what lies behind the impressive figures on growth, and look at those data that provide a picture of the way that the great majority of Mexicans live while their country is undergoing rapid modernization.

Rural Mexico
As we noted in chapter 3, the problem of unemployment and underemployment slices through the economy with more than half of the work force without jobs or in precarious work situations in which they receive less than the legal minimum wage. The most dramatic evidence of this chronic problem is found in predominantly agricultural states like Chiapas, Guerrero, and Oaxaca, where 90 percent of the work force lank permanent employment. While an almost universal condition in these impoverished southern states, joblessness is endemic throughout the rural zones, and two-thirds of unemployed and underemployed Mexicans are found in the countryside. On any given day, in villages throughout the countryside, hundreds of thousands of able-bodied men can be found sitting in front of their houses or in the center of a dusty little plaza waiting for work. These are the people who either have no land of their own or who own a minifundio, a plot of land so small that it does not require the labor of all family members who might contribute their manpower. To survive, these peasants rely on work offered by large landowners in the region or by more fortunate peasants who have small plots of their own which occasionally require the labor of extra farm hands. Perhaps a truck will be sent from a neighboring estate to cart the landless peasants off for a day of work in a landowner's fields. If the truck should come, the agricultural workers are in no position to haggle over wages. More likely, no truck will come at all. On the average, agricultural day laborers find work only 135 days out of the year. As a result, their income level is very low-the lowest in Mexico.

In the early 1970s, the average income of all people engaged in agricultural work was $64 per month. Almost 30 percent of the people working in agriculture had a family income of less than $24 per month.. While these figures must be revised upward to take into account wage and price rises in the last decade, in terms of real disposable income, peasants are, if anything, worse off in the 1980s than these earlier statistics indicate. The most critical situation is that of the families of agricultural day workers, or jornaleros. This group includes families who have never received a parcel of land under the agrarian reform program. It includes minifundistas whose parcel is too small to sustain a single family. It also includes the families of younger sons of ejidatarios who, in accordance with agrarian reform law, have passed along their ejidal land grants intact to their oldest son. In 1970, at the close of a decade of spectacular overall growth, of the 1.5 million families headed by an agricultural wage worker, one-third earned an average of only $18 per month. Another 43 percent earned between $24 and $48 per month, while only 5 percent managed to bring home more than $80. These figures refer to the combined income of all wage earners in the jornalero family, which, on the average is comprised of at least five potential wage earners. Although five people may be prepared to contribute their labor, the family income remains so low because the jornaleros are unable to find steady employment and when they get work, they often receive far less than the legal minimum wage.

The minimum wage is established by a national commission according to the type of work performed, local conditions, the cost of living index in the region, availability of work, and a series of other economic factors. As a matter of development policy, increases in the minimum wage have ran well behind cost of living rises. Furthermore, in rural areas actual wages are rarely more than 60-75 percent of the legally established minimum. Indeed, in the early 1970s, the president of the National Commission on Minimum Salaries acknowledged that 80 percent of the employers in some rural areas (Chiapas, Guerrero, and Oaxaca) systematically evaded payment of the minimum wage. Apparently the national commission was powerless to do anything about this situation.

Social and Economic Conditions
The daily life of peasants, whether they are ejidatarios, agricultural wage workers, or the owners of tiny private plots (minifundistas) is full of hardship. In general, the income they receive from their work on the land is insufficient to sustain themselves and their families. Their land is mostly rocky, infertile, and either too arid or too wet to be cultivated profitably. The vast majority of peasants farm without the help of work animals, tractors, or machinery more sophisticated than a machete, wooden plow, or horse. In the mountains and in tropical regions where the bulk of the peasantry are minifundistas, the peasant is likely to leave his house at four or five in the morning to walk for hours just to reach his plot of land. The land may lie five or ten miles away from his village, and the peasant must reach his plot before the midday sun makes heavy -work in the fields impossible. On this small parcel of land, the peasant is likely to raise subsistence crops for his family's consumption: corn, beans, chili peppers, and calabash. The more fortunate peasant may own a cow, a few pigs, a mule, or a donkey. If he has no work animals he may have to walk for miles carrying as much as eighty or a hundred pounds of firewood on his back.

When we look at the peasant population as a whole (including ejidatarios as well as landless peasants and minifundistas) we find that peasants throughout Mexico occupy the lowest position on all the different scales used to measure standard of living. For example, there is greater illiteracy among the peasants than among any other group in Mexico. More than two-thirds of all Mexicans who can neither read nor write live in the countryside. Even among the economically active portion of the rural population, the vast majority would have to be considered functionally illiterate, as fewer than 15 percent of adult males in the poorer, largely rural states of central and southern Mexico have attended even four years of primary school. In contrast, illiteracy has been reduced to only 10 percent in Mexico City and the proportion of children who complete primary school is six times higher in the cities than in the countryside.

Almost half of all rural dwellings consist of no more than one room. A 1979 report indicated that only 28 percent of rural Mexicans had access to electricity and less than half had sources of safe drinking water. These figures contrasted with those from the cities where 80 percent have electricity and 70 percent potable water.
Nutrition in Mexico is poor in general and has declined steadily over the last decade. Somewhere between one half and three quarters of the population do not consume the minimum daily requirements established by the World Health Organization which is a meager 2,750 calories and 80 grams of protein each day. In terms of diet, again peasants as a group are worse off than urban Mexicans: less than half the peasant population regularly eats meat, fish, milk, or eggs. Consumption levels in rural areas sometimes drop below 1,900 calories, and in a number of zones the poorest peasants are reduced to eating wild plants, leaves, roots, insects, birds, and rodents. The state marketing board, CONASUPO (Compañía Nacional de Subsistencias Populares) has 7,500 outlets set up to supply basic foodstuffs to the poor. But income is so low in the countryside that CONASUPO sales represent only 5 percent of Mexico's total retail food purchases indicating that "millions of impoverished Mexicans are outside the basic welfare service."

Since 1910 government statisticians have broken down census figures in such a way as to reveal differences in the social condition of the population in the countryside and in the cities. Unfortunately, even in 1982, this kind of elaborated breakdown of the 1980 census was not yet available, although some preliminary indications su~gest that the sharp contrast between rural and urban life will not be reduced. Still, the figures in Table 2, based on the 1970 census, show clearly enough the contrast between urban and rural standards of living, and they help us to grasp the motives of the millions of Mexicans who leave the countryside each year in the hope of improving their lot in the cities.

TABLE 2
Urban and Rural Social Conditions
Urban Rural
Population Population
(Percentages)

Live in dwellings of only one room 30.6 48.1
Live in homes supplied with electricity 84.5 34.5
Cannot read or write (persons over the age of six) 17.8 39
Go barefoot 1.6 12
Wear huaraches (sandals) 3.8 22
Wear shoes 94.4 65.6
Eat only tortillas (i.e., no bread) 12.8 34
Do not eat meat even once a week 11 30
Do not eat eggs even once week 15.8 30

Source: Secretaria de Industria y Comercio, Dirección General de Estadística, IX Censo General de Población, 1970, (México, D.F. 1972), pp.135, 273, 1081-1082.

Marginality
Taken together, these statistics can be used to construct an "index of marginality." When we analyze the data on housing, literacy, diet, and education we find that the people who do not eat meat are often the same people who do not drink milk. Those who do not drink milk are often the same people who do not wear shoes, who cannot read or write, who live in one-room dwellings, and so on.

There is a close correspondence among all these factors. The population that is marginal in terms of one variable is also likely to be marginal in terms of all the others. For example, because they cannot find regular employment, rural workers also fail to qualify for social security. Whereas 60 percent of urban wage workers are covered, only 11 percent of rural wage laborers and only 3 percent of ejidatarios qualify for social security benefits. Because these different forms of deprivation and various disadvantages tend to overlap and reinforce one another, González Casanova asserts that not only are there great numbers of Mexicans who have little of anything, but "there is an immense number of Mexicans who have nothing of nothing...."

" Despite the fact that the percent of marginal population has decreased in the past 50 years . . . the marginal population has increased in absolute numbers, and should present trends continue, it will increase in the future.... And although marginality occurs in the cities in forms characteristic of slum life, it is a phenomenon which is most closely associated with rural life."

Not only are the peasants the poorest sector of the population, but the gap between the rich and poor is far wider in the countryside than in the towns and cities of the repulblic. The accumulation of wealth in the hands of a few and the poverty of the vast majority of rural people is a direct result of the governmental policies examined in chapter 3. If there remains any doubt concerning the decline and ultimate failure of the land reform program in Mexico, the persistence of economic and social inequalities in the countryside gives silent testimony to the decline of agrarian reform since 1940.

Rural Exodus
The rise in the number of marginal people in rural Mexico is due in part to the increased pressure of population on the land. To be sure, the rural population is increasing at only a third the rate of the urban, and by 1980 less than 40 percent of all Mexicans were living in the countryside. But in absolute terms the rural population has grown from 14 million in 1940 to 23 million in 1970 and an estimated 28 million in 1980. At the same time, however, land resources have remained constant. Only 12 percent of the land surface of Mexico is suitable for agriculture without irrigation. Under the existing agrarian reform program, utilizing the technology presently applied in Mexico, this amount of land is insufficient to support the current rural population, not to speak of the generations to come. Even if official projections on new irrigation water to be produced by future hydraulic projects are correct, the amount of farm land that could be made available with the additional irrigation waters would still be inadequate to feed and employ the rural population. Those peasants who have received ejidal grants are prohibited by law from subdividing their lands among several sons and daughters. Thus, for each peasant who inherits an ejidal plot from his father, there may be five or six brothers and sisters who take their place in the ranks of the landless peasantry. For this reason the number of landless peasants increases each year.

The bracero program.
From the Second World War through the early 1960s, the pressure of overpopulation in the countryside was somewhat relieved by the opportunity for temporary immigration and employment offered by the bracero program in the United States. Mexican workers had always moved quietly across the Rio Grande in a continuous ebb and flow that fluctuated according to general economic conditions and the labor market on either side of the border. But now the flow was to be organized, regulated, and massive. The bracero program was conceived in 1942 as a way to cope with the severe wartime labor shortage in the United States. The braceros (hired hands, or in Spanish "arms") were workers-mostly agricultural workers-who contracted to work in the United States for a specific period of time, usually three to four months, at a wage determined in advance. During the next two decades Mexican braceros sweated in the fields of the southwestern United States and in the factories of the North, often under highly exploitative conditions and at wages well below those earned by American workers. In the United States the braceros faced both racial prejudice and the hostility of the American agricultural work force whose own wage level-low as it was-was further undercut by the bracero program. The Mexican migrants often worked, ate, and slept in substandard conditions while the official program inspectors, under pressure from the American employers, ignored violations of the safeguards built into the bracero contract. In the end, same braceros were cheated out of wages that were due them after months of labor in the field or factory. But in spite of the often grim situation encountered by bracero laborers in the United States, the conditions in rural Mexico were such that each year hundreds of thousands of workers sought to enter the bracero program. At times northern Mexican cities witnessed the outbreak of riots as hundreds of hungry peasants were turned away from the bracero induction centers once the quotas were filled.

In 1964, under pressure from the American labor movement, the bracero program was terminated by joint Mexican-U.S. agreement. But between 1942 and 1964 an estimated twelve million men had worked as braceros, some of them returning to the United States for a few months each year over a period of ten to fifteen years. The money earned by the braceros in the last six years of the program alone brought an estimated one billion dollars into Mexico. Once the bracero program ended, legal migration to the U.S. by agricultural workers was reduced to a fraction, and the Mexican government lost not only an important source of revenue, but an important safety valve for the reduction of unrest in the countryside.

Migration to the United States. The steam valve provided by the bracero program may have been shut tight in the mid-1960s, but the flow of Mexican workers to the United States never ceased; it simply resumed its unregulated, semi-clandestine character. From the late 1960s to the 1980s, roughly 50,000 Mexicans have been issued work permits each year. The rest enter illegally in a variety of ways. They wade the Rio Grande and climb the chain link and barbed wire fences that guard the border, evading the searchlights of the border patrols. They march across the desert and the badlands that mark the 1,945-mile border between the two countries. They travel hidden in the holds of boats that deposit them on lonely stretches of beach along the California shore, or ride concealed in the trunks or under the floorboards of vehicles driven by "coyotes" who specialize in running the illegal migrants across the unguarded portions of the border. Or they sell or mortgage their land and their possessions to raise funds to buy forged visas and other documents. Hundreds actually lose their lives in this desperate effort-lost in the desert, suffocated in the back of a tank truck, or perhaps killed by a coyote they paid and trusted to deliver them to "the other side."

Still, hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, do succeed in crossing the border each year. Under the circumstances, it is impossible to say with any accuracy how many "undocumented" Mexican migrants make their way to the United States every year. The gross flow is thought to be roughly one million-mostly men but also women and dependent children-and estimates the number of Mexicans illegally resident in the United States range from 2 to 6 million. Between 1930 and 1977 more than eight times as many Mexicans were apprehended as illegal immigrants than were issued visas to live and work in the United States. But the figures on apprehensions provide only a very partial idea of the total volume of poor Mexicans flowing across the border. This is because just a fraction of those who attempt the trip are actually caught, and many who are seized, after a few hours in detention and a bus ride back to Tijuana, Juarez, or Nogales, continue their efforts to cross until they succeed, sometimes only hours after their first deportation by the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service.

In the last decade, as the movement of migrants into the U.S. economy became a major "policy issue," increasing attention has been given to determining the motives that prompt millions of poor Mexicans- two thirds of them rural people-to bear great personal risk and hardship to make their way across the border and live without legal status or protection in a strange land. For, once they make it to the American side, the migrants may be treated as "captive labor" by a work contractor, they may be grossly overcharged for wretched housing, their sub-minimum wages may be withheld at the end of a job by an unscrupulous boss, and so on. In short, they are prey to a wide assortment of abuses because those who would exploit or cheat migrants proceed more or less secure in the knowledge that undocumented Mexicans have no legal recourse and that fear of exposure as an "illegal" forces them to suffer in silence.

Given what we already know of the economic and social structure of rural Mexico, the limits on agricultural resources, and the failure of land reform as a program for the future, it comes as no surprise that studies of patterns of migration to the United States indicate that the motives are overwhelmingly economic. In 1976, for example, Cornelius compared wage scales in the United States and Mexico and found a differential of 13 to 1: that is, average pay for unskilled labor was $2.50/hour north of the border, as compared with $l.53/day in Mexico. "Even when travel, coyote fees and other expenses are subtracted, the average illegal migrant . . . can usually net more income from three months or less of work in the United States than he could from an entire year in his home community." Another study which confirms the finding that the motive for migration is largely economic emphasized that adverse economic conditions in Mexico have far more to do with the decision to brave the journey than the lure or promise of favorable conditions in the United States. In fact, Jenkins has found that when conditions worsen in Mexico, immigrants flow northward irrespective of what the market for unskilled labor may be in the United States in that period.

Disposed to accept any kind of work, the vast majority of migrants are employed in agricultural labor: harvesting crops and performing other heavy work in the fields. Some, however, have been drawn into construction or industry. The construction boom in Houston has been fueled part by the availability of cheap Mexican hands for unskilled jobs. Likewise, the development of a new and thriving textile and apparel industry in southern Texas is due largely to the presence of a peel of poorly paid illegal immigrants, and to the consequent inability of needle trade unionists to organize American citizens and documented Mexicans in a setting in which cheap foreign labor is in abundant supply.

Overall we can say that immigration to the United States has served as an escape from the devastating personal consequences imposed on poor Mexicans by the development pattern we have examined. It is a strategy which has turned millions of Mexicans into economic refugees, exposing them to serious hazards and indignities, and placing them in a situation in which they depress the wages of other poor people, if they do not actually take jobs from them.

The border industrialization program.
Another policy that has been eagerly promoted by the Mexican government as a solution to the problem of rural unemployment and unrest is the "border industrialization program." With full support from an American government anxious to reduce the flow of Mexican migrants to the Southwest, the border industrialization program was launched in 1965 with a bilateral agreement which permitted he construction of American-owned assembly plants in twelve cities along the Mexican side of the border. Under the agreement, all duties and restrictions on imports and foreign capital are waived by the Mexican government on the condition that none of the goods produced are sold in Mexico. Special U.S. tariff regulations, Item, 807.00 and 806.30, permit "American products" assembled abroad to return, duty-free, provided that the components involved were originally produced in the United States. Under these tariff regulations, only the "value added" to the product is taxed as the goods reenter the United States.

Mexican policy makers have supported the border program in the expectation that hundreds of thousands of new jobs would eventually be crea ed in these plants. Furthermore, it was hoped that revenue pumped into the economy in the form of wages paid to factory workers would have a "multiplier effect," stimulating other economic activities and creating work in the service sector. Given these expectations, every possible inducement was given to U.S. firms to locate in northern Mexico, "twinning" their assembly operations to plants just across the border in cities like El Paso, Texas, or Nogales, Arizona. "Mexicanization" restrictions would not apply to these ventures; 100 percent foreign ownership was permitted. And to stimulate the development of these assembly plants, or maquiladoras, the Mexican government constructed industrial parks where low rents, cheap electricity, water, and transportation facilities were offered to attract U.S. firms. Indeed, the conditions were so attractive that over the next decade, hundreds of U.S. companies leaped at the opportunity to locate in Mexico. Clothing, electronic components, auto parts, tools, toys, sports equipment, televisions, radios and cameras, and communications hardware were only the largest of the industries that responded to the offer. From the American industrialists' point of view the key advantage of the border was the unlimited supply of cheap, non-unionized, and relatively docile labor. While these same qualities had been sought and found at an even lower price in overseas assembly operations in Haiti, Taiwan, Korea, and Singapore, location in Mexico reduced transportation costs to the point that higher profits could be realized even after paying Mexican workers twice the going rate in a Taiwanese sweatshop. And when American businessmen drew comparisons between their Mexican employees and unionized American workers, the Mexicans won highest praise:

Mexican women are 40 percent more productive than their North American counterparts. Taught all their lives to submit to male authority, they rarely object to the conditions imposed upon them. A US businessman whose job is to promote the maquiladoras to foreign firms explained: "there's no welfare here. You can punish Mexican workers. Also there's the 48-hour week. You don't see any horsing around here, no queues for the water-fountain or the bathroom. These girls work."

Given these inducements, by 1982 some 600 assembly plants had been constructed, employing a labor force almost entirely of young, unmarried women. Maquiladora workers currently receive a minimum wage established by the Mexican government of $1.35/hour, plus benefits which, in 1982, came to 75/cents hour. While this rate of pay is substantially higher than the wages received by the average Mexican worker, it represents a great saving to American employers, who mast pay a basic hourly wage of $3.55 across the border in the United States. In some operations, the differential is even greater: "With the devaluation of the peso, a Mexican worker assembling a seat belt earns just over $1 an hour, while his American counterpart makes $12."

Successful as the experiment has been from the point of view of American capitalists, it has fallen far short of even the most modest expectations of Mexican supporters. Altogether, 130.000 jobs have been created, but even these are highly vulnerable to reversals in the American economy. In the 1974 recession, for example, 55 assembly plants shut down, laying off 26,000 workers.49 Apparel operations are particularly unstable. "Companies often were formed for the duration of a specific contractual arrangement, then dissolved, only to reappear when another production run or consignment was negotiated." The American firms shift their operations back and forth among numerous domestic and foreign plants, hiring and firing at will. In general, one of the attractions of employing Mexican, rather than American labor is that, like braceros, the assembly plant women can be discarded at pleasure: when their labor is no longer required, or they become pregnant or too old or tired or nervous to withstand the physical wear of the minute, repetitive tasks they perform hour alter hour. "Temporary" maquiladora workers may be dismissed without notice or severance pay, and many firms turn over their work force at a rate which guarantees that few attain permanent status.'' It is easy for these firms to pursue such personnel practices because the supply of job seekers is virtually unlimited, and the tasks they are called upon to perform are relatively simple, if mind-numbingly tedious.

Apart from the disappointing figures on total numbers of jobs created, other bright hopes for the program have proven equally unrealistic. Since the vast majority of maquiladora workers are women, their employment has little impact on the rate of illegal migration because most undocumented workers are men. Indeed, the presence of the assembly plants in the border towns inflates the economy of those cities, which in turn, draws more unemployed people from southern and central Mexico into the North. Only 3 percent of the new arrivals in the border cities have actually found employment in the maquiladoras. As in the oil boomtowns on the Gulf coast, the influx of hopeful job seekers who do not find work swells the ranks of the unemployed in the border region, stretching the social infrastructure to the breaking point. Although the Mexican state has spent millions on an industrial infrastructure to attract the foreign firms, its social expenditures on health and education facilties in the area have been modest. This is not surprising, however, when we consider that those who hold the real power and influence in this context-that is, the owners and the managers of the assembly plants- live and seek their social services on the American side. As Forbes cheerfully reported:

The Certron carp . . . has a maquila in Mexicali that pays 670 employees $1.36 an hour to snap spools of audio tape into plastic cassettes. Korean workers could beat that price by nearly half; but Certron couldn't jet its managers once a week to check on a Korean plant. When American managers are needed at a maquila plant every day they can live 30 minutes across the border in American towns with their kids in American schools, as about 350 American managers of Juarez plants do.

Finally, the expectation that the border industrialization program would stimulate the Mexican economy, creating related jobs through a multiplier effect, has not been borne out. On the contrary, the maquiladora plants provide a classic example of a perfect "enclave economy." With all components imported from the United States, and all finished products immediately exported, there is no possibility that the assembly process will spin off into other productive activities. The only possible stimulus for the local economy comes in the form of wages paid to local people. But, given the proximity to the border, it turns out that most of those paychecks are spent on the American side. The higher quality and lower price of American consumer goods, along with the advertising that bombards the Mexicans day and night from the Spanish-language American media, lead those receiving paychecks to buy U.S.-made products. Indeed the propensity of northern Mexicans to pour their disposable income into goods and services in the American border towns has stimulated the economic development of these cities and the general expansion of commercial opportunities in the southern United States. This, in fact, is the chief argument put forward in the U.S. Congress by supporters of the maquiladoras who have fought repeal of the tariff regulations which facilitate the border industrialization program.

Migration to the cities. Just as migration to the North has been a constant of Mexican rural life throughout the century, so, too, the exodus from the countryside to the cities, above all, to Mexico City, has constituted a steady trend from the days of the revolution onward. The shift in the relative proportion of rural to urban population since 1910 clearly reveals this pattern (see table 3).

TABLE 3
Proportion of Urban and Rural Population 1910-1980

% urban population % rural population

1910 28.7 71.3
1930 33.5 66.5
1950 42.6 57.4
1970 58.6 41.4
1980 65 (estimated) 35

Source : Compendio Estadistico

However, in the last two decades the movement has reached massive proportions as each year well over one million Mexicans pour into the cities hoping to break out of the vicious circle of poverty that life in the countryside has become. Rural migrants enter Mexico City at a rate of more than half a million each year. This means that an average of about 1,370 people arrive in the capital each day to seek their fortunes in the big city. And although the population of the capital is swollen by these migrants, in the 1970s Mexico City was only eighth among Mexican urban centers in its expansion, and it currently falls behind the oil boomtowns and some of the border cities in its rate of population growth.

The population of Mexico City is now 15 million and projections for the year 2000 vary from a highly optimistic 29 million to somewhere in the range of 34 or 35 million depending on whether the current rate of population growth persists or can be reduced birth control. Mexican policy makers came very slowly and reluctantly to a position of support for a nationwide, government-sponsored family planning scheme. Although the population growth rate of 3.5 percent that prevailed through the last decades meant that the total population doubled every twenty years, until the early 1970s no official move was made. Opposition to birth control from the Catholic Right was reinforced by popular notions that linked masculinity to frequent reproduction. Furthermore, nationalistic objections were raised by sectors of the Left that claimed the mass birth control campaigns were part of an imperialist plot fostered by a U.S. government fearful of being "swamped" by a more numerous and fruitful neighbor. Only in 1973, when the economic consequences of unchecked population growth had become frighteningly apparent, was the National Population Council created and the first government-funded Family Planning Centers established. By 1980, more than five thousand of these centers had been opened, and official reports were claiming that 38 percent of all fertile women were making use of these facilities, causing the birthrate to drop from a high of 3.6 percent to under 3 percent. Unfortunately, while in the long run the "responsible parenthood" program may bring about a decline in birthrate, the short-term impact will be negligible. Table 4 illustrates the trends in population growth (a) when the growth rate is held constant, or (b) if the more optimistic projects of reductions in the growth rate come true.

TABLE 4
Mexican Population 1970-2000 at Constant and Declining Growth Rate
(Figures in Millions)
Year: 1970 1975 1980 1985 1990 1995 2000
a) 50.6 60.1 71.1 85.8 103.9 126 153
b) 50.6 60.1 71.1 85.8 101.9 120.5 140.7

a) population growth rate constant at 3.5 percent
b) growth rate held constant at 3.5 percent until 1980; 5 percent yearly reduction projected in the growth rate until 1990; 10 percent annual reduction in the growth rate projected for the period 1990-2000

Source: Secretaria de Recursos Hidráulicos, "Estudio de los Recursos Humanos por Cuencas de la Secretaria de Recursos Hidráulicos, Bioconservación, S.A., Supervivencia, Año 2, No. 5/6 enero/ abril 1976, p. 17.

Thus, although estimates of the total future population vary widely, what all analysts agree upon is that the current population will double again by the year 2000 and that Mexico City will become the largest city in the world sometime within the next twenty years. And whereas today one Mexican in five lives in the capital, by the turn of the next century one third of all mexicans will live in the metropolitan area which currently sprawls 35 to 40 miles in every direction, radiating outward from the Plaza of the Constitution. As the city spreads, it gobbles up what was once the richest farmland in the country. Government seizure of ejidal land for urban construction is a process which over the last two decades has claimed 8,926 hectares in 127 expropriations in the Federal District and 16,600 hectares in 300 separate expropriations in the State of Mexico.

The loss of prime farmland is only part of the ecological disaster wrought by the growth of Mexico City, a fact obvious to any visitor to the capital from the time the city looms as a dark brown smudge on the horizon. Sitting in a ring of mountains more than 7,000 feet above sea level, with prevailing winds that carry factory emissions from the most heavily industrialized zones into the city center, the city suffers an almost permanent air inversion. Indeed, by the mid-1970s, Mexico City was two to five times more polluted than Los Angeles, depending upon which pollutant was being measured. But toxic industrial emissions represent only part of the problem. Most analysts agree that 70 percent of the pollution comes from vehicular traffic. Through the 1970s, 400 automobiles were added each day to the 2.5 million vehicles already circulating in the Federal District. By 1981, the rate of increase in the number of cars was 3.5 times the population growth rate and, in addition to the cars there were 200,000 buses and trucks. These buses move six million people a day, while 3 million daily riders commute underground on the 35 miles of subway lines. But encouraged in part by the artificially low price for gas which, as we have seen, was a key component of government energy policy, 10 million trips are made each day in private cars and taxis.
Into this smog-blackened atmosphere come the rural poor in a desperate effort to improve their economic and social condition. Once in the city, however, they find that the work they had hoped to secure is unavailable in the urban areas, especially for those who lack specialized skills or experience with industrial production. As we have noted, something like 750,000 or 800,000 new people enter the Mexican work force each year. And if there are few new opportunities for people in the countryside, jobs in industry have certainly not expanded to absorb the rural surplus. Because industrial development in Mexico has moved steadily in the direction of increased reliance on advanced technology, as industry expands, the number of jobs has not increased proportionately. Thus, the rural migrants make their way to the city, full of hope, only to discover that the city is already full of urban unemployed. According to the estimates provided in a study carried out by the Sub-commission on Migration of the Department of the Federal District, there are presently more than 2 million unemployed and 8 million underemployed people in the capital, a figure which constitutes 60 percent of the economically active population.

URBAN MEXICO

Life in the Slums
Generally unable to find the jobs they seek in the city, the rural migrants are forced to squat on the outskirts of the large urban centers. Here, on the periphery of the cities, squalid slums spring up like mushrooms as migrants construct makeshift dwellings out of mod, corrugated paper, hammered-out tin cans and scrap lumber. By 1970 there were 452 such slums or "lost cities" (ciudades perdidas) in and around Mexico City which housed 1.5 million people, 70 percent of them rural migrants. In addition to the lost cities, poor neighborhoods (vecindades or barrios) in the capital house another five to six million people. Some of the lost cities are perched at the very edge of deep ravines on the Mexico City-Toluca road, while other slum neighborhoods sit rotting in the heart of downtown Mexico City, stashed away in the streets behind the National Palace. Even in exclusive, upper-class zones, small squatters' communities cluster on beds of volcanic rock, along drainage ditches, or wherever some space has been left because the terrain is too rocky, hilly, swampy, or unstable to construct architect-designed homes for the rich. The slums on the main route between downtown Mexico City and the international airport are carefully concealed from the eyes of tourists and other foreign visitors by high walls, constructed by the municipal government and decorated with slogans praising the PRI and its candidates of the day.

Hidden away behind the municipal walls, the lost cities grow and fester. In many of these communities the birthrate is even higher than in the countryside, but the infant mortality rate is also tragically high. Manuel Mejido, investigative reporter for the Mexican daily Excelsior, found that in the slum called Colonia Juan Polainas, 60 percent of all babies die before their first birthday. In Juan Poleinas 2,032 people live in 441 one-room dwellings. Together the 2,032 residents share 27 water taps, 51 open toilets, and 77 wash-basins. Often more than one family will occupy a 10-foot square windowless room, and sometimes pigs, goats, and chickens, and other domestic animals live indoors as well.

El Capulín, a slum that sits precariously under a web of high tension wires is typical of thousands of poor neighborhoods and lost cities in the capital. El Capulin lacks the most rudimentary public services. The people light their homes by pirating electric current from the heavy electric lines that run directly overhead. There are no schools or medical services, no paved roads, no drinking water, no garbage collection, and no sewage system. Drainage is so poor that one torrential rainfall can wash away hundreds of houses. In May 1972, for example, 50,000 people in Mexico City were left homeless after an unusually heavy rain and hailstorm. Even when the weather is clear, the unpaved streets run with black, brackish water that is full of human and animal wastes. Poverty is the common denominator among the residents of El Capulín. Although the general census for 1970 indicated that only 36,559 people in the capital go barefoot, in El Capulin, where 90 percent of the people have migrated from rural areas, no one wears shoes.

Nativitas, a community of 2,500 people who share only 236 houses, suffers much the same conditions as Juan Polainas and El Capulín. In these and other squatter communities, caciquillos ("little strongmen") who have no legal title to the property, lay claim to the land beneath the squatters' huts. The caciquillos force the squatters to pay rents up to $15 per month for the privilege of occupying the little squares of land on which their huts sit. The slum dwellers may be forcibly thrown out at any time. Although they may have been paying rent to the self-appointed "landlord" for a period of years, the squatters have no legal recourse if they're turned out of their makeshift homes. For the most part the police are conspicuously absent from the slums and lost cities, and the crime rate in these places is so high that, by 1970, Mexico had attained the sad distinction of numbering among the five countries with the highest rate of homicide in the world.

When the police do appear, it is often to extort money from the owners of the tiny general stores that serve the residents of the lost cities. However, the uniformed police and the small payoff they demand seem benign in comparison with the secret police who are well known for their extortion of large sums from those whom they discover have a previous criminal record. In order to produce the forty or fifty dollars demanded by the secret agents for their monthly payoff, those with past criminal records tend to fall back on the tricks of their former trade: armed robbery, mugging, and picking pockets.

One high crime area is Nezahualc6yotl, the city that has become infamous as the largest slum in the Western Hemisphere. This lost city sprawls just to the east of Mexico's modern international airport. With a population estimated at 3 million in 1981, Nezahualcóyotl is a collection of poor one-room houses, shanties, and shacks which is now larger than San Francisco, or Toronto and Vancouver combined. Nezahualcóyotl developed in the 1940s as a refuge for the poor who could not find housing of any sort inside the capital. Early promoters sketched out "streets" and cheap house plots in the vast dry bed of Lake Texcoco, an area long considered uninhabitable because it was subject to periodic dust storms and floods. During the 1950s and 1960s this population center grew rapidly as hundreds of thousands of squatters joined the initial working-class settlers on the public lands they had made their home. But neither drainage, nor sewers, nor running water nor electricity was added. In 1970, conditions in Nezahualcóyotl were little changed from its spontaneous, makeshift beginnings a quarter of a century earlier. Although the giant slum was now officially incorporated-thus becoming the third or fourth largest "city" in Mexico- and electric power had been extended into its main streets, municipal "improvements" never kept pace with Nezahualcayotl's growth. In the 1970s only 2 percent of the roads were paved and the streets still ran with putrid garbage in the rainy season and became thick with dust in the dry season. More than half the houses were one-room dwellings and 80 percent were without any kind of toilet facility. Ninety percent of the population suffered from chronic hunger, malnutrition, and parasitic infections.

Lacking drinking water, sewers, or garbage collection, the over-crowded population of Nezahualcóyotl is ravaged by disease as are slum dwellers throughout the republic. The big killers are gastroenteritis and amoebic dysentery. Even in the 1980s, gastroenteritis and respiratory infections, which account for only 5 percent of fatalities among North American children, caused almost half the deaths among Mexicans under 5 years of age. The National Institute of Nutrition reported that the combination of gastroenteritis and overall malnutrition gave Mexico a mortality rate among preschool children that is 12 times higher than that of the United States. Furthermore, diseases like polio, rabies, and typhoid fever still occur in Mexico with alarming frequency. In 1972, for example, Mexico suffered what the Pan American Health Organization called "the world's worst typhoid epidemic since World War II and possibly the worst of this century.""

Occupation and Income
The vast majority of slum dwellers, whether they have migrated from the countryside or were born in the city, are unable to find steady employment. In some of the slums and lost cities like Colonia Juan Polainas, the proportion of adults who cannot find regular work runs as high as 97 percent. How do these people manage to survive and provide for their families?

Most of the people who cannot find steady work engage in such work as selling chewing gum, pencils, plastic toys, or national lottery tickets. Normally they have no fixed stall from which they vend their wares. Rather, they wander the streets, looking for customers for their handicrafts, candy, ice cream pops, hairpins (sold in five-pin bunches), and plaster statues. They jump on and off city buses hawking plastic combs, comic books, movie magazines, hair tonic, ball-point pens, and glossy postcards. From tiny little boys to stooped old men, they bend low to shine the shoes of passersby. Some manage to live on what they earn singing on crowded buses, playing musical instruments on street corners, or improvising dances for the benefit of tourists strolling in Chapultepec Park. Youthful sword swallowers work the grassy margins of some of the principal boulevards, thrusting flaming knives down their throats as an assistant collects tips from motorists halted in traffic. Others clean windshields, wash, and "guard" cars in the hope that when the owner returns to his auto, he will reward this attention with a few pesos. The early morning edition of newspapers are often sold in the streets at 4:00 A.M. by children sometimes no older than eight or nine. To beat out their competitors, the newspaper vendors rush up to the windows of cars stopped temporarily at crowded intersections.

Some of the unemployed who live at the outskirts of the city wait at the roadside for the trucks that pass carrying produce destined for the city markets. Those people gather the fruits and vegetables that fall off the back of the trucks, wash them in the polluted water of their slum community, and travel on into the city where they set up little pyramids of guavas, papayas, tomatoes, peanuts, etc., on the sidewalks of the main plazas and shopping districts. Here, unfortunately, they most compete with peasants who have left their villages in the middle of the night to make it to the city in time to set up their own little pyramids of fruit, vegetables, and nuts.

Another occupation is the age-old standby of the poor: prostitution. And thousands of women who will not or cannot sell their bodies gather up their children each day and travel downtown where they ask directly for alms or beg indirectly, pretending to have lost their busfare home. Those who ask for alms are known as pordioseros, from the words por Dios, "for God's sake" or "for love of God."

Finally, there are approximately 4,000 families in Mexico City totaling more than 20,000 people, who live by scrounging the garbage dumps for saleable waste. These people have a long standing grudge against the municipal garbage collectors whom they accuse of skimming off the most desirable waste items such as paper, cartons, glass bottles, and metal cans, which represent the more highly prized merchandise on the rubbish market. The garbage truck drivers who carry 3,800 tons of waste to the municipal dump at Santa Cruz Meyehualco extract a payment from the garbage pickers for every load of trash they deliver. At another major city dump, Santa Fe, 1,000 well-organized rag pickers sift through a pile of rubbish a mile and a half long and hundreds of feet high. Working this dump for the valuable recyclable items is a hereditary privilege passed on from parent to child. The garbage pickers have organized three cooperatives to protect their access to the source of their livelihood. In the city of Monterrey, where there are an estimated 90,000 ownerless dogs, garbage scroungers compete with dogs and rats as well as municipal garbage collectors for access to the garbage dumps.

Whatever the jobs that desperate slum dwellers create for themselves, the going is usually rough. Obviously there is no social security for those who perform the kind of work described above. In addition, these people are often victimized by policemen and other authority figures who demand kickbacks from the poor to allow them to sell whatever it is they are trying to sell. Finally, the urban sprawl of Mexico City, Guadalajara, or Monterrey is such that simply reaching his or her place of work may cost the peripheral slum dweller as much as two hours on one of the rickety old buses that crawl downtown through the city streets. Even with the construction of an ultra-modern thirty-five mile subway line, public transport in most poor neighborhoods remains woefully inadequate. Only about half of the buses registered for service are in operation at any one time. In grave need of repair, the buses lurch back and forth, belching out the heavy black diesel exhaust that contributes to making Mexico's large cities among the most dangerously polluted in the world.

By the 1980s the condition of some of the earlier settlers and early settlements had stabilized as rural people managed to create for themselves a community within the broader social fabric of the city. However, the constant stream of new migrants to the capital meant that housing and public services became more inadequate each year, and two-thirds of the metropolitan area was comprised of lost cities, slums, and squalid working-class districts. Despite the efforts of the public housing agency (Institute del Fondo Nacional de la Vivienda para los Trabajadores, or INFONAVIT) to provide workers with low-rent apartments and low-cost mortgages, demand for accommodation in Mexico City ran 10 times higher than supply, and González Casanova estimated the overall housing deficit as 5 million units. Between 1971 and 1975, 100,000 units were actually constructed by various government agencies, and roughly 600,000 people were actually relocated. But only a third of those needing accommodation qualify to apply for INFONAVIT houses because they are reserved for the salaried working class. An exception was made in the late 1970s when a small group of marginal families was given the chance to rent low-cost INFONAVIT apartments because the construction of new freeway exits necessitated the expropriation of land on which they held squatters' rights. It gives us some idea of their desperation when we consider that, to raise money, these marginal people generally sublet their prized apartments to other, better-off families, and moved to new ciudades perdidas on the far periphery of the city.

The Working Class.

Urban poor people who are fortunate enough to find steady employment generally live in conditions only slightly better than those of the rural migrants and the urban subproletariat. Like their unemployed neighbors, workers find that housing and social services are in short supply. Most working-class districts suffer from inadequate schools, medical facilities, drainage, refuse collection, and other services. Indeed the line between a working-class barrio and a full-fledged slum is often difficult to establish.

As we have noted, the abundant supply of unskilled labor tends to depress the wages of those who are already employed, minimum wage laws are often disregarded, the basic labor guarantees provided by the Constitution of 1917 have yet to be applied, and only a minority of the working class is covered by social security. Inflation bites into the workerts paycheck, and the cost of living has risen so rapidly over the past ten years that workers are forced to labor longer and longer hours simply to maintain their families at the same standard of living. "Although the 1980s have brought a small but continuing rise in living standards for a small part of the working class (those organized in strong unions), those of most unorganized workers suffered serious deterioration." After basic food and rent are paid, these people rarely have any money left to put aside as savings. As a result, an illness or an unforeseen expense normally precipitates an economic crisis for the working-class family. Even salaried workers who are somewhat better off have great difficulty accumulating savings. Salaried workers bear a particularly heavy tax burden because the unemployed have no reported income to tax, while the bourgeoisie is taxed lightly or manages to evade taxation altogether.

Naturally many workers dream of a better future for their children, if not for themselves. Accordingly, they struggle to send their children on to higher education. However, the number of working-class students attending secondary school in Mexico is disproportionately small, and we find that among all the students enrolled in the public National University, only 14.7 percent are sons or daughters of workers. In fact, 43 percent of all university students come from the richest 9 pe cent of Mexican families, and the average university student's parents enjoy a family income 3.2 times the national average.

CONCLUSION

In chapters 3 and 4 we have examined the rapid process of economic development, which those in power like to call the Mexican miracle. We have also surveyed the conditions in which the bulk of the population lives as the ruling elite struggles to push Mexico into the ranks of the advanced, modernized, industrial nations. The data presented in this chapter should give same notion of the real-life experiences that are often lumped together under such seemingly neutral terms as "foregone consumption," "the social costs of development," and "social dislocation." While Mexico has shown remarkable progress on a number of economic scales, and has joined the ranks of the "oil-rich nations," the majority of its people continue to live in a condition most accurately described as wretchedness or squalor. And most live this way with very little hope of ever escaping. For people whose social welfare has been sacrificed to the goal of capital accumulation, the term "Mexican miracle" must have a very bitter ring. One group of Mexican intellectuals described the miracle this way:

If there is something "miraculous" in Mexico, it is that the people tolerate a situation of backwardness and dependency in which millions of Mexicans barely manage to survive, and justice and democracy are conspicuous by their absence or exist only in the rhetoric of the PRI.