AGE: 42
OCCUPATION: Labor organizer
BIRTHPLACE: Tehuacán, Mexico
INTERVIEWED IN: Tehuacán, Mexico
Martín Barrios was raised in a family of activists in Tehuacán. He has spent over twenty years working as a human rights advocate in the Mexican state of Puebla, and he has defended labor rights for over twelve years. According to Martín, the fight for rights among indigenous Mexicans shares a close affinity to the struggle for labor rights in Tehuacán’s numerous maquilas.1 For Martín, the power dynamic of the maquila echoes the centuries-old relationship between European colonizers and the native population of Mexico.
Martín keeps busy between his activism and a rock band he’s led for years, and he can be hard to pin down. Still, we manage to reach him for a series of interviews between 2011 and 2013. Today, Martín is the director of the Commission for Human and Labor Rights in Tehuacán Valley, and he has opened up his house as a meeting space ever since the commission’s office closed down due to financial difficulties. A victim of violence, death threats, and wrongful imprisonment—as well as the beneficiary of protective measures by international agencies—Martín says that his work defending human rights comes from the positive examples of his parents.
IT WAS A PEACEFUL LIFE
I’ve lived here in Tehuacán, Puebla, since I was born in 1972. When I was a kid, Tehuacán was a lot smaller than it is now—the downtown area was only four or five blocks long. There was less infrastructure, and the housing built for workers at the maquilas was just starting to pop up.2 From where I lived, you could walk for ten or fifteen minutes and reach the fields. At that time there were trees, gardens outside. You could play soccer all day. The streets were safe, and I spent a lot of time playing in the street—playing soccer, shooting marbles, flying kites. Something else we did as kids was go to the matinee on Sundays to watch movies of all those luchadores, like Santo.3 It was a peaceful life.
I also spent a lot of time swimming. There are many natural springs and pools here in Tehuacán, and back then there were a number of soda factories in town that used the springs as a water source. There were a few garment factories as well, but they were small and served only local brands. The soda factories were a larger source of employment in the region. A few of those soda factories would have swimming pools on site that the public could use for a small fee. Then there was a big economic crisis in Mexico in 1982, and many of those soda factories went broke and shut down.
When I was a child, my parents taught classes at the university in Puebla. My father taught philosophy, and my mother anthropology. My parents were also activists. There was a first generation of activists from the era of the sixties and seventies who fought against the Dirty War in Mexico, and my parents were among them.4
In the eighties in Tehuacán my parents participated in many protest marches. I remember them explaining that we lived in a very oppressive climate, because the control exerted by the PRI and local businessmen was vast.5 The PRI had so much power then—the radio was censored as well as the newspapers, which toed the party line. Tehuacán was a very conservative city, and very Catholic. The concept of human rights didn’t even exist in our part of Mexico, and my parents helped carve out a space for protest and resistance.
In the early eighties, my mother left the university to focus on activism, and she went to work at INI6 in Chiapas.7 My mom spent many years in the mountains. She supported the legal defense of political prisoners, and people fighting for land rights and land ownership.
From my earliest years we had many activists at the house, so often that I didn’t even notice most of the time. My parents were also active in organizing with the PSUM.8 It was normal for me to have political activists in the house, but when I was young, I didn’t want to participate myself. When I saw these gatherings at home, I’d get the sudden urge to go outside and play soccer with my friends.
The garment maquilas also started in the 1980s, and that’s when my parents started their work with the maquila workers. There were always meetings at my house, so I got to know some of the workers even when I was still a kid. So seeing the struggle of workers is something that influenced me, even if I didn’t choose to participate.
My dad was always an activist, but his focus was teaching. His main influence on me was inspiring me to love literature. There were always many books at my house, fiction and poetry. Ray Bradbury was big. I remember Lovecraft as well. Many Latin American writers as well—Cortázar, Borges, José Agustín. The whole Onda literature.9 José Agustín even wrote about Rockdrigo.10 I didn’t learn about activism by joining my parents, or by having them explain their work to me. I learned by watching what they were doing, and by reading and figuring things out for myself.
By the time I was in high school, I was really into liberation theology.11 I myself am an atheist, but I have close relationships with many priests who fight for the rights of workers and indigenous Mexicans. I’ve known a priest named Father Anastacio Hidalgo since I was a little boy. Father Hidalgo, whom we call Father Tacho, used to work with my aunt Marta with tuberculosis patients from indigenous populations in the Sierra Negra area.12 He’s a man who has helped me find the path I’m on. My aunt Marta was a medic, and Father Tacho would bring tuberculosis patients to see her at our house, where aunt Marta would treat them. Sometimes I’d visit the Sierra Negra with my aunt. And here in Tehuacán during the eighties there existed the Regional Seminary of the Southeast, a Catholic seminary formed by all these priests like Father Tacho who fought for the rights of the indigenous and the poor. When Norberto Rivera Carrera became bishop of Tehuacán in 1985—the man who later became archbishop of Mexico—he closed the seminary. He said the seminary was communist, the typical slander.
When I got to high school, I wanted to play music. Sometime around 1989, when I was around seventeen, I started a band with my friends. We tried to make our own songs. It was tough, because whenever we played at bars, people only asked for covers of popular songs. We wanted to play our own material. It wasn’t really political material we were writing, but back then even playing rock music at all was an act of protest, since the culture was so conservative. Now you have all sorts of urban expression like punks and goths, but back then, twenty years ago, the police would come down on you for having long hair. You could be beaten. And we had to make our own spaces to play in. I remember when the city wouldn’t allow a rock festival, so some bands got together and we organized it ourselves. Of course, when the festival was a success, the city took the credit.
I had a lot of trouble in high school because the people in charge there were aligned with the PRI. It was the local custom to coerce students to attend rallies in favor of the PRI, march for the PRI, celebrate patriotic holidays with the PRI, and any number of other idiocies that the mayor came up with. We students were forced to participate or else our grades would suffer.
I wasn’t able to finish high school because the school administration disappeared my documents. They held a grudge against me. They once asked me and my band to play patriotic music at events for the PRI and I refused to go, so they found a way to fail me. We had to take exams to graduate, and they kept losing my exams—that happened three times. I decided then that they must really not want me in school. The education system here in Puebla is horrid anyway; I couldn’t learn anything from them.
I was eighteen when I left school. I worked at a sombrero factory for a few months afterward. My job was to put MADE IN MEXICO labels on the sombreros. They were exaggerated palm leaf sombreros that were sent to the United States for Cinco de Mayo. They celebrate Cinco de Mayo over there, not September 16 for some reason.13 I’d slap the MADE IN MEXICO tag over and over again on so many sombreros—they love those extremely exaggerated sombreros in the United States.
I worked at the sombrero factory for maybe six months, but the work bored me. The manager, not even a manager really, just a foreman, he treated us badly. And the factory would cheat on our pay. The factory would pay something like 80 pesos for one week of work.14 It was a laughable salary; you couldn’t even afford to go to the movies on the weekly wages. I was a bit more informed, so I’d explain to my fellow workers that we were supposed to be paid double for overtime. I told them the same applied to holidays, and we’re not obligated to work on holidays. The foreman would hear me and he’d send me to work by myself in the warehouse, away from the other workers. I was a bad influence.
THE SPRINGS AND RIVERS TURNED BLUE
I never went to university. After I left school, I played with my band for a few years. Then, when I was in my early twenties, I really started to get involved in activism myself. Father Tacho was building an alliance of different social justice organizations in the area, an association of human rights activists called the Human Rights Commission of the Tehuacán Valley, and I got involved that way.
In 1993, I got together with a few other young people and activists in the area, including some others from the liberation theology school of thought, and we formed a working commission on indigenous rights called Cetirizchicahualistli. Cetirizchicahualistli is a Nahuatl word that means “to make one single force.”15 We worked with indigenous groups around the Sierra Negra on issues like land ownership. And in town, we also worked for indigenous civil rights. We’d defend the indigenous women who came to Tehuacán to sell their goods. The police would crack down on them for selling without permits. And we’d defend the boys who did work in the streets like cleaning windshields.
We established an office, and starting around 1995, it was my job to run it. I’d scrounge funds to pay the rent. In those years we had a government subsidy from the INI, the same governmental organization my mother worked for. And we found funding from NGOs in Canada and the United States. Probably 90 percent of the work we did was in promoting the rights of indigenous people in Puebla, but we also began to take a look at labor rights, especially after the maquilas began to move in.
Garment factories had existed in town when I was a kid, but they were small and served local markets only. Then in the nineties, especially after NAFTA was signed, there was a boom of maquilas in town that served transnational corporations. Just after NAFTA, the mayor of Tehuacán traveled extensively to the United States to bring foreign investment. From ’95 up until ’99 or 2000, new maquilas were popping up everywhere. Tehuacán didn’t sleep. Workers were moving here from all over the valley, from all over Puebla. The movement of people was impressive. There were dozens of factories that needed two thousand workers or more each, and the demand for labor far exceeded the working population of Tehuacán. More than a hundred residential districts grew in the city’s urban area, and migration into the areas around the city was rapid. Foreign retail stores like Woolworth and others appeared. Meanwhile, farmland outside the city disappeared. The metropolitan areas turned into blocks of dense residential development, while suburban neighborhoods, which were not planned well, became immersed in absolute instability.
The new factories served a number of well-known brands. Guess, Levi’s, Calvin Klein, and Dockers have all been supplied by the maquilas of Tehuacán. Some of the factories themselves were relatively small, but many of the maquilas in town were run by a couple of big consortiums—the Tarrant Apparel Group and the Navarro Group—which ultimately employed around ten thousand and twenty thousand garment workers respectively, and were formed from alliances between U.S. business interests and local wealthy families.
These new companies moved into the old soda factories that had been shut down in the eighties. The maquilas were finding this infrastructure already set up for their needs, which made the area even more attractive. The natural springs the soda companies had used for their mineral water were now used to wash jeans. The old soda companies had been an important part of the community—they had made their pools available for recreation, and they had even supplied fresh water for free to locals who wanted to fill up gallon jugs at outdoor spigots. All the new maquilas were using the same springs, but they were terrible for the health of the community. The springs and rivers turned blue. The fields that were watered from local springs began to turn blue as well, all from the dye runoff from jeans production.
And these waters are toxic. Last year there was a study done by Greenpeace on the waters of Tehuacán, and they found cancer-causing chemicals. Even with the process the maquilas use now to give the water a clean, translucent appearance, it was found that the cancer-producing chemicals were not eliminated.
Tehuacán and the whole region are becoming waste areas, debilitated by the runoff from their own maquilas. Here in Tehuacán we have at least twenty industrial laundry facilities. These have always existed at the maquilas, and they serve to wash the clothing after it’s made. The pollution is worsened by certain kinds of jeans fashions. In the nineties brands started to use acid wash or stone wash, which meant using pumice stone or special chemicals to wash out the jeans and give them a distinct look. The “stone bleach” style that became popular for a while involved eliminating the indigo dye from the jeans with enormous quantities of bleach. Finally, there’s the “sand blast,” which entails submitting garments to silica sand baths to give them a worn appearance. The use of these materials harms workers’ respiratory tracts. Some even get sick with silicosis, which is an illness that otherwise only affects miners.
Our organization began investigating all these issues in the mid-nineties, because our city was transforming rapidly, and every other human rights issue was suddenly tied to the impact the clothing factories were having on the community. As early as 1995, we were involved in helping some international labor organizations report on the conditions of workers employed by the Navarro Group, and out of that collaboration, my current work grew. Our job was to help find workers to interview for international labor groups and unions such as UNITE, and through our work we learned of many cases of underage labor, unfair firings, and wages withheld arbitrarily. We knew the workers at these companies must live under incredible fear, since we were threatened by anonymous calls and by the local police because of our help on the ground with that report.16 Finally, in 2002, a handful of my colleagues and I formed the Commission for Human and Labor Rights in Tehuacán Valley, and we really started to fight directly to protect the rights of garment workers in the area.
THEY GAVE ME A SERIOUS BEATING
In 2003, a year after I’d helped form the new labor commission, I had my first big conflict with the Tarrant Apparel Group. It was the first time we were right in the middle of the fire. I’d been speaking to workers about their rights under Mexican labor law for a few years, but our conflict with Tarrant was my first big fight.
That year there had been many layoffs at Tarrant. The workers didn’t know what to do. They were being fired, but they didn’t know how to organize. We were able to make a workers’ coalition of about two thousand to resist further layoffs and a possible shutdown of Tarrant Apparel, a company that employed more than ten thousand in Tehuacán and nearby towns. The problem was that Tarrant had found an even less expensive source of labor in Central America, and wanted to leave Tehuacán altogether. When the shutdown was inevitable, we wanted to make sure that the company didn’t flee without paying the workers a fair severance.
Had we not informed the workers of their right to severance pay, they would have been robbed of it. We were able to win 10 or 12 million pesos to distribute to the workers.17 I don’t remember the exact amount, but it definitely affected the company—I started receiving anonymous threats.
Then, on the morning of December 29, 2003, just a month after we won the severance pay, I was heading to our commission’s office when two guys jumped me by the door of my house. I heard a voice just behind me mutter something, and when I turned I was struck with a brick in the temple. I didn’t even have time to put my hands up. I fell to the ground, and then I felt the two men kicking me and hitting me on the back with the brick while I was down. Then they started turning me over, pulling me up by the hair so they could get at my face with the brick. I managed to block the brick with my arm as it swung at my nose. The guy dropped the brick, and he started kicking me in the ribs with his steel-toed boots. I was able to pull away, and when I did, the two guys started to run. I grabbed a pipe in the road and started to chase them—I had no idea how badly I’d been hurt, but I was drenched in blood. I chased them thinking I could grab one of them, or maybe the police would come by. I just wanted them to be interrogated, to find out who sent them. I caught up to them on a street corner, and one of them said, “Come on, come on, if you think you can do anything to us.” I didn’t dare go up to them. Then a taxi came by, and phoom, they were gone.
They gave me a serious beating. I ended up in the hospital that day. I was in bed for a week not able to move. I reported the incident, but the police didn’t do anything. The two attackers were never found.
THEY BEGAN TO FIGHT BACK HARD
In 2005, the maquila owners were fed up with our commission’s labor rights campaign, and they began to fight back hard. That year, the governor of Puebla, Mario Marín, had just started his term in office and he began working closely with the factory owners to keep workers from organizing. One of the governor’s first measures was to remove the Tehuacán arbitration board’s power.18 What this meant was that the workers from the Tehuacán area had to go to the city of Puebla, over eighty miles away, to bring their labor lawsuits to trial.19 So the intention of this was really just to discourage their complaints.
Because of my leadership among labor activists in the area, I always knew that the bosses wanted to teach me a lesson. Sometime in 2005, a worker at a factory managed by the Navarro Group told me he heard that the companies were planning something against me. And soon I was receiving death threats by telephone.
On December 28, 2005, I was walking along the street on my way to my house to pick up a cell phone. A group of men tackled me, asking my name. They said they were police, though they were in plainclothes. They had me at gunpoint and hoisted me into a car.
At first they didn’t tell me their motive. I thought they wanted to intimidate me. But I got worried when I realized that they were taking me all the way to the city of Puebla. At that point I thought that the accusation could be more serious, since they were taking it to the state capital.
The police then showed me a warrant and explained the charges, that a maquila owner named Lucío Gil was accusing me of blackmailing him. Then things took an unexpected turn when they next took me to Gil’s house. Gil was a sort of midlevel guy, a factory owner who worked closely with the Navarro Group but wasn’t really one of the more powerful owners in the city. I’d helped some workers in his factory in the past, but I’d never spoken with him or dealt with him directly. At first I thought, Why are the police bringing me to a private home? They’re going to torture me.
Then some of the police went to Gil’s door to bring him out and identify me. When he came out, Gil was angry; I could see him outside cursing and telling them that he didn’t have anything to do with me and asking why they had brought me there. When the police returned, they told me that the man had lost his nerve, and that he wasn’t pressing charges against me anymore, that he didn’t have anything against me.
“Well, that does it,” I said. “So let me go home.”
One of the police responded, “How are we going to let you go when we’ve already let everyone in Puebla know that we’ve arrested you? We can’t do that.” I couldn’t believe it. Gil had said that he didn’t have any charges to press against me, and in spite of this, the police proceeded with the arrest, and we drove into Puebla where I was booked.
“YOU COULD GET OUT IN A DAY, OR IN A YEAR”
I was put in prison in Puebla, and when my lawyer got there, he said to me, “You’re basically a political prisoner, Martín—you could get out in a day, or in a year.” I wasn’t sure what to think. I was still confused about why they were holding me even though Gil had renounced the charges right in front of me.
The first days were really tough, a total psychological war. I couldn’t sleep. The first night, the tiny cell was crowded with fourteen of us, and I had to sleep on the toilet. Then the next day they wanted to put me to work at four in the morning—hard to believe, but there was a secret maquila in the prison using prison labor. And they had me serving food in the violent offender ward of the prison, with murderers, rapists, and assorted psychopaths.
On January 4, 2006, after I’d already been in prison for a few days, the criminal court announced the formal charges of blackmail against me and denied bail. According to the accusation, I had demanded $150,000 from Gil and threatened to mobilize workers against him if he didn’t pay up.
The maquila owners made the most of the days that followed my arrest. They published spreads in the local daily newspapers saying, “This time the governor has come through for us by putting that saboteur behind bars.” With that, we could be certain that the maquila owners had played in the arrest and confirm that everything that was happening was related to my work in defense of labor rights. They published the spreads in the Puebla Sun and the World of Tehuacán among many other newspapers.
Whoever it was who had me arrested thought that I’d have less support if they moved me from Tehuacán to Puebla, but they were mistaken. In fact the case became high profile very quickly. The local media and later the national media picked it up, and immediately human rights organizations organized a campaign. There was broad solidarity among workers from many sectors, academics, NGOs, unions, and so on, and a very strong international campaign started. All of them were pressing for my release.
My defense consisted of presenting evidence regarding my participation in an event that was twenty-four miles away from Tehuacán at the moment I supposedly blackmailed Gil. There were at least 150 workers at that event who were witnesses to my attendance, so there wasn’t the slightest doubt. I could not have blackmailed that man. Gil himself never testified in court, and I think he was still trying to disassociate himself from the case. I believe he’d been pressured to press charges by more powerful interests, but he knew the whole thing was a farce.
By the second week I was in prison, the political climate wasn’t favorable for the governor, who was facing a lot of national and international pressure to release me. In the end, the pressure was so strong that the governor himself was sending lawyers to defend me. His lawyers told me that the offense had changed. They said, “Agree that you only threatened Lucío Gil, you didn’t try to blackmail him, and we’ll arrange bond so that you can go free.” But I was willing to stay for several months if I had to. I didn’t want to plead guilty to any charges.
I REFUSED TO SIGN THE PAPERS
Sometime in mid-January 2006, I was asked to take a call at the prison office. It was the secretariat of governance, saying, “We have forced Gil to grant you forgiveness, so you are free. Good afternoon.”20 They were offering a sort of pardon: getting Gil to say he forgave me for my supposed blackmail, but not drop the original accusation. I didn’t accept it. “Forgiveness for what? I haven’t done anything.”
I refused to sign the papers acknowledging Gil’s supposed act of forgiveness, and because that was my letter of release, I couldn’t leave the prison. Instead I asked to speak with my lawyer. But the prison officials tried to deceive me by telling me, “Your lawyer already knows all of this. He’s asked you to sign.” I refused again.
The situation got out of control because by order of the government of Puebla they had to release me, but because of a signature that seemed like a formality, I couldn’t get out of jail. The director of the prison finally arrived, saw me, and yelled, “Please Martín, go already! If you stay we’ll be accused of illegal detention.”
So I was free, but it was all a very important experience to me. I met commendable people in the prison. Some were really supportive, including young people who initially wanted to give me a hard time and later became my protectors. There were many indigenous people in the prison, many political prisoners, and even groups that had organized to denounce the prison conditions they had found themselves in.
DENIM ITSELF ISN’T THE CULPRIT
After I was released, I went back to work fighting against the worst abuses of the maquilas. In 2007, we fought to support a campaign against Vaqueros Navarra, one of the major factories under the Navarro Group. Vaqueros Navarra, like Tarrant, was trying to squeeze out workers while looking to move operations to countries where it was even less expensive to operate. Under the contracts in place, workers were supposed to receive a share of profits, but the bosses were cheating them. We began to counsel the workers, and we sought a just payment of their profit share. We weren’t fighting for the U.S. brands to stop contracting with Navarra. We didn’t want the factories to close—we just wanted the workers to be treated fairly. But when Navarra saw that losing control to organized labor was a possibility, they no longer sought new contracts.21 They closed up most of Navarra to teach us a lesson, but other factories under the Navarro Group remain in the city. Thousands of workers lost their jobs, and many of those went to the United States to look for work.
The transnational garment industry has left the valley. There are still large numbers of maquilas in Tehuacán, but the difference is that the focus is now on the Mexican market only. And the working conditions have actually worsened. Work hours are longer, and salaries are lower. Sexual harassment is common, as well as daily layoffs. Maquilas are still everywhere in Tehuacán, but the difference is scale. Homes have turned into maquilas. In order to get away with not paying for many benefits they have dispersed into all the neighborhoods. You see signs at many different houses soliciting needleworkers.
In Mexico there are a lot of fights over the defense of labor rights, from the south up through the north, in the smallest cities and in the biggest cities, along the northern border as well as the southern border. The challenges we have as labor rights defenders in Mexico are many, but most important is to influence consumers of these products to pressure the companies and brands to address the inadequate labor standards in their maquilas.
One problem is that many consumers aren’t concerned with knowing where the products they’re using come from. And for those consumers here in Mexico who know what’s going on, they don’t have as much power to change things as consumers in other countries. For instance, in Mexico, the act of boycotting some products isn’t as effective as it would be in the United States.
It’s a difficult goal: we’re seeking conscientious consumers, consumers who know how to research, who know how to examine a whole production chain, who know how to follow up on the brands, who demand information from companies, and so on. Denim itself isn’t the culprit; the way the companies handle manufacturing and the workplace is the problem.
CITIES IN MEXICO ARE BECOMING AMERICANIZED
I remember that before NAFTA was passed you’d rarely see people with electronics like Walkmans or other new gadgets of the time, because you couldn’t bring them in. If you did, it was usually contraband, but now it seems you see electronic devices everywhere. Everybody has the newest devices like iPads and tablets. With the passing of NAFTA I’ve seen how all the medium-sized cities of Mexico are becoming more and more Americanized. Cities are beginning to lose their identity. Walmarts, Burger Kings, and malls are everywhere.
One aspiration I have is to create a cultural center that’s also a union headquarters, with an office and everything. We want to build a place where workers feel at ease, where they can gather to defend their rights and those of other workers. We want them to be able to inform themselves, have access to the Internet, read the newspaper, and analyze what’s going on in this country. We want the cultural center to be a space for conferences about labor rights.
I work on reaching people through art, too. About four years ago I bought a drum kit and formed a band called Mixtitlan. Now I have a band called Necromancer. We play thrash metal but we have blues and stoner rock influences. We sing in Spanish because that was the idea, to play our own music in our own language and touch on social topics. The people who follow us work in the maquilas.
I don’t know what the future holds for Tehuacán. It’s increasingly polluted and congested. The living standards are low. If the government doesn’t find another form of investment here, then Tehuacán will remain the same: a city with work but poorly paid workers. The children of the maquila workers from the boom in the 1990s are now the ones looking for work, and their exploitation is worse than it was for their parents. But we’ll keep fighting for the rights of workers as long as our bodies hold up.
1 In the 1960s, Mexico established free trade economic zones to encourage foreign investment, primarily from the United States. When the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) became law in 1994, the presence of maquilas expanded rapidly throughout Mexico as U.S. manufacturers sought out inexpensive labor. For more information, see Appendix III, page 354.
2 After NAFTA was signed in 1994, Tehuacán and surrounding suburbs more than doubled in size from about 150,000 residents to nearly 400,000 over a ten-year period.
3 Rodolfo Guzmán Huerta, or El Santo (“The Saint”), was a legendary luchador, or masked wrestler. He acted in over fifty lucha libre films (movies starring masked wrestlers) from 1952 until his death in 1984.
4 The Dirty War (la Guerra Sucia) was a conflict between loosely affiliated leftist movements and student groups on one side, and the Mexican government on the other. The conflict culminated in the Tlatelolco Massacre of 1968, in which dozens of students were killed and thousands arrested during a protest.
5 The PRI is the Partido Revolucionario Institucional, or Institutional Revolutionary Party.
6 The INI was the Instituto Nacional Indígenista, which was replaced in 2003 by the Comisión Nacional para el Desarrollo de los Pueblos Indígenas, or National Commission for the Development of Indigenous Peoples. The INI was an agency of the Mexican government established to promote the welfare of indigenous peoples. Indigenous ethnic groups, many of whom speak pre-Columbian languages such as Nahuatl, Maya, and Zapotec, comprise nearly 15 percent of the Mexican population.
7 Chiapas is a state in the southwest corner of Mexico. A mountainous region, it is home to a number of indigenous populations.
8 PSUM is the Partido Socialista Unificado de México, or Unified Socialist Party of Mexico. PSUM, which descended from the Communist Party of Mexico, existed from 1981 to 1987.
9 La Onda was a Mexican literary and artistic movement of the latter half of the sixties that dealt with counterculture topics such as drugs, rock and roll, and sex.
10 Rodrigo “Rockdrigo” González was an influential singer-songwriter whose work dealt with the everyday life of urban culture in Mexico.
11 Liberation theology is a Catholic religious and political movement started primarily in Latin America in the sixties that seeks to address economic, social, and political inequality. The movement flourished in the sixties and seventies, but its influence diminished in the eighties after its leaders were accused of promoting Marxist ideology and admonished by the Vatican for overt political actions.
12 Sierra Negra is one of the highest mountain peaks in Mexico, located an hour north of Tehuacán.
13 September 16 is Mexican Independence Day and marks the beginning of revolt against Spanish rule in 1810. Cinco de Mayo commemorates a major military victory over an invading French force in Puebla on May 5, 1861. Cinco de Mayo is celebrated primarily by Mexican emigrant communities and is a far less significant holiday inside Mexico than September 16.
14 At the time, 80 pesos = approximately US$5.
15 Nahuatl is an indigenous Mexican language and was spoken by the Aztecs before the Spanish colonial period in Mexico.
16 The report, Cross Border Blues: A Call for Justice for Maquiladora Workers in Tehuacán, was released in 1998 by the National Interfaith Committee for Worker Justice. The document was presented by UNITE, a U.S. union to U.S. companies such as Guess.
17 10 to 12 million pesos = approximately US$1 million.
18 An arbitration board is an impartial committee assigned to resolve labor disputes. For more information, see glossary, page 348.
19 The city of Puebla is the capital city of the state of Puebla. It is a city of over 1.5 million, eighty miles northeast of Tehuacán.
20 The secretariat of governance is the head of the governance department in the state of Puebla.
21 For more on the labor battle between Vaqueros Navarra and labor organizers, see Ana Juárez’s narrative, page 63.