IWRA Proceedings

In the years after World War II, American tourists used to cross the border into Mexico expecting a landscape of dusty towns where they could buy tequila, exotic food, and handcrafts. But with the emergence of manufacturing plants, called maquiladoras, and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), exchanges between both sides of the border increased considerably; northern Mexico now resembles U.S. border cities like San Diego and El Paso, with modern factories, hotels, fast-food restaurants, and shopping malls. Northern Mexico, especially the cities that border the U.S., has become an increasingly important economic zone that is often used to exemplify the impacts of free trade and foreign investment in Latin America (Marston et al. 2002). The border region includes major cities with populations of more than one million people, such as Tijuana and Ciudad Juárez . The region also is home to irrigated agricultural valleys, such as the Mexicali and the Lower Río Grande along the border or, farther south, the Yaqui and Mayo in Sonora, that produce a large percentage of Mexico’s domestic and export crops. Also, the border towns of Nogales, Nuevo Laredo, and Reynosa became important commercial and industrial centers due to the industrial push brought about by the maquiladora plants during the last three decades of the 20th century. In addition, the state capital cities of Mexicali, Hermosillo, Chihuahua, and Saltillo, each with a population of more than half a million ...