The Churn

Last August, in a corner of South Texas where local newspapers still call businesses "corporate citizens," an emergency vehicle paid a visit to a highly fortified underwear mill. The hundred-and-fifty-three-year-old Fruit of the Loom company, owned by Warren Buffett's Omaha-based Berkshire Hathaway, had just announced that its Cameron County factory would close by the end of the year. Much of its production would be shifted to Honduras. The news brought the county government's mass-layoff response squad to the scene.

The first task of the Rapid Response Unit (actually, one spiky-haired twenty-six-year-old named Mario Maldonado) was to buffer the shock of the eight hundred workers who, only weeks before, had been sure that their jobs were safe. The second task was tougher: to convince those workers, in the face of double-digit unemployment and thirty-three-per-cent poverty rates, that this economic equivalent of an axe blow was in fact a main chance.

Rapid-Response Mario, a local himself, had grown deft at drawing out this line of reasoning. The factories that had closed here in the past four years evoked an informal history of middle-class sartorial choice: Levi's and Wrangler jeans; Carter baby clothes; Converse sneakers; Dickies uniforms; Vanity Fair lingerie; North Face parkas; self-belted Haggar slacks. Mario exudes solidity, from his broad chest to his black, unflinching eyes, and though he suspected that many of the workers would never again have jobs as good as the ones they were losing, sentimentality was not part of his commission. He was here to help workers figure out what happens next.

Fruit of the Loom had chosen a few veteran laborers to go, briefly, to Honduras to train the cheaper workers who would replace them. Some of the others would board the meat- and poultry-industry buses that idled outside the county employment office, luring those sufficiently desperate to take short-term slaughterhouse jobs in the Ozarks. But, as Fruit of the Loom's cutting machines and bleaching vats were cranked up on pallet jacks, loaded onto flatbeds, and hauled to the Port of Brownsville, many of the company's workers pocketed a month's severance and filed into Mario's van. They applied for unemployment assistance equal to roughly half their former wages, took aptitude tests, and studied the twenty training brochures that were taped to the van's walls. And thus they joined the Rio Grande Valley's eight thousand other former inseam, watch-pocket, and waistband experts in what economists call capitalism's necessary churn.

Mario knew a little about revising life expectations, having taken this job when he could no longer afford tuition at the University of Texas. He and his wife had just had their first child, a daughter. If he occasionally felt his resourcefulness flag as he helped middle-aged men with six children type up resumes that said, "Willing to take entry level," he consoled himself with the thought that Fruit of the Loom, a factory nearly the size of Madison Square Garden and one of the county's largest private employers, might be globalization's final local casualty. "Honestly," he said, "there's not much left to close."

Cameron County, which has a population of three hundred and thirty-five thousand, sits at the southernmost tip of Texas and consists of a smattering of small towns and two cities, Harlingen and Brownsville. The shuttered factories bear polite signs on their doors: "At this time we are not accepting applications." Its laid-off workers still speak of their former employers with affection -- their loyalty reiterated on the back pockets of their jeans, the neckbands of their T-shirts, and in the form of pet Chihuahuas named Chuck Taylor and 501. But Cameron County's textile workers are now, as units of labor, generic. After forty-one straight months of job loss in the American manufacturing sector, they are a class of obsolescents in need of repurposing.

Lupita Sanchez is a veteran member of the obsolescent class. Her mother stole across the Rio Grande when she was nine months pregnant, in order to bear a daughter with American citizenship and improved odds of a tolerable life. In due course, Lupita, who is now thirty-three, fulfilled this maternal ambition. Raised on both sides of the border, she grew up to be a decently compensated seamstress, and then a quality-control supervisor, at a Brownsville mill that made Mickey Mouse and Little Mermaid T-shirts for Disney. The stability of this work had given Lupita's daughter Silvia, now thirteen, a sense that she belonged to the American middle class. On the summer day that the Fruit of the Loom announcement marked the end of the county's textile era, Silvia sat erectly at the dining-room table of her parents' small frame house, a ponytail loose at her neck, trying to master Bach's "Bourree Anglaise" on her secondhand flute (thirty-three dollars a month on an installment plan). Silvia seemed unaware that the demise of an industry might in some way affect her well-being -- an outlook that her mother wanted to preserve.

Lupita has a round, open face and a purposeful way of walking even when she has nowhere to go. Before her factory closed, in 2001, she and her husband, a pipe fitter's helper named Sergio, had together earned thirty-five thousand dollars a year, plus benefits. That amount, combined with shrewd home economics, was enough to raise their children -- Silvia and her younger siblings, Sandra and Luis Angel -- and treat them to a weekly blowout at Peter Piper Pizza. In August, 2003, the family's income, without benefits, had fallen to thirteen thousand dollars, well below the poverty line of $21,959 for a family of five.

After she lost her job, Lupita had tried to reinvent herself in accordance with market imperatives. First, she earned a G.E.D. and a certificate at the local branch of the University of Texas, as a "Microsoft Office Specialist." When she discovered that this certificate provided her little entree into actual offices, she took out a thirty-five-hundred-dollar loan and trained to be a certified medical assistant -- taking vital signs, scheduling appointments, and drawing blood (a task at which, given her dexterity with a needle, she excelled). Although few people Lupita knew had health insurance anymore, health-care occupations still accounted for nearly half the job vacancies in the county, a statistic manifest in the classified ads that she read every morning before turning to her current occupation -- rolling out tortillas and grilling two hundred fajita lunches to peddle at local construction sites.

She took home thirty dollars a day from this private enterprise, which was just about what she had earned the last time she worked outdoors. Two years after her father's sudden death (when she was seventeen), she left home to do migrant farm labor in Michigan and Indiana. The work had been predictably dismal, but she had embraced the consolations at hand: the clean rivers, and Sergio, who had followed her North from the border. When she was nineteen, she married Sergio; two years later, they had Silvia, and two years after that, a second daughter, Sandra. Lupita was tormented by the thought that her daughters might grow accustomed to life in migrant barracks. Between picking seasons, she returned to Brownsville, put on her best blouse, walked into a local textile mill, and asked if she might learn to sew.

Since the nineteen-sixties, low-slung steel-and-concrete factories had been springing up all over the county's farmlands and chaparral flats, their owners lured by mild weather and cheap labor. To workers, the mills possessed a clear-cut hierarchy. Fruit of the Loom (whose entryway for a time bore a cautionary banner, "Wear the Union Label -- Unemployed") was a better place to work than Vanity Fair or Haggar, but it was not as good as Levi's, the sole union shop, which paid the highest wages. Most of these employment options had come at the expense of millworkers in places like Lowell, Massachusetts, or Henderson, North Carolina; but until recently few South Texans had given much thought to this correlation. In the race for a cut-rate, docile labor force -- the Great Unregulated Place -- Cameron County had, only a decade ago, been in contention. But, as economic boundaries extended far beyond the North American continent, this community no longer rated.

Cameron County is full of geckos, free-tailed bats, twice-fried-food franchises, and audacious contradictions. A replica of the Statue of Liberty is attended not by the "Give me your tired, your poor" inscription but by a notice that the spot is under twenty-four-hour surveillance. Anglo sons of the Alamo wear cowboy hats with guayaberas made in China. The United States' richest diversity of birds shares the sky with the smoke trails of eight hundred thousand smoldering tires from a dump just over the Mexican border. And, while the rhythms of daily life often seem to have two speeds, slow and stop, the county has negotiated American economic history's two greatest transitions -- from farming to manufacturing and, now, from manufacturing to service -- in the space of forty years.

Lupita's neighborhood, an unincorporated scrap of Brownsville called Cameron Park, has been an axis of both transitions. According to the 2000 census, it is the poorest place in America. Its six thousand residents have a per-capita income of forty-one hundred dollars, and its roads have only recently been paved. There are no street lights, and the scents and sounds of roadside corncob venders and feral cats evoke the homeliest of Mexican villages. Still, the lives unfolding here testify not just to economic hardship but to a strain of what used to be called American exceptionalism -- the elasticity of economic class. Once a landing point for indigent, illegal farmworkers, Cameron Park is now populated mainly by working (and voting) second-generation citizens whose emotional investment in their homes and their community is intensified by their itinerant pasts. Secondhand double-wides have been enhanced with pastel paint jobs, oval windows, and bevelled-glass doors. Yards are gaudy with plumbago, the circular driveways enclosed by wrought-iron fences. The local Catholic church is the neighborhood social center, and the middle-school chess team is nationally ranked. But, these days, the forces of social mobility press downward.

Lupita, like many other Cameron County natives, knows the script that outsiders have in mind now when they visit: the ways in which plant closings wrench the heart from a community. But in twenty-first-century America, where even the bleakest corners have absorbed the cultural authority of Sarah Jessica Parker and Bed Bath & Beyond, the mourning is not for a vanished way of life; and the crippled hands endemic among veterans of twenty thousand inseams stanch a good bit of nostalgia. What's mourned is material and specific: the Tommy Hilfiger watches and the college educations that your teen-agers asked for, health insurance, the decent car, the white kitchenette set you coveted for the house whose loss you're now struggling to forestall -- the stuff, immense and absurd, of family stability.

Since the turn of this century, three million American manufacturing jobs have disappeared. Some economists and politicians attribute this loss to global trade deals. Others credit improvements in production efficiency. But, however the responsibility is apportioned, most people agree on one point: the need to retrain displaced workers. Under a popular, expanding federal program called Trade Adjustment Assistance, workers who are judged to have lost their jobs because of foreign-trade policy are eligible for the sort of expensive, generously conceived assistance that has become a rarity since Great Society strategies fell out of fashion. Beneficiaries like Lupita receive up to two years of aggressive training in "demand occupations" -- jobs identified by government and business officials as growth areas -- as well as unemployment compensation and subsidized health care while they learn. It has been estimated that this assistance can cost up to twenty thousand dollars per worker.

The state of Texas, which was disproportionately affected by the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement, has in the succeeding decade become a national model of this market-driven worker redducation. Since 2000, it has received forty-eight million dollars in federal retraining money, not including a $1.6-million "national emergency grant" awarded after Fruit of the Loom announced its closing. With that financial support, closed banks, mills, and military facilities have been reincarnated as centers for the development of what administrators call "the twenty-first-century workforce."

Across the street from Lupita's closed factory, former textile workers study computer maintenance in a shopping mall whose stores have moved away. In one aisle, a red-white-and-blue poster, near a pile of mannequins from an erstwhile J. C. Penney store, reads, "Creating Higher Skill, Higher-Wage Job Opportunities in Your Community: George W. Bush." At a long-shut United States Air Force base, women who were about to graduate from a business-computing course looked one day like a congeries of Whistler's mothers: clad in black plastic hairdresser's capes with white tab collars, they waited tight-lipped for their waist-long hair to be snipped into blunt cuts and bangs. An instructor in high heels told them, "It's like in that show