Across town, in another sewing plant, the pace was just as frantic as workers plowed through piles of cut fabric, feverishly sewing the material into slacks, while others stood over big, steamy pressing machines and ironed the finished garments.
Deep in the interior of Mexico, this small city, once famous for its bottled mineral water, is a major center of the country's burgeoning garment industry. About 400 companies in and around Tehuacan pump out jeans, shirts, dress slacks and other apparel at a dizzying pace as manufacturing orders pour in, mostly from American companies.
The boom here has been created by the global economy of the 1990s, the hopscotching across the Third World by manufacturers in search of cheap labor. China, Indonesia and Hong Kong are prime spots in Asia, and low wages have made virtually all of Latin America and the Caribbean attractive destinations for garment-makers.
But in Mexico, the lure is more than low wages and a large, desperate labor pool. Compared with Asia, the Caribbean and Central America, Mexico is hardly an inexpensive labor market. But in contrast to the United States, where the minimum wage is $5.15 an hour, Mexico - with a legal minimum wage of about $4.25 a day - seems cheap, indeed.
Mexico has become a magnet for garment-makers because of tariff and quota breaks guaranteed by the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the country's proximity to the United States, and the decreasing value of the peso, which has made the dollar stronger.
The result is that Mexico - which exported more than $4.6 billion in clothing to the United States in 1997 - has surpassed China as the largest exporter of apparel to American consumers. Business is so brisk that the U.S.-Mexican border, the first frontier of post-NAFTA expansion, is crowded, real estate is more expensive, and the competition for workers has slowly driven wages higher.
