Beginning in 1965, Mexico began a program to renew and modernize the cities along its northern frontier. Known as the Programa Nacional Fronterizo, or PRONAF, this drive involved the creation of new parks and roadways, border crossing points and, most importantly, factories. These cities were magnets for migrants from Mexico’s southern states and had long been in danger of losing citizens to U.S. cities just north of the border. PRONAF promoted the building of pleasant-looking cities and more amenities, coupled with a stronger and more diverse economic base.
At the heart of PRONAF was a manufacturing program founded upon a key trade arrangement with the United States. The Border Industrialization Program (BIP) allowed American companies to set up factories in Mexico close to the U.S. border. U.S. companies were incentivized by loopholes in the language of U.S. treaties and tariffs. These exceptions allowed companies to export key components for consumer goods to Mexican factories to be assembled into a final product that was then shipped back to the United States without a tariff penalty. U.S. companies could keep the most “technical” aspect of the production processes in the United States while offshoring the low-wage but more labor-intensive work of assembly. Because Mexican workers could be paid far less than their counterparts in the United States, this arrangement boosted U.S. companies’ profits.
For both U.S. companies and Mexican public officials, the BIP was a success. Throughout the 1960s, Mexican officials trumpeted how both location and the quality of workers made cities like Juárez and Nogales superior to comparable sites in Taiwan. Companies cut costs and Mexico’s border cities saw the average wage of their workers surpass that commanded by workers in the interior of the country. In fact, it was so effective that borderlands leaders on the U.S. side began to implement their own ideas about how to replicate its successes in U.S. border cities like El Paso and Laredo.
During the second half of the 1960s, the United States and Mexico further collaborated to build a set of regional economic plans to decrease poverty and improve the standard of living in the linked metropolitan areas that straddled the border. Dubbed the Commission for Border Development and Friendship (CODAF), its American wing was headed by former El Paso mayor and ambassador to Costa Rica Raymond Telles. Part of the goal was to reduce labor migration from Mexico to the United States, as the bracero guest worker program ended. A related component of this plan was a Great Society drive to make sure that Mexican Americans living in border cities in the United States had access to jobs, training and programs that allowed them to overcome the obstacles posed by decades of discrimination.