Home Economics: Our Neighbors on Rio Grande Boulevard
by Andrew Kang Bartlett

When he was asked why he came to the United States, Lucas Benítez, with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, said, “I am a cast-out offspring of NAFTA.”

The impact of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) on Lucas and millions of other people from Mexico and the United States has been severe. One obvious impact has been increased emigration from Mexico to the United States. NAFTA, ratified by the United States, Canada and Mexico in 1994, opened up the borders of North America for trade. Many U.S. corporations subsequently shifted manufacturing and assembly to Mexico, and tens of thousands of workers in the United States lost their jobs in the first two years.

NAFTA also opened Mexico’s borders to cheap, subsidized agricultural products, most significantly corn. Corn was the foundation of rural Mexico prior to NAFTA. When cheap U.S. corn came pouring in, the livelihoods of approximately two million Mexican farmers were destroyed, as were a similar number of small- and medium-sized businesses. With fewer living-wage jobs in Mexico, increased poverty for many Mexicans, and the dislocation caused by NAFTA, many Mexican workers found themselves pushed out of their home economies. The lure of higher wages in the United States, albeit in occupations shunned by most North Americans, has been pulling them north. The number of undocumented immigrants from Mexico to the United States has tripled to 6.2 million since 1990.

In order to understand this increase in immigration, we must understand NAFTA. This will be easier to picture if we shrink it down to household size. Let’s imagine that the nation of Mexico is represented by the Garcia family, in one house, and across the street, the nation of the United States is represented by another family, the Smiths. The Garcias and the Smiths live across from each other in Texas, on Rio Grande Boulevard.

How did NAFTA change the lives of the Garcias and the Smiths? How did their incomes and lifestyles change as a result of national trade agreements? Find out by reading the full text of this article in the September/October 2008 issue of Horizons.

Andrew Kang Bartlett is the associate for national hunger concerns, Presbyterian Hunger Program. He has done human rights, community organizing and development work in Japan and San Francisco. He and his wife, Haeja Kang, have two sons, Elías and Julian.

Art by Dan Colon.

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