Trading Places in El Paso and Juarez: Plans, Policies, Symptoms

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TRADING PLACES IN EL PASO AND JUAREZ: PLANS, POLICIES, SYMPTOMS In the last decade, Juarez has been cited as one of the world’s most violent cities, a by-product of turf wars between rival drug cartels for monopolies on lucrative trade routes into the United States. However, Juarez has a notable history as a hub for other forms of trade between the United States and Mexico and was once considered a “showroom” on the border, a site for the cultivation of Mexico’s tourist industry during the 1960s when the Programa Nacional Fronterizo (ProNaF) was set in motion by Adolfo Lopez Mateos in 1961.1 Juarez borders on the American city of El Paso and these twin cities form a unique pairing in the geography of the American Southwest/Northern Mexico. After the San Diego-Tijuana region, El Paso and Juarez form the second largest international urban area that spans the U.S.-Mexico border. Unlike San Diego and Tijuana, which are separated by a few miles, the city centres of El Paso and Juarez are contiguous and connected by bridges which are easily crossed on foot.2 The physical proximity of these cities and their shared history as a gateway through the mountains (El Paso del Norte) has shaped both official and unofficial economic activity within the U.S. Mexico borderlands more generally. Juarez is often regarded as an informal city of 1.5 million, an unplanned mass of colonias and transnational maquiladoras that resulted from the rapid industrialization of Mexico’s northern border between the 1960s and 1990s. However, its historic centre and its more recent ProNaF zone represent two significant urban plans that have shaped its relationship to the neighbouring city of El Paso and the United States in ways that officially commemorate rare moments of agreement between the two countries. The informal circulation of goods along the older bridge connecting El Paso and Juarez runs contrary to expectations: the trade in secondhand goods here is quite easily seen flowing south from street markets in El Paso where items are brought into Juarez and points throughout Mexico and Central America. However, the official ProNaF infrastructure established during the

1960s to accommodate flows of American tourists in automobiles is now quiet and relatively empty, while street markets and swap-meets in El Paso see a steady flow of day traders visiting from Juarez, buying cheap used and overstock goods cast off from mainstream American markets. The economic conditions that have enabled this unofficial trade are complex, but they can perhaps be understood as a kind of epi-phenomenon or symptom of larger trade policies established between the United States and Mexico (the Border Industrialization Program in the 1960s and the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1994) as well as a benign cousin of the arms trade from the U.S. that flows into Mexico, fuelling much of the violence that the country has seen in recent years. In the weekend markets near the Paso del Norte Bridge that connects downtown El Paso with the old tourist district of Juarez (along Avinedo Benito Juraez), one can see two forms of unofficial trade taking place: the export of narcocorridos to the United States alongside the piles of used clothing destined for “fayuca hormiga”, the local expression for second hand clothes smuggling, which is severely restricted in Mexico. Fayuca Hormiga translates into English as “ant trade” as clothes are often concealed as laundry or small personal purchases of new clothes from the U.S. and are brought back to Juarez by “armpit smugglers” who cross on foot with shopping bags, sometimes multiple times per day. In order to protect the Mexican textile and garment industries, Mexico’s official policy toward the import of used clothing is an import tax of 35 per cent along with a fine of up to 20,000 pesos (US$2,000) if caught with a substantial amount of used clothing.3 The ironies here are thick. The sale of narcocorridos, ballads chronicling the political unrealities of the drug trade, are exported for sale in the United States in a bizarre twist of bad policy, a.k.a. the “war on drugs”, while legal markets for used American clothing bound for the global south are processed in large warehouses stateside to furnish a restricted market in Mexico.

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1 Marisol Rodriguez and Hector Rivero, “ProNaF, Cuidad Juarez: Planning and Urban Transformation,” ITU A/Z 8, no. 1 (2011): 196–207. 2 San Diego and Tijuana’s city centres are separated by several miles and one passes by the Imperial Beach military base and Tijuana River National Estuarine Research Reserve when travelling south toward Tijuana along the I–75. Hence, San Diego is physically at some remove from the urban density of Tijuana. 3 Melissa Gaultier, “Fayuca Hormiga: The Cross-Border Trade of Used Clothing between the United States and Mexico,” in Borderlands: Comparing Border Security in North America and Europe, ed. Emanuel Brunet-Jailly (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 2007), 95–116. 4 Rodriquez and Rivero, “ProNaF, Cuidad Juarez.” 5 Daniel D. Arreola and James R. Curtis, The Mexican Border Cities: Landscape Anatomy and Place Personality (Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 1993). 6 Rodriquez and Rivero, “ProNaF, Cuidad Juarez.”

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Lincoln greets drivers heading south into Juarez from El Paso and the ProNaF marketplace was built as a kind of modernist strip mall connected to the architectural centrepiece at the apex of the plan, the conical Arts and Anthropology Museum. The ProNaF district has been largely neglected since the 1960s but its symbolic value in marking the peaceful resolution the Chamizal boundary dispute in El Paso-Juarez played well in the creation of the Border Industrialization Program in 1965 which established export processing zones in Northern Mexico for American and transnational companies to take advantage of the heady combination of cheap labor, lax environmental regulation and proximity to U.S. markets. In the transition from a modernist cultural plan to foster international relations on the border (ProNaF) to the economic policies set in motion through free trade agreements in the late 20th century (NAFTA), which have arguably gutted Mexico’s stability, there is a stark juxtaposition seen in marketplaces on either side of the border. Where the optimistically open spaces of the ProNaF period beckoned to American audiences in the 1960s, this complex is now quiet and often empty, while the cross border traffic between El Paso and Juarez circulates steadily through the informal markets that stretch between the older city centres. Where transnational policies failed to establish “good” neighbourly relations at the border, the interface can perhaps be found in the exchange of “licit” goods traveling between the two cities.

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Acculturation and Economic Policy on the Border: ProNaF and the Border Industrialization Program The population growth in cities along Mexico’s northern border began only in the middle of the 20th century and the border region garnered the reputation as cultural backwater, a tawdry, Americanized and illegitimate zone of Mexico far away from the seat of Mexican culture in the south. ProNaF was established to put a stamp of cultural legitimacy on the growing tourist industry at the border and to suggest that Mexico was modernizing and “open for business” in the 1960s.4 Mexican craft markets were established for American tourists where sarapes and sombreros were abundantly on offer; at the same time several ProNaF complexes included archeological museums to showcase pre-Colombian artefacts to stem the tide of pop-cultural versions of Mexicanness proliferating in the north.5 Under ProNaF, Juarez was the city that received the most funding and infrastructure as the project was instituted at the same time as the international resolution of a disputed portion of land known as El Chamizal in 1963.6 The boundary between the United States and Mexico surveyed in 1848 followed the course of the Rio Grande/Rio Bravo from the Gulf of Mexico westward to El Paso-Juarez where it then continued straight overland through the desert and across the mountains to Tijuana. However, the river had shifted course significantly during the 19th century; by the turn of the 20th century a channel engineered to control flooding had created Cordoba Island, an artificial island between the two countries that became a grey zone of commercial activity, most notably during Prohibition in the 1930s. The dispute over this territory was resolved in 1963 when President Kennedy offered to honour the recommendations of an international tribunal held over 50 years earlier in order to broker new economic arrangements between the U.S. and Latin America through the Alliance for Progress, a controversial development programme which was short lived. The ProNaF plan for Juarez was designed by the Mexican architect Mario Pani and the urban planner Domingo Garcia Ramos, who established the plan along the base of the Chamizal park with access to the U.S. border along a wide boulevard that connected to the newly constructed bridge. A statue of Abraham

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