ABSTRACT

This chapter proposes how the transnational life arrangements at the Mexico-US border range between exploitation and empowerment. It focuses on acting subjects in transmigration processes and their 'doing' of transnational life. The chapter argues that maquila workers at the Mexican border do not immediately gain agency through migration or by taking up maquila work, but that these changes open up some room for maneuvering which is an important prerequisite for their agency. Mobility and migration have not only an economic dimension, but also a social one, which has been highlighted in the debates focusing on transmigration. The foundations for the first maquiladoras were laid in 1965 in the context of the Programa de la Industrializacion Fronteriza (PIF) at the northern Mexican border. The program aimed at stimulating this border region that had been identified as being 'economically weak', and thus gave a green light for the further implementing of the neoliberal economic system.