La Nueva Frontera: Two Countries, One City

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Juarez and its outskirts are dotted with enormous new plants, but these are not your padre's maquiladoras: some look like Italianate palaces (Johnson & Johnson) or works of modern art (Thomson electronics). Some have in-house banks, cafeterias, spic-and-span bathrooms and, increasingly, on-site training in new technologies unfamiliar to illiterate peasants from Oaxaca. Jaime Garcia, 31, an engineer from Torreon, heads an all-Mexican team of 16 young designers at Delphi Automotive Systems' Technical Center, working on steering-column prototypes for U.S. cars due out in 2004. From his wide-windowed floor, Garcia has a panoramic view of both cities. He admits that the border isn't Silicon Valley. "But we can see that kind of future from here," he insists. "We're not just assembling things anymore. We're creating things."

Unfortunately life has not changed for everyone in Juarez: hourly pay is still about $1.25. Many workers have to travel hours each way by bus from colonias like Anapra, subdivisions that have sprung up without paved roads, water or sewer service. The homes look like preschool art projects, glued and stapled together from cardboard and plywood and tin. Bootleg power lines drop from overhead wires, loop down to the ground and are held in place by a rock, then snake through the sand to a house. Some wires are live, and arc and spit when it rains. The young women who live here are favored by the maquila bosses for their nimble fingers and obedience. But more than 200 women, many of them maquila workers, have been murdered since 1993--often raped, strangled and mutilated during their long, dark treks home to remote colonias. Most large maquilas have begun providing bus service, but it has failed to stop the killings.

A new Juarez is growing up across town from the old colonias, partly the result of a public-private partnership. Delphi joined Mexico's federal-housing agency in a project to build affordable homes (from $15,000 to $18,000 each) in safe neighborhoods as little as 15 minutes by bus from the plants. The program has helped cut Delphi's employee turnover from as high as 10% a month to 1.2% a year--and put newlyweds Giron and his wife Tania, via Delphi's employee savings plan, into a two-bedroom bungalow with a modern kitchen and interior, done in beige and cool mint, on a street appropriately named Hacienda de la Novia (the Bride's Ranch). Going to the U.S. to live and work doesn't cross their mind anymore. "We used to think the bosses living in El Paso didn't think too much about Mexicans," says Tania. "This makes me feel as if that's changed."

Many chronic problems are shared by the twin cities. They slurp from a common, underground desert aquifer, but Juarez's exploding population may run out of fresh water in as little as five years because it sits on a smaller portion of the aquifer. El Paso is looking to import water from 150 miles away. Druglords have killed so many people here that victims' families--on both sides of the Rio Grande--have their own support groups. Tuberculosis and hepatitis flow freely back and forth--and beyond. "The truck driver with TB who sits in our restaurants today will be in Denver or Chicago tomorrow," says Jose Manuel de la Rosa, regional dean for Texas Tech's Health Sciences Center. "Our problems will be dispersed throughout the country."