SUMMER 2026
ISSUE 07

₁ Nina Ebner and Kelsey Mae Johnson, “Blood and Borders: Geographies of Social Reproduction in Ciudad Juárez–El Paso,” Annals of the American Association of Geographers 111, no. 2 (2020), 499.

₂ Aryeh Shander, Sherri Ozawa, and Axel Hofmann, “Activity-Based Costs of Plasma Transfusions in Medical and Surgical Inpatients at a US Hospital,” Vox Sanguinis: The International Journal of Transfusion Medicine 111, no. 1 (2016): 55–61.

₃ Douglas Starr, Blood: An Epic History of Medicine and Commerce (Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1998), 207.

₄ Kathleen McLaughlin, Blood Money: The Story of Life, Death, and Profit Inside America’s Blood Industry (One Signal Publishers, 2024), 106.

₅ Cirila Quintero Ramírez, Trabajadores, sindicatos y activistas en la frontera norte de México: Un mapeo laboral actualizado (El Colegio de Tamaulipas, 2023), 68–69.

₆ Mariana Méndez, “The Region That Produces More Than Germany and Japan: Mexico–U.S. Border Emerges as the World’s Third-Largest Economy,” ProTexas Industry, August 20, 2025, https://www.protexasindustry.com/en/article/the-region-that-produces-more-than-germany-and-japan-mexico-u-s-border-emerges-as-the-world-s-third-largest-economy.

₇ Mateo Crossa, “Unequal Value Transfer from Mexico to the United States,” Monthly Review 75, no. 5 (2023): https://monthlyreview.org/articles/unequal-value-transfer-from-mexico-to-the-united-states.

₈ Luis F. Munguía, “How Mexico Doubled the Minimum Wage,” Phenomenal World, August 5, 2025, https://www.phenomenalworld.org/analysis/mexico-minimum-wage.

₉ Devon G. Peña, The Terror of the Machine: Technology, Work, Gender, & Ecology on the US–Mexico Border, (CMAS Books, 1997), 8–98.

₁₀ Peña, The Terror of the Machine, 8.

₁₁ Diego Enrique Osorno, Slim: El mexicano más rico del mundo (Vintage Español, 2016), 268.

₁₂ Mexican manufacturers experienced a form of deindustrialization as transnational firms began to import more of their inputs and suppliers and relied on the Mexican workforce to assemble products quickly.

₁₃ Nina Ebner and Mateo Crossa, “Maquiladoras and the Exploitation of Migrants on the Border,” Latino USA, October 16, 2019, https://www.latinousa.org/2019/10/16/maquiladoras.

₁₄ Alma E. Muñoz and Alonso Urrutia, “Aumento al Salario Mínimo de 13%; Será de 9 mil 582.47 pesos para 2026: Sheinbaum,” La Jornada, December 3, 2025, https://www.jornada.com.mx/noticia/2025/12/03/economia/sheinbaum-anuncia-alza-al-salario-minimo-se-ubica-en-9-mil-58247-pesos.

₁₅ Munguía, “How Mexico Doubled the Minimum Wage.”

₁₆ Crossa, “Unequal Value Transfer from Mexico to the United States.”

₁₇ Crossa, “Unequal Value Transfer from Mexico to the United States.”

₁₈ Gene Lyons and Byron Harris, “A Bleeding Shame: Mexican Blood Is Big Business on the Border,” Texas Monthly, November 1980, 152–57.

₁₉ Lyons and Harris, “A Bleeding Shame,” 157.

₂₀ Starr, Blood, 231–49.

₂₁ Starr, Blood, 232.

₂₂ Jacques Pépin, The Origins of AIDS (Cambridge University Press, 2011), 199–200.

₂₃ Ebner and Johnson, “Blood and Borders,” 507.

₂₄ Jack Herrera, “Military Machines Line the Texas Border. It’s Unclear Who They’re There to Scare Off,” Texas Monthly, August 27, 2025, https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/military-machinery-strykers-el-paso-border.

₂₅ Ebner and Johnson, “Blood and Borders,” 507.

₂₆ Ebner and Johnson, “Blood and Borders,” 507.

₂₇ Peña, The Terror of the Machine, 117.

₂₈ Nina Ebner and Gabriel Antonio Solis, “Nearshoring and the Militarization of the US–Mexico Border,” NACLA Report on the Americas 55, no. 4 (2023): 414.

₂₉ Ebner and Johnson, “Blood and Borders,” 499.

₃₀ Eric Nava-Perez, “Worker Strikes as Insurgent Planning in Mexico,” Critical Perspectives on International Planning, https://sites.utexas.edu/internationalplanning/case-studies/worker-strikes-as-insurgent-planning-in-mexico.

₃₁ Nava-Perez, “Worker Strikes as Insurgent Planning in Mexico.”

₃₂ David Bacon, “Tijuana Police Defy Court Protection of Maquiladora Strike,” David Bacon’s Story Index, June 16, 1999, https://dbacon.igc.org/Mexico/22TijuanaPolice.htm.

₃₃ Cirila Quintero, Trabajadores, sindicatos, y activistas, 286–7.

₃₄ Nicolas Allen, “AMLO’s Presidency Has Been a Success: Interview with Edwin F. Ackerman,” Jacobin, August 29, 2023, https://jacobin.com/2023/08/amlo-presidency-mexico-morena-pri-neoliberalism.

₃₅ Karina Suárez, “Mexico Struggles to Mandate a 40-Hour Work Week,” El País, December 6, 2023, https://english.elpais.com/international/2023-12-06/mexico-struggles-to-mandate-a-40-hour-work-week.html.

₃₆ Víctor Ballinas, “Diputada Susana Prieto Renuncia a Morena y se Declara Independiente,” La Jornada, February 29, 2024, https://www.jornada.com.mx/noticia/2024/02/29/politica/diputada-susana-prieto-renuncia-a-morena-y-se-declara-independiente-876.

₃₇ Mark Anner, Matthew Fischer-Daly, and Cirila Quintero Ramírez, “Between Labour Control and Worker Empowerment: Authoritarian Innovations and Democratic Reforms in Mexico,” Journal of Industrial Relations 66, no. 4 (2024): 578–603.

₃₈ David Bacon, “A New Life For Mexico’s Oldest Union: Interview with Mexican Labor Leader Humberto Montes de Oca,” Institute for Research on Labor & Employment, January 30, 2024, https://irle.ucla.edu/2024/01/30/a-new-life-for-mexicos-oldest-union.

1

The line forms before sunrise, a daily procession of mothers and fathers, workers and students, crossing the international bridge above the overgrown banks of the Rio Grande. In early October, the humidity breaks into random bouts of rain as they pass from Matamoros (population 611,000) to Brownsville (population 194,000). Many, if not most, are on their way to donate plasma, a straw-colored liquid protein used in a range of lifesaving medical products. Immediately across from the border gate, and less than a block away from each other, stand two boxy plasma centers, both owned by CSL Limited, an Australian biotech company. A few blocks away stands a third, owned by Grifols, a biopharmaceutical firm from Spain. These centers open as early as 5:00am and close around 14 hours later. Thousands pass through their doors each week – not just in Brownsville, but all across the border, in dozens of plasma centers from McAllen to Laredo, Eagle Pass to El Paso, and beyond.

To say these Mexican nationals are “donating” their plasma is a bit of a misnomer. For each hour-long session, “donors” receive a gift card of around USD 50. At most, they can earn around USD 400 monthly, that is, if they wait in line to donate the maximum of two times each week. (Though, if you’re “feeling lucky,” Grifols recently began offering scratchcards with a potential “instant $30 BONUS” for visiting donors.) It would be more accurate to term this plasma selling. But legally, plasma companies classify their payments as “gifts” for those volunteering their time, skirting the law that bars visitor-visa holders from working in the United States. These “gifts” are essential to what has become a multibillion-dollar industry. Driven largely by the growing numbers of aging nonworkers in Western countries, demand for “longevity” medicine has surged, fueling interest in stretching plasma’s already extensive therapeutic capabilities. And Texas has the highest number of active plasma centers of any US state, concentrated along the border. In 2022, when US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officials under Biden attempted to bar Mexican visitors from donating plasma, these multinational firms went so far as to argue in court that Mexican donors, who make up 10 percent of the blood plasma collected in the United States, were merely “couriers” delivering a product across the border, “far removed” from actual “labor for hire.”

Plasma selling has long been an extra source of income for workers in Mexico’s northern states, a way to subsidize the country’s flagging wages, particularly among those working the assembly lines in the maquiladoras (foreign-owned, export-oriented factories and assembly plants). Matamoros, a city with a long history of export-oriented development, has routinely ranked among the most expensive cities in Mexico. In early 2025, the average monthly salary in Tamaulipas, the state where Matamoros is located, was about MXN 8,600 (roughly USD 463).

One plasma seller from Matamoros told me that if her factory wages increased tomorrow, she’d stop donating plasma immediately. Today, however, she donates “out of necessity.” Twice per week, she wakes up before her husband and high school-aged daughter to cross the international bridge and visit the nearest Brownsville CSL. She tends to feel “fatigued” and dehydrated after each session and sets aside time to nap at home before leaving for her evening shift on the line, where her monthly salary is approximately MXN 3,200 (USD 172). Taking the plasma gift cards into account, she said, she makes closer to MXN 5,500, a 66 percent increase in monthly wages. Other workers told me the donations as much as doubled their monthly wages. While physically taxing, this boost allows her to stretch her paycheck just enough to cover her daughter’s school supplies, buy groceries, and pay rent.

In their excellent 2020 study, Nina Ebner and Kelsey Mae Johnson argued that plasma donation in El Paso among Ciudad Juárez maquila workers “demonstrates how the nonwork time of social reproduction and the body’s biological capacities for replenishment are increasingly dedicated to income generation.”¹ For plasma sellers, the emphasis here is on income generation without work, or at least as little work as possible. Other forms of informal labor – food stalls, for instance – might more immediately be considered a second job, involving more traditional methods of labor and pricing to accomplish the same income generation as the altogether more passive act of plasma selling. When asked, most plasma sellers I spoke to from Matamoros and Ciudad Juárez mentioned food and childcare as the primary expenses paid by their donation money. Others relied on plasma to make rent or fill their car with gas. The plasma enabled Cynthia – an assembly-line worker living in Salvarcar, in Juárez’s far southeast, who has been a plasma seller for two years – to buy Christmas gifts, including merchandise from the anime series One Piece for her teenage daughter. “I sleep very little on the days when I come here,” she said, “but, I don’t know, you get accustomed to it.”

While more passive than traditional labor, the effects of plasma selling have been shown to wear on the body in different ways. Repeated attachment to the plasmapheresis machines that extract plasma can cause a person’s veins to collapse, and consistent donations can decrease the amount of protein in one’s blood, which is essential for clotting wounds, transporting hormones, fighting infections, and so on. The argument could be made that spending one’s life force, quite literally, to manufacture a product – often worth hundreds of US dollars – is labor, full stop.² But among the plasma sellers I spoke to, the most work-like aspects of plasma selling are the demands of the commute. Beyond monitoring what they eat and how much they sleep to safeguard their body’s ability to produce iron-rich platelets for harvest, plasma sellers are focused on getting in and out as quickly as they can. Few of the workers I spoke to explicitly considered plasma donation a second job, but they also loosely organized, particularly online, to help each other navigate border checkpoints, avoid harmful labor conditions, and sell their plasma faster.

2

On that last point, plasma multinationals are only happy to oblige. Beginning in 2022, after a federal judge ordered CBP to allow Mexican citizens back into the plasma trade, Grifols, the Spanish firm, announced that it would bus Mexican donors from the border gate to its plasma centers. Plasma sellers would still cross into the country themselves, but when they arrived on the other side, a van would be waiting for them. In theory, this would quicken the overall pace of production.

When I visited El Paso in January 2025, a white van arrived outside a Grifols center on Texas Avenue every 20 minutes or so, beginning at 7:00am, to pick up and drop off plasma sellers in groups of around ten. The Paso del Norte international bridge was around a 30-minute walk away, in a part of downtown dominated by government offices and bail bondsmen, close enough to a Union Pacific railyard to hear the occasional train. Every day, a contractor parks his truck near the building’s side entrance and loads up boxes full of the contaminated plastic materials, driving them to an incinerator in Albuquerque, nearly four hours away.

The transport – of people and byproducts – hadn’t always been so efficient, particularly in the years when the business was only beginning to coalesce around the border, which happened almost concurrently with the advent of the maquiladora system. After the United States’s Bracero Program for agricultural guest workers was canceled in late 1964, boosters framed the maquiladoras as a replacement for the millions of people suddenly out of work, though, in reality, the low-wage factory jobs attracted mostly young women from rural areas. The first industrial park, dedicated to manufacturing televisions, was constructed in Ciudad Juárez in 1966. Meanwhile, the blood business was coming into its own. An ever-increasing number of plasma-derived drugs in development meant that plasma was becoming an “industrial affair.”³

Plasmapheresis had not yet been automated, meaning that, all told, the procedure by which blood was removed from a donor, the plasma centrifuged from the blood, and then the red cells reinfused, took a couple of hours. Early plasma industrialists already knew the areas most likely to sell: downtrodden neighborhoods, college campuses, and communities along the United States–Mexico border. Today, the number of plasma centers tends to balloon alongside the rate and concentration of poverty, primarily in Black and brown census tracts and in deindustrialized zones. For instance, Flint, Michigan, a former company town of less than 80,000, has six paid plasma centers, the same amount as in Brooklyn, population 2.6 million.⁴

There are critical differences between labor conditions in Ciudad Juárez and Matamoros. For one, Ciudad Juárez – the birthplace of the maquila – gained far more workers than Matamoros in the latter part of the 20th century and had a far weaker union tradition. Meanwhile, in Matamoros, the overwhelming majority of industry and services “were unionized until the dawn of the 21st century, and collective bargaining had become an instrument of both [the workers’] progress and their setbacks.”⁵ Few of the Juarense maquila workers I met said they were affiliated with a union, but every plasma seller I met in Matamoros was. The Matamoros workers I spoke to also primarily assembled car parts – axles, doors, and the like – whereas Juarense workers ran the gamut from medical equipment to makeup. Despite these differences, however, the unilateral importance of Mexico’s northern states is hard to overemphasize.

Boosters tout the border region, consisting of Mexico’s northernmost states and the southwestern United States, as the world’s third-largest economy, valued at some USD 7.8 trillion.⁶ Given that plasma sellers are able to leverage the exchange rate to their advantage, wages in Mexico clearly do not match this reality. Mateo Crossa, a researcher at the Mora Institute in Mexico City, tracked the unequal exchange between Mexican and US manufacturing from 2008 to 2022, finding that a more than 40 percent increase in labor productivity among Mexican workers was “accompanied by a drop in the average wage level” of over 25 percent.⁷ The minimum wage in Mexico grew year after year until its peak in 1976, when it reached USD 20.76 per day in equivalent 2025 terms.⁸ The next year saw a financial crisis marked by hyperinflation and massive unemployment. In response, authorities froze wage adjustments, resulting in a 75 percent loss of purchasing power over the following decades.

In The Terror of the Machine, anthropologist Devon G. Peña’s classic 1997 examination of factory labor on the border, Peña sketches an enduring practice called tortuguismo, or “working at the pace of a turtle,” an act of “informal resistance” and “sabotage.”⁹ By unclasping conveyor belts and playing “sick” or “stupid,” workers acted quietly, without their union’s support, to disrupt the pace of work.¹⁰ Plasma selling has emerged as tortuguismo’s opposite – an informal yet deliberate strategy to augment the speed of production, to spend oneself, including one’s nonwork hours, to make ends meet.

Peña was writing as the ink on the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was still drying; for the previous decade, Mexico had suffered from what economists classified as a great depression. What followed was a monumental restructuring of labor and production, an event that Mexican journalist Diego Enrique Osorno likened to “what Russia experienced during Perestroika.”¹¹ The coalition of workers Peña had followed fell apart, and Mexico’s economy began to grow at roughly the same pace as the United States, albeit at the expense of its already existing industry.¹² But the daily minimum wage remained frozen at USD 5.25 until 2017. Even as then-president Andrés Manuel López Obrador, or AMLO, somewhat reversed course by more than doubling the minimum wage within the country’s border zones – offsetting the reform by cutting corporate taxes – wages for assembly-line workers in Ciudad Juárez remain some of the lowest in Mexico.¹³ AMLO’s successor, Claudia Sheinbaum, has promised annual 12 percent wage increases each year of her sexenio, or six-year term. Currently, the minimum wage in Northern Mexico stands at MXN 440.87 (USD 24.93) per day.¹⁴

Yet, productivity exploded – once again – from 2008 onward, as more corporations moved production to Mexico to gain access to its superexploited workforce.¹⁵ All told, the difference between “what Mexican workers were paid and what they would have received” had they been paid the average wage of the US manufacturing industry within that timeframe equaled USD 128 billion.¹⁶ If we turn this monetary amount into labor time, “capitalists appropriated a surplus value of 1,800 hours in 2022, which means that wages in the export manufacturing industry in Mexico are only 10 percent of what they would be if paid in line” with the United States.¹⁷

For decades, US media has turned to the border plasma industry as a window into the transnational economy and its discontents. In 1979, The New York Times followed the “unorthodox, slightly romantic work” of two Border Patrol guards as they failed to arrest plasma sellers earning USD 8 per pint. A year later, Texas Monthly captured a veritable standoff between CBP and “a dozen” plasma sellers “crouch[ing] under boxcars and inside gondolas” in what was then the Southern Pacific railyard, many of them bearing “identical scars on their arms” from the nurse’s needle.¹⁸ The reporter goes on to wonder, seven months before the first reported case of AIDS, whether deeper regulation was warranted, given the unknown effects of “bleeding a hundred times a year.”¹⁹ As it turns out: Yes, it was.

3

In the 1980s, the plasma market had ballooned in the West, leading to the industry’s “wildcat period” in which capitalists sought to increase production at the lowest possible cost by turning to the Third World, particularly Latin America.²⁰ In Nicaragua’s capital, for instance, the right-wing Somoza regime leased property to an exiled Cuban doctor named Pedro Ramos Quiroz, who turned it into a massive plasma center, the world’s largest – at least for a time. Locals nicknamed it the “casa de vampiros.”²¹ In 1978, a group of rioters stormed the facility and burned it to the ground. The sudden closure spiked plasma prices by as much as 15 percent.

At the same time, doctors worried that few of these privately run plasma centers followed US Food and Drug Administration regulations, but in truth, those in the United States weren’t doing much better. Despite federal regulations to the contrary, plasma companies mixed plasma into humongous pools that were not properly sterilized. It was not uncommon for plasma brokers to set up on skid rows and in prisons with little regard for people’s medical histories. By 1983, tens of thousands had died from AIDS. Two years later, the world began adopting a heat-pasteurization method along with a battery of tests that made the chances of viral transmission effectively zero.

Lawsuits came and went. Despite all the bad press, the United States remains the “OPEC of plasma,” but the industry is haunted by the prospect of contamination. Where once dozens of countries contributed, however marginally, to the global blood pool, today only five countries – the United States, Austria, the Czech Republic, Germany, and Hungary – permit paid plasma donations. In 1987, Mexico joined the rest of the Third World in outlawing the practice within its territory after recurring HIV outbreaks in its 13 plasma centers, located in the periphery of Mexico City and near the Texas border.²² In this respect, the plasma multinationals’ visitor-visa loophole is a holdover from the industry’s “wildcat” days.

Today, however, the application process to become a plasma seller is extensive. Beyond the more obvious protocol (drug testing, blood testing), Mexican citizens must conduct an in-person interview at a US Consulate and prove at least one year of continuous employment and that their permanent residence is within a 50-mile radius of the plasma center where they are registering to donate. These requirements are meant to, per the Plasma Protein Therapeutics Association, “remove any concern about the social status of a Mexican national donating plasma.”²³

Is an employed person’s blood ipso facto cleaner than that of the unemployed? Obviously not. But the application process fits snugly into a political arena rife with showy mobility restrictions. In March, for instance, the Trump administration deployed more than 50 Stryker military vehicles to patrol El Paso’s border fence, despite a 90 percent decrease in border crossing encounters in the area over the past year. “The visual optics of vehicles like these is a deterrent factor,” one CBP agent said.²⁴ Same book, different page.

As the most common employer in Mexico’s northern cities, maquila bosses provide the proof of employment necessary for potential plasma sellers to demonstrate their stability. Per Ebner and Johnson, “the jobs they [maquila bosses] provide continue to be poorly paid and precarious, generating a continuous need to supplement waged labor with other kinds of income,” but they also “facilitate border crossing through providing access to formal employment opportunities.”²⁵ As Jesús, a Ciudad Juárez assembly-line worker, told Ebner, “Without the documentation from my supervisor, I would never have even tried to apply for a border crossing card.”²⁶ Access to plasma selling, then, has become a comparative privilege for the employed, a quasi-safety net for factory workers to stretch their precarious wages. And it’s controlled, however capriciously, by management.

Before NAFTA, Peña noted a stark decline in tortuguismo, due in part to a new method of monitoring assembly workers through handpicked “group chiefs” among them.²⁷ They were selected on the basis of loyalty and a demonstrated ability to individually speed up work, even if their peers refused or were unable to do so. Among workers, group chiefs were referred to as rompecolas, literally “ass busters.” The “privilege” of donating plasma closely mirrors the “privilege” to work: Management decides you work harder, so you do. If everyone can’t slow down, at least you can try to finish first.

4

“Maquilas are not profit centers, they are cost centers,” the manager of a Juárez industrial park said in 2018. “Companies come here to take advantage of cheaper production costs.”²⁸ Productivity in the maquiladora and the plasma center increased simultaneously, reaching unprecedented degrees of expansion. US media noted a post-recession increase in plasma donations along the border while the plasma market grew from USD 11 billion to USD 21 billion in under a decade. In 2020, blood products accounted for 2.3 percent of the total value of US exports, outranking the export of soybeans (1.8 percent) and petroleum gas (2 percent).²⁹

When the Morena party of then-president AMLO swept into power in 2019, Matamoros workers launched what was quickly termed a labor spring. Beginning January 10, a strike wave that became known as the 20/32 movement – fighting for a 20 percent wage increase and an annual bonus of MXN 32,000 – grew from approximately 2,000 workers in three Matamoros maquilas to more than 50,000 workers from as many as 48 factories in a matter of days.

Workers claimed the streets, created their own delegated committee structures, and coordinated to demand, in addition to raises, the resignation of their corrupt union leaders. (Indeed, establishment union leadership had, in the past, gone so far as to argue against wage increases for their rank and file.) The sector’s output reportedly declined by 35 percent, an estimated loss of USD 100 million.³⁰ Contrary to his predecessors, AMLO’s official position was one of neutrality; he left it up to Tamaulipas’s conservative governor, Francisco Javier García Cabeza de Vaca, to declare the strike illegal.³¹ (Contrast this with 1998, when the first strike by an independent union in the history of the maquiladoras was violently quelled by over 100 members of Tijuana’s Special Forces police detachment, with the help of state Judicial Police.³²)

At the center of these protests was 52-year-old labor lawyer Susana Prieto Terrazas, originally from Ciudad Juárez. In the end, the workers got their raises and chartered a new independent union, The National Independent Union of Industrial and Service Workers (SNITIS). Several other independent unions joined the fold, and the future appeared bright. But in Brownsville, the majority of plasma sellers I spoke to did not identify with the 20/32 movement. In fact, I found not one of them associated with SNITIS; they were indifferent to the labor movement, if not hostile to it. Some argued that, today, SNITIS was the same as the other unions in town. Still others said they supported their employers over the striking workers. They were also split on Morena – some supported the party, others said they weren’t doing enough.

Given that the barriers to plasma selling have increased over the years, it follows that some of those with the privilege to sell might be closer to management than others on the shop floor. But after SNITIS’s initial success, the independent union has also since struggled to maintain its momentum. Despite the near-complete takeover of Mexico’s electoral realm by Morena’s populists, the labor movement has failed to spread apace. For many reasons, it seems, the new labor insurgency has been unable to become a tangible alternative to the border crossing’s jagged offerings.

According to Cirila Quintero, a longtime labor researcher at the Colegio de la Frontera Norte, SNITIS’s mobilization capacity began its decline soon after its 2019 victory.³³ With one union contract to its name, signed in 2022, the overwhelming majority of SNITIS members were dismissed from their jobs and today have no affiliation with any company. Meanwhile, the 45,000-plus workers affiliated with Sindicato de Jornaleros y Obreros Industriales y de La Industria Maquiladora – a union dating back to the 1930s, before the maquila – achieved their demands and went back to work, while AMLO’s neutrality at the national level belied a state-level crackdown on unions and workers who had participated in collective action. The return to work and subsequent repression allowed leaders to seek political solutions as representatives of the movement, without the full mobilization of the movement itself.

In 2020, Susana Prieto was jailed by state authorities in Tamaulipas for over a month, only winning her freedom through an international pressure campaign. As a condition of her release, she was exiled from Tamaulipas. She returned to the adjacent state of Chihuahua, where Ciudad Juárez is located, and in 2021, she became a state congresswoman, running on the Morena ticket. This was proof, to some, of “how links are being formed between the party and a new labor movement.”³⁴ In late 2022, Prieto submitted legislation to reduce Mexico’s workweek from 48 hours – among the longest workweeks in the world – to 40, in line with the US standard. The opposition was swift; Carlos Slim, the richest man in Mexico and a close ally to AMLO, argued it would hurt people’s “purchasing power,” while AMLO stalled on the proposal, asking for more time to ensure “all voices” were heard.³⁵ By early 2024, the measure had still yet to become law, and Prieto resigned from the Morena party caucus.³⁶ Meanwhile, Prieto’s supporters reaffirmed her control over SNITIS just as a nascent group within SNITIS demanded more internal democratic measures, which would have forced Prieto to pass the baton.³⁷

Whereas SNITIS may have formed as a response to Mexico’s anti-democratic unions, they have since faltered along similarly anti-democratic lines. In 2024, Humberto Montes de Oca, secretary for internal relations of the militant Sindicato Mexicano de Electricistas, put it bluntly: “Unfortunately, there is as yet no commitment to a widespread challenge by established independent unions to the old CTM [Confederación de Trabajadores de México] structure. Democratic unions are fragmented. They do not have, with the exception of the new Central Obrera, any intention of promoting a widespread process of democratization. They exist in an enclosed world of their own, and have no plan to expand outside of it. This is a conservative policy – to conserve your resources within your own space, and not confront the charros [corrupt, government-controlled, or employer-friendly labor unions].”³⁸

In May 2025, President Claudia Sheinbaum announced that Mexico would reduce the standard workweek to 40 hours by 2030. In response, calls for “¡40 Horas Ya!” (40 Hours Now!) have sprouted online, but no one has sufficiently mobilized to make that demand concrete. To maquila workers, and plasma sellers, the central tension remains the pace of labor: the speed one is forced to work the line, the pace one can extract their own blood. It’s at once a testament to the lengths people will go to put food on the table and evidence of the Mexican labor movement’s distressing limits, even under the populist auspices of Morena.

One afternoon in Brownsville, the clouds above us broke, but the rain only intensified. Pedestrians fled for cover under the trees lining a pathway to the international bridge, and pressed against the walls to be shielded by the eaves’ overhang. Then, all at once, the rain stopped again. Someone dropped their three kids off at a park bench before stepping into the CSL building. She’d only be a second.