TheReservAermv of Labor[·J EiD McCAUrGHAN PETERBAIRD Dust swirls around the weathered sign - "Ejido Emiliano Zapata " - while three young women stand at dawn along the main highway leading into Mexicali. They are waiting for the bus which carries them daily from the parched and salty lands of their parents' ejido (state-owned, collectively farmed lands) into town where they hurry to work at one of the hundreds of new U.S.-owned assembly plants. Arriving at the electronics shop - a large, grey building of corrugated steel - they laugh with a dozen other youngs girls and wait for the siren blast which orders the morning shift to work. They seem more like a group of school girls than the modern, industrial workforce they in fact represent. Ten years ago many of them worked the fields as children, bent alongside their .parents •in the stark, white heat of cotton, salty ·earth, and summer sun. A few years from now, when thelr eyesight begins to fail from the strain of their work on the assembly line, they may be back in the fields, or in the streets selling trinkets to the tourists. But for now they are part of the thousands of young Mexican women who, in the past few years, have left the tradition of home and agriculture to venture lnto the world of industrial employment. Behind their story He the forces of capitalist development in North America which, since the early 1800s, have transformed the dusty plains and valleys of Mexlco's northern frontier into the home of a massive reserve army of tabor to be used, abused and discarded at will by U.S. industry and agribuslness. The U.S.-Mexico border area (by U.S.-Mexi,co border area, we mean t•J Article appeared on NACLA's ,Latin America & Empire Report, Vol. IX, No. 5, July-August 1975. 81 6
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