Case Study

Maquiladoras

Young women filled 78 percent of the earliest maquiladora jobs along the border.

Mexico

In 1964, the United States terminated the Bracero Program, which had allowed Mexican agricultural workers to cross the border seasonally since 1942.1 Hundreds of thousands of men returned to Mexican border towns with no employment waiting for them. The Mexican government responded in 1965 with the Border Industrialization Program, allowing foreign firms to import raw materials duty-free, assemble products using Mexican labor, and export the finished goods back across the border.2

The first industrial park opened in Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua, in 1966, attracting a television manufacturer.3 The factories were called maquiladoras, from the Spanish maquila, a colonial-era term for the fee a miller charged to grind another person's grain. By 1973, more than 200 maquiladoras operated along the northern border, with Baja California hosting 102 of them.3

The program was designed to employ the returning braceros. Instead, young, single women filled as many as 78 percent of the earliest positions.4 These women, mostly born and raised in the borderlands, had been economically invisible before the factories arrived.

78%

Percentage of early maquiladora jobs filled by young, single women rather than the returning male braceros the program was designed to employ

By 1985, the maquiladora industry had become Mexico's second-largest source of foreign earnings, behind oil and ahead of tourism.4 A currency devaluation in the early 1980s and changes in U.S. customs law drew a wave of American firms seeking cheaper labor than they could find in Asia. The passage of NAFTA in 1994 accelerated the trend further, and between 1995 and 2000, exports of assembled products from Mexico tripled.5

Competition from Chinese Special Economic Zones slowed the industry after 2000, and roughly 529 maquiladoras closed in 2002 alone.5 As of early 2025, approximately 6,550 IMMEX-registered manufacturing establishments operate in Mexico, employing more than 3.2 million workers and generating nearly 90 percent of the country's manufactured exports.6

Timeline

1964

The U.S. Bracero Program ended, leaving hundreds of thousands of Mexican laborers unemployed along the border.

1965

Mexico launched the Border Industrialization Program, creating the legal framework for maquiladoras.

1994

NAFTA took effect, accelerating the growth of maquiladora factories across Mexico.

2006

Mexico replaced the original maquiladora program with IMMEX, modernizing the manufacturing framework.

Endnotes

1 Kitty Calavita, Inside the State: The Bracero Program, Immigration, and the INS (New York: Routledge, 1992).

2 Leslie Sklair, Assembling for Development: The Maquila Industry in Mexico and the United States (San Diego: Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies, 1993), 46.

3 Consejo Nacional de la Industria Maquiladora y Manufacturera de Exportacion (INDEX), "History of the Maquiladora Industry."

4 EBSCO Research Starters, "U.S. and Mexican Companies Form Maquiladoras," citing Patricia A. Wilson, Exports and Local Development (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992).

5 Devon Peña, The Terror of the Machine: Technology, Work, Gender, and Ecology on the U.S.-Mexico Border (Austin: CMAS Books, 1997).

6 INEGI (Mexico's National Institute of Statistics and Geography), IMMEX establishment data, early 2025.