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In the last century, Mexico witnessed a population rise in the northern border region which was largely connected to the availability of maquiladoras employment. The conditions of employment have been deplorable which impacts on the dwellers in the city into precarity. In the understanding of precarity, the paper defines the subject within the context of two positions, one from the epistemological and the class structure positions. This paper addresses what precarity means within the context of those living in the colonia Mexico 68, having considered the conditions of employment, either informal or formal work. The spatial identification of precarityin colonia Mexico 68, an irregular settlement to the west of the city was identified where the state of living based on the ethnographic findings underlying it within the subjective philosophical submission of Luckman and Berger, through random sampling of respondents across gender, age, formal and informal work disposition. Subjective philosophical positon of Berger Peter and Luckmann (1966) suggests that individual experiences explain inhabitants’ lived realities. It was observed that the condition of precarity was largely pertinent with similar experiences amongst respondents, the habitat and work environment. It is of note that to curb the problem of precarity questions of the embodied state of those submerged in it must be uplifted beyond just safety-nets but inclusion through social trust disposition.

The COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent supply chain crunch brought a significant shortage to global semiconductor manufacturing, affecting a multitude of businesses and consumers. The Biden Administration recognized this serious issue with the passage of the CHIPS Act and the significant amount of investment allocated toward domestic semiconductor manufacturing. The Trump Administration has taken a different approach and has thus far relied on tariff applications to gain favorable policy concessions. At the Trump Administration’s fingertips, however, is the most modernized trade agreement in the world, the USMCA. Through the agreement, North America—specifically the United States and Mexico—is primed to facilitate broad semiconductor investment throughout the continent. This Note argues that the USMCA should include a provision specific to semiconductor investment in the 2026 joint review. Additionally, this Note proposes that a semiconductor provision could take lessons from the maquiladora system of the past, existing USMCA provisions, NAFTA investment arbitration, and current geopolitical tension to guide its construction.

Prior to the millennium, economists and policy makers argued that free trade between the United States and Mexico would benefit both Americans and Mexicans. They believed that NAFTA would be a “win-win” proposition that would offer U.S. companies new markets for their products and Mexicans the hope of living in a more developed country with the modern conveniences of wealthier nations. Blending rigorous economic and statistical analysis with concern for the people affected, Mexican Women in American Factories offers the first assessment of whether NAFTA has fulfilled these expectations by examining its socioeconomic impact on workers in a Mexican border town. Carolyn Tuttle led a group that interviewed 620 women maquila workers in Nogales, Sonora, Mexico. The responses from this representative sample refute many of the hopeful predictions made by scholars before NAFTA and reveal instead that little has improved for maquila workers. The women’s stories make it plain that free trade has created more low-paying jobs in sweatshops where workers are exploited. Families of maquila workers live in one- or two-room houses with no running water, no drainage, and no heat. The multinational companies who operate the maquilas consistently break Mexican labor laws by requiring women to work more than nine hours a day, six days a week, without medical benefits, while the minimum wage they pay workers is insufficient to feed their families. These findings will make a crucial contribution to debates over free trade, CAFTA-DR, and the impact of globalization.

Managers implement several Green Supply Chain Management (GSCM) practices to improve sustainability and economic performance, such as environmental management systems (EMS), eco-design (ED), source reduction (SR) and attending to external environmental management (EEM) requirements; however, the relationship among them requires a deep study. This paper reports the case of the Mexican maquiladora industry, analyzing the main relationships among GSCM practices with environmental impact (EI) and environmental cost savings (ECS). The analysis reports three structural equation models (SEM) developed as simple, second-order, and mediating models. Those relationships are tested using 160 responses to a survey applied to the Mexican maquiladora industry and with partial least squares algorithms (PLS), where conditional probabilities for different scenarios in latent variables are also reported. Findings indicate that EMS has a direct effect on EI (β = 0.442) and ECS (β = 0.227), indicating that EMS reduces EI and cost associated with the production process; however, ED has no direct effect on EI (β = 0.019) and ECS ((β = 0.006), and it can be due to the maquiladora nature as foreign companies focused on manufacturing and not to product design.

The history of themaquiladorashas been punctuated by workers' organized resistance to abysmal working and living conditions. Over years of involvement in such movements, Rosemary Hennessy was struck by an elusive but significant feature of these struggles: the extent to which organizing is driven by attachments of affection and antagonism, belief, betrayal, and identification. What precisely is the \"affective\" dimension of organizing for justice? Are affects and emotions the same? And how can their value be calculated?Fires on the Bordertakes up these questions of labor and community organizing-its \"affect-culture\"-on Mexico's northern border from the early 1970s to the present day. Through these campaigns, Hennessy illuminates the attachments and identifications that motivate people to act on behalf of one another and that bind them to a common cause. The book's unsettling, even jarring, narratives bring together empirical and ethnographic accounts-of specific campaigns, the untold stories of gay and lesbian organizers, love and utopian longing-in concert with materialist theories of affect and the critical good sense of Mexican organizers. Teasing out the integration of affect-culture in economic relations and cultural processes, Hennessy provides evidence that sexuality and gender as strong affect attractors are incorporated in the harvesting of surplus labor. At the same time, workers' testimonies confirm that the capacities for bonding and affective attachment, far from being entirely at the service of capital, are at the very heart of social movements devoted to sustaining life.

This article analyzes and compares the knowledge and implementation of Industry 4.0 (I4.0) technologies in maquiladoras in Tijuana and Ciudad Juárez through a descriptive quantitative approach. Online surveys were conducted with manufacturing sector workers to assess their familiarity with and practical application of 19 specific technologies. The results show that, while knowledge levels are moderate, practical adoption of these technologies remains limited, with Ciudad Juárez showing a slight advantage. The findings highlight the importance of improving I4.0 training to enable more effective implementation and support technological transformation in these border regions. Although the study's geographical scope is limited, it is recommended that future research encompass a wider diversity of industrial contexts. This research contributes to the understanding of the transition towards I4.0 and provides valuable insights for designing policies aimed at technological training in the sector.

Research in the Global North (e.g., US, Europe) has revealed robust patterns of environmental injustice whereby low income and minority residents face exposure to industrial hazards in their neighborhoods. A small body of research suggests that patterns of environmental injustice may diverge between the Global North and South due to differing urban development trajectories. This study uses quantitative environmental justice methods to examine spatial relationships between residential socio-demographics and industrial parks in Tijuana, Baja California Norte, Mexico using 2010 census data for Tijuana's 401 neighborhoods and municipality-provided locations of industrial parks in the city. Results of spatial lag regression models reveal that formal development is significantly associated with industrial park density, and it accounts for the significant effect of higher socioeconomic status (measured using mean education) on greater industrial density. Higher proportions of female-headed households are also significantly associated with industrial park density, while higher proportions of children and recent migrants are not. The formal development findings align with other studies in Mexico and point to the importance of urban development trajectories in shaping patterns of environmental injustice. The risks for female-headed households are novel in the Mexican context. One potential explanation is that women factory workers live near their places of employment. A second, albeit counterintuitive explanation, is the relative economic advantage experienced by female-headed households in Mexico.

Leigh Sanders, the Taiwanese American protagonist in Emily X. R. Pan’s The Astonishing Color of After (2018), grew up as a person with stolen memory because it has been a taboo in her multiracial family to talk about Taiwan and her mother Dorothy Chen Sanders’ immigration to America. This paper will explore how Pan utilizes magical realism to facilitate her protagonist’s quest to gain memory about her late mother’s life, give voice to her mother’s willful silenced immigration story, and eventually set her lopsided family tree right. Besides, the theory of place-making shall be applied to discuss how Leigh reconstructs her mother’s life story by place-making with/in Taiwan and finally connects with her late mother and maternal family. Through the lens of place-making, this study shall foreground Pan’s ingenuity in infusing magical realism with Taiwan’s local currents to characterize her protagonist’s quest to construct memory and connection. The coda will briefly discuss Pan’s innovation of the existing immigrant narrative tradition and her contribution to the magical realist narrative mode.

This paper examines the intersection of environmental injustice and reproductive violence, extending its scope to include nonhuman animals, through the literary analysis of Ruth Ozeki’s My Year of Meats (1998) and Alicia Gaspar de Alba’s Desert Blood (2005). Both works are well-researched novels of fact and reveal the biopolitical commodification of minoritized human and nonhuman bodies under neoliberalism. By highlighting the hidden realities of reproductive and environmental violence, these narratives expose systemic intersections of racism, sexism, and speciesism. The analysis demonstrates how reproductive violence serves as both a consequence and a strategy of neoliberalism and biopolitics, perpetuating power structures and brutal violence. By integrating nonhuman animals into the discourse on environmental and reproductive justice, this paper advocates for a more inclusive and holistic approach to understanding and addressing intersecting systems of oppression.

This article analyzes and compares the knowledge and implementation of Industry 4.0 (I4.0) technologies in maquiladoras in Tijuana and Ciudad Juárez through a descriptive quantitative approach. Online surveys were conducted with manufacturing sector workers to assess their familiarity with and practical application of 19 specific technologies. The results show that, while knowledge levels are moderate, practical adoption of these technologies remains limited, with Ciudad Juárez showing a slight advantage. The findings highlight the importance of improving I4.0 training to enable more effective implementation and support technological transformation in these border regions. Although the study's geographical scope is limited, it is recommended that future research encompass a wider diversity of industrial contexts. This research contributes to the understanding of the transition towards I4.0 and provides valuable insights for designing policies aimed at technological training in the sector. En este articulo se analiza y compara el conocimiento y la implementación de tecnologías de la Industria 4.0 (I4.0) en maquiladoras de Tijuana y Ciudad Juárez, mediante un enfoque cuantitativo descriptivo. Se realizaron encuestas en línea a trabajadores del sector manufacturero para evaluar su dominio y aplicación de 19 tecnologías específicas. Los resultados muestran que, aunque el conocimiento es moderado, la adopción práctica de estas tecnologías sigue siendo limitada, con un ligero avance en Ciudad Juárez. Los hallazgos destacan la importancia de mejorar la capacitación en la I4.0 para facilitar una implementación más efectiva y apoyar la transformación tecnológica en estas regiones fronterizas. Si bien el alcance geográfico del estudio es limitado, se recomienda que futuras investigaciones abarquen una mayor diversidad de contextos industriales. Esta investigación contribuye al conocimiento sobre la transición hacia la I4.0 y proporciona información útil para el diseño de políticas de capacitación tecnológica en el sector.