Navigating a narrow stretch of rural highway, Monica Campos peered out the windshield of her car, admiring the rows of purplish green agave plants on the side of the road. Driving out of Guadalajara, Mexico’s second largest city, an urban hub home to 1.5 million residents and a wealth of foreign companies including HP, IBM, and Dell, Campos, a staffer at the state of Jalisco’s Consejo Regulador del Tequila, an industry group, explained “20 years ago there were 300 brands [of tequila]. Now there are more than 1600.” Jalisco has a long industrial history. “The railroads were built during the government of Porfirio Diaz,” at the end of the nineteenth century Campos explained. While mezcal producers in the isolated hills of Oaxaca still use horse-drawn stone wheels to mill the agave they roast in open firewood-powered ovens, tequila producers in Jalisco have employed industrial production techniques for over two centuries.
It’s a level of economic development that is easily recognizable by the tourists who visit Jalisco to sample tequila as well as by the migrants who pass through the state as they travel north to try and cross into the U.S. As organized crime groups in eastern Mexico have increasingly targeted migrants passing through Gulf Coast states, many Central Americans moving towards the U.S. border now opt for the longer Pacific route that passes through the Mexican states of Jalisco, Sinaloa, and Sonora. In Jalisco, La Bestia passes through massive fields lined with neat rows of agave plants. From the train migrants can also see steam rising from the ovens of the distilleries that make tequila.
In Jalsico Mexico “La Bestia’s” train tracks cross through agave fields. Photo by N. Parish Flannery @LatAmLENS.
Jalisco has achieved success economic development and industrialization that Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador have not managed to rival.
Standing in front a six-foot tall pile of broken pieces of agave in front of the massive steam ovens at the Herradura distillery, Jaime Orozco, explained “the factory has grown now it employs a lot more people.” Orozco, whose father also worked for Herradura, helps load in 70 tons of agave every day. “It’s all done by hand,” he told me. Herradura now employs ferments hundreds of thousands of liters of tequila every day. It’s part of the reason why Jalisco has expanded tequila exports from 64 million liters in 1995 to 167 million liters in 2013. Tequila has become a booming business for international companies such as Diageo, which owns Smirnoff and Jose Cuervo, Brown-Forman which owns Jack Daniels and Herradura, and Bacardi which is the partial owner of Patron.
Jaime Orozco stands in front of the oven at Herradura’s tequila factory in Jalisco, Mexico. Photo by N. Parish Flannery @LatAmLENS.
In addition to rapidly expanding tequila exports, over the last twenty years Jalisco has also specialized in producing automobiles, car parts, and electronic goods. Now the city is also becoming known for its tech sector. In 2010 IBMinvested $20 million in a production facility in Guadalajara. After expanding HP’s workforce in Guadalajara during 2013 and the company’s regional director, Alexis Langagne said that from Mexico “we export around $1.8 billion a year. We create ten thousand jobs and we’re going to expand our centers in Guadalajara.”
Inside the Centro de Software, a state-government sponsored incubator for tech companies, 26-year-old tech entrepreneur Luis Cosio explained, “we’re not talking about call centers. It’s not a maquila. It’s a question of intellectual property. We do web platforms, e-government.”
Angel Banuelos, the CEO of masfusion, inside his office in Guadalajara’s Centro del Software, an incubator for the city’s new generation of tech businesses. Photo by N. Parish Flannery @LatAmLENS.
Angel Bañuelos, the CEO of MasFusion explained, “we want to supply know-how. We’re really focused on exporting services.” It’s a combined effort of local universities, and representatives from both the private sector and the government that have built of a tech cluster in Guadalajara, helping the city earn the moniker “Mexico’s Silicon Valley.” Jacabo Gonzalez, the Director of Jalisco’s Institute of Information Technology said “it’s about creating an ecosystem. When people have a need they know the expertise is here.” Guadalajara’s economy is now moving to a post-industrial stage, training a new generation of IT specialists, graphic designers, digital animators, and engineers to export high-value added services to clients around Mexico and across the globe. It’s a successful example of cluster development that cities around the world are trying to emulate.
In Honduras, by contrast, exports still focus on low value-added products such as bananas and coffee and manufactured goods produced in low-tech maquiladora factories. It’s an economic model that has let to a concentration of wealth at the top of society and limited investments in education and professional development for the bulk of the population.
En route to the town of Tequila, Campos looked out the driver side window of her car at two men in loose-fitting, worn-down clothing standing in front of the tracks. “The train passes through here…I don’t know if these guys are Centroamericanos or Mexicans,” she said. Migrants leaving small towns in Chiapas and Oaxaca, two of Mexico’s poorest states, ride along with Hondurans, Guatemalans, and El Salvadoreans as they pass through Jalisco en route to the U.S.
Diego Ramos, a staff-member at the Guadalajara based migrant outreach organization FM4 Paso Libre told me, “In 2014 we’ve helped more than 4,500 people. Forty-three percent of the people are Honduran. We also have El Salvador and Guatemala and people from Chiapas, Oaxaca and Guerrero in Mexico.”
“When we ask what the final destination is it’s usually frontier states: Texas, California and New Mexico and also Florida and New York,” he added.
Miguel Martinez (right) returned from working in the U.S. and now harvests agave for tequila producers. He thinks it would be too dangerous to try and cross back to the U.S. Photo by N. Parish Flannery @LatAmLENS.
Standing in front of the tracks, Miguel Martinez, a held up the shovel-like “coa” knife he uses to harvest and trim the agave plants used to make tequila. He grew up in Jalisco but also lived in the U.S. from 1998 to 2000 in California. Now he thinks that crossing the border to look for work is too dangerous. “Mostly it’s Central Americans on the train. It’s so hard to go. It’s dangerous. Plus there’s more work here now in the planting [of agave] and production of tequila,” he told me.
Diego told me that by the time migrants reach Guadalajara “they’ve already crossed half the country. They’ve been on the road for thirty days and are exhausted. They stay for three days.” Almost none stick around long term. “Those who stay [here] is nothing, 1 percent,” he added. Unlike other areas in southern Mexico relations between the migrants passing through and the locals in Guadalajara aren’t particularly tense. “They aren’t seen as a threat in the labor market. People go to the rail-yard to give food and clothes to the migrants,” he added. “We don’t see a lot of cases [of violence against migrants] in Guadalajara,” he said. “When we ask where the extreme violence is, it is in Chiapas, Tabasco, Oaxaca,” he added.
Hector Bolivar, a 32 year-old Mexican entrepreneur who lived in Los Angeles for most of his life but was deported at age 29 and now runs a shop that sells expensive, high-end guitars he imports from the U.S. to his hometown in Jalisco, explained that his own story was “like getting ripped up by the roots.” He says that since re-establishing himself in Jalisco he hasn’t heard about a lot of hostility towards Central American migrants among locals. He hasn’t seen news about attacks against migrants passing through. “I saw it more in Tijuana,” he said.
A production manager stands in front of the industrial distillation equipment in Herradura’s factory. Photo by N. Parish Flannery @LatAmLENS.
Most of the people passing through Jalisco have elementary school level education. They aren’t going to look for jobs in the Centro del Software or compete with skilled technicians at factories in the surrounding area. “They have low professional development, they aren’t going to take an engineer’s job,” Ramos added.
While Central American migrants aren’t likely to stay and look for work in Guadalajara, some migrants from Chiapas do come to stay and work in the fields. At the same time, Jalisco has also historically been a sending state for migrants looking for work in the U.S.
“Jalisco is a destination for migrants, it has migrants in transit. It’s a sending state and a receptor for returning migrants,” Ramos explained.
Rocio Moreno, the 36-year-old founder of the migrant outreach organization No Somos Invisibles, told me that in Guadalajara, if there’s discomfort with the presence of migrants it comes from wealthier residents, not blue-collar workers. “The rails pass Avenida Inglaterra—a street that passes by big houses, people with money. They get angry,” she explained.
“People were annoyed because [the migrants] made a mess or slept in the grass on the side of the streets. Now it’s less common to see campsites near the train yard,” she added.
A migrant from Honduras stands in an agave field near where the train tracks pass by Herradura’s industrial tequila factory. Photo by N. Parish Flannery. @LatAmLENS.
But as the flow of Central American migrants increased over the last two years, people in Guadalajara have responded. “In the last few months people have started to help more. You see more people sharing water or giving food,” she explained.
Perhaps surprisingly to an observer from the U.S., “working class people actually help more than upper class or upper middle class people,” she told me.
This may be due to the fact that “the migrants don’t stay. They go to El Norte,” she explained. “Middle class people are scared they’ll stay and rob. But if you talk to migrants they’ll say they have no plans to stay and look for work. It’s not their intention to stay so working class people aren’t scared [that migrants] will stay to work,” she added.
While traveling on the train though Jalisco’s tequila trail, migrants pass through an area that is home to one of Mexico’s biggest economic development success stories. The combination of a humming local economy burgeoning with new businesses and an absence of hostility towards migrants is likely not a mere coincidence. It’s a lesson that should be noted by policymakers on both sides of the border.
