Fronteras Struggling to Survive

Sunday, 12 April 2009 00:00

The future of Fronteras, a town of 1,500 people in Sonora, Mexico, may be looking up thanks in part to a research group at the University of Arizona.

Tired of inaction by the government as her adopted hometown fell apart, Alice Valenzuela contacted the Tejido Group, a research project in the UA department of architecture and landscape architecture. She asked for an urban plan for the town and was told that it needed more than an urban plan, it needed everything.

Located 40 miles south of the border between the United States and Mexico, Fronteras was founded by German Jesuits sent by Pope Innocent X in 1645, according to Valenzuela.

It was one of the northernmost Spanish outposts in what is now Mexico and was the birthplace of explorer Juan Bautista de Anza, who went on to establish the first land route from Mexico to the Pacific coast of California.

Former Mexican President Plutarco Elías Calles lived in Fronteras for a time, and Geronimo was once imprisoned in a cave built into a hill near the city.

Despite its eventful past, today's Fronteras is economically depressed says Valenzuela.

Valenzuela has lived and worked on a ranch she owns with her husband near Fronteras for almost 19 years. A graduate of the University of Arizona, she moved to the ranch from the Bay Area in 1990 with her husband Roberto, also a UA graduate, and their two young sons.

The young family decided to take over the part of Roberto's father's ranch given to them before he died. It was a life-altering decision for Alice, a journalist, and Roberto, an electrical engineer, because it meant giving up their careers and neither had ever owned or operated a ranch.

But it was a move prompted, in part, by anxiety over how their sons would turn out if raised in the wealthy Bay Area neighborhood they were living in.

Alice says warning signs were everywhere, including preschoolers who wore designer shoes, 16-year-olds driving BMWs, and not being able to get anyone to baby-sit despite offering three times the minimum wage.

So they moved to Mexico, lived, worked and taught their children on the ranch, and have been successful enough financially to stay out of debt and send both sons to college in the United States.

Turning a profit in ranching is a feat in and of itself, according to Alice.

“There are these two jokes about ranching, people who do it really do it for the love of it and for the quality of life more than for the money,” she said. “The two jokes are, ‘Did you know you can make a small fortune in ranching? Provided you start with a large fortune. And then the other joke is, you ask a rancher, ‘what would you do if you won the lottery? Oh I'd ranch until it's all gone.'”

However, the Valenzuela's success has not been mirrored by Fronteras. The town's economy is almost entirely based on cattle, crops, and the Grupo Mexico mine an hour away.


The town did have a maquiladora, or assembly factory, for Levolor blinds, but it closed in 2002 which left more than 200 people without jobs.

Because the mine is not hiring, ranching and farming are the only legal drivers of the economy, leaving the fortunes of Fronteras almost totally dependent on nature.

Even more than other types of businesses, running a successful ranch or farm is not always in the owner's control, Valenzuela says.

“If you run a McDonald's, you have control over what you pay your employees, your utility bills are pretty fixed, your labor costs are pretty fixed, your cost of materials is pretty fixed. There's a lot of stuff within your control,” she said.

“But in a biologically based business, you can't command it to rain, that's out of your control, you can't dictate the price you get for your calves, they're a commodity. This year we got 30 percent less for our calves than for the same calves we sold last year, just because the economy tanked. So you live on 30 percent less than you made last year even though you produced the same amount of cattle.”

In the midst of a record drought over the past decade, Fronteras is struggling to survive. Many younger people leave for work in Agua Prieta or the United States, which has fractured the normally close-knit families in the town.

The town does not have a hospital or high school, and its middle school is a "telesecundaria," or television school. All the grades are taught together by a teacher on a television.

There isn't a waste management department, so garbage is just dumped on private property outside of town.

Behind the police station is a police car sitting on its wheels because, Valenzuela says, someone stole the tires for themselves. She also said she doubts if the ambulance even runs.

In addition to a dearth of jobs, Valenzuela says corruption is to blame for Fronteras's woes. Because of strict term limits, each mayor can only serve for three years.

Valenzuela says this creates no incentive for them to do a good job and the money allotted for paving roads and other types of infrastructure often disappears.

When a new mayor comes in he hires new people for every position, from the street sweepers to the police, usually friends and family regardless of qualification.

Knowing they won't have jobs under the new mayor, the outgoing people at those positions take what they can with them, even the computers and police cars.

Valenzuela says that 90 percent of people live marginally as farmers, with the only two jobs that offer the possibility of a brighter future being drug trafficking and working illegally in the United States.

Since her sons moved away, Valenzuela has turned her considerable energy towards helping the people of Fronteras. When she asked what she could to help, she was told that a new maquiladora to replace Levolor would create the most jobs.

“How do you attract a company to a town with no schools, no roads, no waste, etcetera?” she wondered.

For the past three years she has worked with a group of local women and they managed to form a partnership with an American electronics recycling company. An article in the Tucson Weekly chronicles how Retroworks De Mexico came about.

The new partnership has created a handful of jobs and some hope in Fronteras, but the larger problems will not be solved easily because of the system, she said.

“It's not just Fronteras, all the towns in Mexico have similar stories,” Valenzuela said. “It's not just a bad mayor here and there, it's the system, it's the system, it's the system.”

Valenzuela says real improvements are only possible by working around the government. The Tejido Group agreed to help and is working with the town to obtain funding and create a design plan.

Alice says she hopes that the UA will eventually "adopt" Fronteras, using all facets and disciplines to help it rebuild and in return students would get a real life situation to practice their skills on.

Written by Cameron Jones You are reading Fronteras Struggling to Survive articles