Workers Find Better Jobs but Not Prosperity : Labor: More U.S.-owned companies are locating along the border in Mexico. Many laborers say they are better off, but still find themselves living in squalor.

If the United States and Mexico conclude a free-trade agreement, sweeping away restrictive tariffs and other commercial barriers, a fast-growing neighborhood here known as El Ejido Chilpancingo may offer a glimpse into the future.

In a bustling desert valley along this border city’s eastern edge, life already resonates to the rhythms of what now passes for free trade--the plethora of mostly U.S.-owned assembly plants known as maquiladoras that form an imposing presence on the hillsides and mesa above the residential community.

Overlooking the neighborhood, huge banners solicit unskilled workers to sew fabric, fashion electronic parts and assemble plastic components for firms that have found profitability in this economic frontier.

“Where else could my children and I find jobs?” asked Enriqueta Garfias, a 37-year-old mother of six from Mexico City, who, along with her three teen-agers, works inside an 850-employee complex owned by Douglas Furniture of California. Like many furniture firms, it moved here from the Los Angeles area.

Critics and proponents of the free-trade pact expect such an accord to prompt more companies to construct production facilities in Mexico--particularly in the border zone.

The attraction: low Mexican wages (typically less than one-quarter of U.S. salaries), less rigorous enforcement of costly environmental and worker-safety guidelines, and the region’s proximity to the lucrative U.S. market.

Already, the plants provide jobs to 500,000 workers in Mexico, mostly in northern border cities, including more than 70,000 in Tijuana.

While workers here reside throughout the city, many are clustering in Chilpancingo, a long-established suburb eight miles east of downtown that has been transformed dramatically because of its proximity to Otay Mesa, base of many of the foreign-owned plants.

Their homes stand in striking contrast to the high-technology environments in which they toil. From Chilpancingo near the Pacific coast to the almost-identical colonias of Ciudad Juarez on the Rio Grande River to the squatter communities of Matamoros on the Gulf of Mexico, tens of thousands of maquiladora workers cram into dilapidated apartments and shacks of cardboard and scrap wood, which often do not have running water and electricity.

Such living conditions, while deplorable from a U.S. perspective, are not unusual in urban Mexico. Chilpancingo is neither desperately poor nor rich by Tijuana standards. Most maquiladora workers interviewed said they are better off here, where they have jobs and steady incomes--something they did not possess in their hometowns.

“I wanted to stay home and study, perhaps enter the university, but there was no way to earn a living back where I come from,” said Mario Felix, 18.

He resides with six other young men in a makeshift home on the banks of a polluted stream that flows into Chilpancingo from the hillside and mesa that hosts the maquiladoras. “There’s work here, but it’s hard to live like this,” Felix said, sitting inside his fly-infested dwelling while a roommate washes dishes in fetid water from the stream.

Like Felix, most maquiladora employees are in their late teens or early 20s and have migrated here from elsewhere in Mexico.

The workers say they typically earn between 80 cents and $1.20 an hour, compared to perhaps 50 cents an hour elsewhere in Mexico. Industry representatives say average wages are closer to $1.30-$1.50 per hour, including insurance and other benefits.

Many complain of grueling production schedules and factory fumes--conditions that help explain astronomical industry turnover rates that can exceed 100% a year.

“It’s very boring work and they never let you rest inside,” said Teodora Gonzalez, 39, Felix’s neighbor.

“When you had a headache, you couldn’t even go to the bathroom,” she said. “I’m going back home. I may die of hunger there, but I’m not staying here.”

While salaries exceed national averages, residents note that living costs--for rent, land, electricity (when available) and other expenses--are also more dear in the border zone.

“We’d like to buy a little lot and build a home, but everything is so expensive here,” said Enriqueta Garfias, as she, two daughters and a younger sister strolled through Chilpancingo’s sparsely vegetated central plaza.

Garfias arrived from Mexico City almost two years ago, along with five of her children.

“In Mexico City, the only work for women is washing dishes or clothes, or ironing, and the pay is very little,” said Garfias, who sews fabric at Douglas Furniture.

As Tijuana’s maquiladoras have multiplied rapidly, outlying neighborhoods such as Chilpancingo have grown haphazardly, quickly transforming ranchland and brush into housing lots. Rent-gouging is common. Services such as running water, electricity, sewage and public transportation have not kept pace.

“Tijuana is a strategic point for many activities--for industry, for maquiladoras, for tourism--but we face a serious shortage of infrastructure,” Tijuana Mayor Carlos Montejo Favela said in an interview recently.

Compared to many maquiladora workers, residents of Chilpancingo do have a major advantage: Their homes are close to the plants, thus saving long commutes and costly bus fares. Often, employees residing in distant districts travel an hour or more to their jobs, transfering two or three times before reaching their destination.

“It’s a long trip, but I do it to earn something for my family,” said Jose Rosario Murguia, a father of three from the northern city of Guadalajara. He said he commutes 1 1/2 hours each way from his home in the sprawling El Florido neighborhood to reach his job at the Douglas Furniture facility.

In Chilpancingo, as elsewhere in the city, many residents use scrap cardboard and wood from the assembly plants to build homes and ignite cooking fires. U.S.-produced metal drums, once used to store toxic paints, solvents and other chemicals are widely used to store water for washing, despite the clearly labeled “poison” markings (in English) on many warning against reuse.

In traditional Mexico, where most poor women are still largely confined to the role of mother and homemaker, considerable social upheaval is associated with an industry that relies so heavily on females. Women compose about 60% of the nation’s maquiladora work force--a fact that industry representatives say stems largely from their dexterity and patience for the painstaking assembly work typical in the plants. Critics see other reasons: Women are less likely to agitate for higher wages and better working conditions.

The two-income family is increasingly commonplace among maquiladora families.

“My wife earns more than I do, but still it’s hard,” said Francisco Javier Carrillo, 24, a furniture worker, who resides in a one-room cinder-block dwelling in Chilpancingo with his wife, Rosa, 28, and their children, Jorge Alberto, 2, and Laura Patricia, 1.

The couple’s combined salaries of $93 a week leave them little to spare, Carrillo said, particularly because day-care payments to an area woman amount to about $26 a week. Both try to send money to families back home in the Mexican interior.

“We seldom eat meat,” said Carrillo, who has been in the city three years. “Before I came, I heard that there was a lot of work in Tijuana. That’s true. But no one tells you how hard it is to live here.”

In recent years, Mexican officials say the proportion of women workers in the plants has been on the decline, as the industry increasingly involves heavier manufacturing, such as the production of furniture, vehicle parts and machinery.

However, in the mostly Japanese-owned electronics assembly plants above Chilpancingo, scores of women, often in production smocks, emerge from behind the gates when the sirens signal closing time. Like high-school sweethearts, many walk hand in hand with novios (boyfriends), who are likewise employed in the industry.

“I’ll probably keep working after I get married,” said Patricia Diaz, 18, as she held hands with her boyfriend, Armando Montero, also 18, after work one day in Chilpancingo. Both wore laminated identity cards from the Japanese plastic-manufacturing firm where they are employed. “This job is all right for now,” said Diaz, her face a playful teen-age dazzle of black mascara and red lipstick. “But maybe afterward I’ll go to L.A. where I have a lot of uncles and I can earn a lot more.”