ALBANY -- Natalia Testo could have gone skiing. But while her family hit the Colorado slopes last week, the 16-year-old took a different path.
She left behind her expensive clothes, her Coach bags and her classmates at Academy of the Holy Names and joined a delegation to the Mexican border.
In Los Napolitos near Reynosa, she stepped out of a van into a raw breeze and stared at rows of shacks. Cold air seeped through the shanty walls, made of shipping pallets. She felt hot tears in her eyes and a wave of guilt.
As her personal economy turned global, she realized that pieces of her cellphone, her sneakers, even her shopping bags were made by Mexicans living in this polluted slum -- across the Rio Grande from McAllen, Texas -- netting as little as 89 cents an hour from American manufacturers.
She saw a new cost to her Coach bags. Or her offhanded way of hitting up her dentist father for $20 in gas money.
Testo joined 21 others in the New York State Labor-Religion Coalition's Youth Delegation to the U.S.-Mexican border. Traveling to Reynosa and Matamoros, the group examined the impact of the North American Free Trade Agreement by visiting homes, talking to workers and meeting teenagers who can't afford high school and wind up working in the factories.
"I won't get so much stuff I don't need," she said Friday, the day after she returned. "I'll put (the money) to good use. And tell the girls (at Holy Names). I think it's gonna be hard for them to understand. I don't think I can find the words to say what I saw."
In lieu of words, Testo hopes to create a slide show with Marcus DeSieno, 17, of Guilderland, and Dan Tick, 15, of Bethlehem, to inform her classmates about the conditions.
Besides the three Capital Region schools, students from Oakwood Friends School, a Quaker school in Poughkeepsie, traveled to Mexico.
The Labor-Religion Coalition has led 20 trips to the maquiladoras, American-owned factories just over the border in Mexico. Organizers say NAFTA has cost tens of thousands of American jobs and kept more than 2 million Mexicans living in impoverished neighborhoods.
"You smell the landfill these people are living on, it's surreal," DeSieno said. When he got home, DeSieno realized his bedroom was larger than some of the houses he'd seen.
He worries about the people he met on the one-week trip. "It's the most horrendous feeling, that (the people I met) are still down there and I'm up here and it's always gonna be that way."
Things have worsened over the years, as companies from GM to Delphi experience downturns, said Maureen Casey, coalition International Project coordinator.
While on the trip, the high school students talked about possible solutions, from an increase in "fair trade" practices, which pay workers enough to meet basic needs, to the creation of an economic union for the Americas based on the European Union model.
DeSieno and Tick took photographs and hope to launch a gallery show to educate people about the conditions.
"I felt ashamed that I benefit from these people's despair," said Tick. "Whether I want to or not, it's so deeply tied into our way of life. Converse has maquiladoras. Panasonic has maquiladoras," as do GM, Delphi, DuPont and LG Electronics.
The New York State Labor-Religion Coalition is an alliance of religious, labor, community and youth groups committed to economic justice with 11 affiliates statewide.
The coalition has launched a scholarship fund that pays for middle school and high school for the children of maquiladora workers. "That's the main thing their parents want," said Executive Director Brian O'Shaughnessy.
For information on the New York State Labor-Religion Coalition, call 213-6000. |
