In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

SAIS Review 21.1 (2001) 123-130



[Access article in PDF]

Informality Knows No Borders? Perspectives from El Paso-Juárez

Kathleen Staudt


At the U.S.-Mexico border, where people breathe the same air, use water from the same sources, and work in integrated economies, some advocate a regional approach to address people's well-being. All along the 2,000-mile border, a part of Mexico until the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, people cross the border some 47 million times each year to work, shop, and visit relatives. 1 International Relations was once wedded to the idea of nation-state analyses, but more recent work that incorporates examples like El Paso-Juárez now examines borders and frontiers as spaces in which to contest sovereignty and organize transnationally. 2 Nation-state analysis, with its different policies and regulations, may disguise similarities in people's work. This paper focuses on the incidence of informal economic activity on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border and raises questions about its continuity under the North American Free Trade Association (NAFTA), border militarization, and currency fluctuations, all developments of the late twentieth century.

The discourse on informal economies grew out of International Labor Organization (ILO) studies conducted nearly three decades ago in less-industrialized countries. Once termed a sector and dichotomized from the formal economy, informality referred to income-generating activities that tended to escape routine official censuses, taxes, and regulations. Informality also was used to conceptualize small businesses and microenterprises utilizing low technology and a handful of employees or family workers. Informality, people expected, would disappear in a modern, industrial economy, relegated to the shady world of criminality and tax avoidance. Challenges to this approach located informal economies [End Page 123] emerging side-by-side with industrialization and the global economy, as for example in sweatshops. 3 Few empirical studies, however, examine informality in industrialized economies. A good place to start is the U.S.-Mexico border.

This article examines the combined cities of El Paso and Ciudad Juárez. Each city is large. Juárez, with approximately 1.5 million people, is the fifth largest in Mexico, and El Paso, with an extimated 700,000 people in 1997, is the seventeenth largest city in the United States. Beginning in 1965, Juárez's industrialization leapt forward under the Border Industrialization Program and U.S. tariff measures that facilitated low-labor-cost export-processing factories known as maquiladoras. Mexico's entry into the General Agreement on Tariff and Trade (GATT) in 1986 and NAFTA in 1994 solidified a freer flow of commerce and goods among the United States, Mexico, and Canada. But is this really free trade, given the still-complex rules, regulations, and tariff schedules that accountants and lawyers help businesses decipher? I argue that the quintessential free traders are informal workers who produce and trade with little regard for national and border regulations.

At the U.S.-Mexico border, a collaborative group collected data between 1992 and 1994 on these characteristic free traders from 600 low- and middle-income households and targeted samples of informal workers such as street vendors and fayuqueras (cross-border traders, or more ominously, contrabandistas). The results show borders as opportune spaces for informal economies to grow and flourish under certain conditions. Informal workers ignore and resist regulations, but ironically their success in countering petty hegemony deepens their vulnerability to a global hegemony that cheapens labor. 4 The paper concludes with reflections on the year 2000 and predictions for the future, considering the ever-dynamic contexts of border realities, with changing currency values, the deepening of NAFTA, border militarization, and new political casts of characters.

Informality: Common to Both Sides

Informal economies are common to both sides of the border territorial line, despite the widespread industrialization of each side. One in three households responded affirmatively to questions about self-employment and other income-generating activities on the survey instrument. For women, common informal activity included [End Page 124] working as maids, taking in children for home-based childcare, and catering. For men, common informal activity included working...

pdf

Share