FRONTERAS, Sonora – This country demands patience.
“In Mexico, you never get anything done on the first trip, there’s always a suprise” Alice Valenzuela often says of her adopted homeland.
It also requires faith.
“Whenever there’s a problem, we all sink to our knees and wait for the next miracle,” she says. “That’s the best thing to do. You can’t rely on flawed human beings.”
In Fronteras, a small town about 40 miles south of the U.S. border at Douglas Ariz., the long-awaited miracle is jobs. When the town’s only industry, a Levolor window blinds factory, that employed 435 people, closed in 2002, its people were left praying for answers.
Three years later, some of those prayers have been answered. But in Fronteras, divine intervention only follows human sweat – and tears.
The Valenzuelas
Alice Valenzuela, 55, easily refers to herself a gringa, “I’m the only one around, usually,” she says.
She has broken down on lonely roads in the Sonora countryside and been recognized by passersby whose faces she herself can’t remember. The sort-of strangers always stop to offer her a lift. In these parts, it’s hard to forget Alice Valenzuela.
Even though she may not look like her neighbors, she calls Fronteras home.
“I’m Mexican now,” she says. “I love where I live. I want to die here.”
Valenzuela and her husband, Roberto, 58, live an hour outside Fronteras on the ranch Roberto inherited from his father. In this rural part of the country, the spaces are wide-open; things are far apart. With only 1,500 people, Fronteras is the seat of a municipality of only 7,000; it’s the biggest thing around.
The Valenzuelas met as students at the University of Arizona. After more than a decade working in northern California – Roberto as an executive for Hewlett-Packard, Alice as a newspaper publisher – the couple returned to Mexico to raise a family. They planned to live on the ranch for a few years and then maybe move back to the United States where their children could go to school. Instead, they never left.
In their second career, the newly minted ranchers won a reputation for their charity efforts and volunteer work in the state. The women of Fronteras naturally turned to the Valenzuelas when the few jobs vanished with Levolor and people were left hungry.
When trouble hit Fronteras, when the few jobs vanished and people were left hungry, the women of the town turned to the Valenzuelas.
Alice Valenzuela balked at first. The ranch was already struggling through an extended drought. She 
and Roberto had their own problems to deal with, she said, without taking on the crushing problems facing Fronteras.
“I said, we’re going out of business and you want us to create jobs?”
She told them, Fronteras doesn’t have enough paved roads, that it doesn’t have restaurants, that it would take three years, maybe five, to find any company willing to invest in the town.
“You don’t have anything,” she said. But, even saying those things, Alice Valenzuela said she knew she had to help in whatever way she could. It wasn’t a choice.
She tells a story about a phone call she once received from a neighbor.
“Alicia, what do you think of the pueblo?”
“What about it?”
“The pueblo, how do you think things are going?”
“About the same I guess.”
“Yes. It has never changed. I haven’t seen any change in my whole life. Things have never gotten better. Only worse.”
And the woman, her friend, started crying.
“That really hit me,” Alice Valenzuela said.
She agreed to help the women of the town in whatever way she could.
“You don’t know how tough this is going to be,” she told them.
Retroworks de México
In Middlebury, Vermont, more than 2,500 miles away, Robin Ingenthron received a very strange phone call from a friend in Bisbee, Ariz.
“I found this place in Fronteras,” the friend said.
“Where?”
Ingenthron is the president of American Retroworks Inc., a recycling management and consulting company. He’s made a 20-year career in the industry in both the public and private sectors. His specialty is electronics recycling and he is a recognized expert in the field.
The friend, Mike Rohrbach, a Bisbee philanthropist, told Ingenthron that he had found the perfect place for Ingenthron to expand his electronics recycling business. Rohrbach told Ingenthron about a group of women in the town who had formed a collective that was trying to bring jobs to the area.
It was the same group of women who had met with the Valenzuelas.
Ingenthron had toyed with the idea of recycling in Mexico in the past, but he wasn’t interested.
“It just sounded like a crazy far-fetched idea,” Ingenthron said, “I told him no.”
Ingenthron visited Fronteras, but he wasn’t sold. He told Rohrbach and the Valenzuelas that they would have to hire him as a consultant. If they wanted his help, they’d have to pay him a $5,000 retainer check.
“I honestly thought they would go away, ” Ingenthron said.
A few days later, Ingenthron found a check in the mail. He was floored. These women were serious.
He flew to Mexico to give them their check back – and go into business.
“I don’t know if it was their prayers or what – but I had to try,” he said.
One Small Problem
After meeting with the Valenzuelas, the women of Fronteras formed a non-profit collective. The Valenzuelas laid out two conditions – everyone does their fair share and not one penny be paid in bribes.
“No one has any expectation of clean government here,” Alice Valenzuela says, “That’s why we have to do things clean.”
The women tried first with a restaurant. The Valenzuelas thought the cooperative might be able to promote tourism in Fronteras. They won a $40,000 grant from the government’s agricultural extension for economic development n the town. They sold tamales to a Soroptimist Club in Phoenix. It wasn’t enough.
When Ingenthron came to Fronteras, it seemed like a prayer had been answered.
“Miracle number 18,” Alice Valenzuela calls it, though she admits she’s long lost count.
The women would move Ingenthron’s recycling business into the old Levolor plant, which they’d taken over. The Levolor factory itself sat in an abandoned school – the building is used to being recycled. The women would disassemble computers, televisions and other electronics imported into Mexico, break them down into their usable parts, salvaging valuables like copper and plastic, and then sell that scrap.
But there was a catch. Every single piece of every computer imported into Mexico had to be documented and logged for make and model – an impossible amount of paperwork.
The only way out of the problem was to change federal law, Alice Valenzuela said.
They did.
Red Tape
Members of the collective met with Sonora’s freshman senator – Alfonso Elias Serrano – who had been a friend and acquaintance of the Valenzuelas.
They asked him to help change the law.
Serrano said it would be easier to get $1 million for an industrial park. Appropriations are one thing – bureaucracy is another, he said.
But he promised to try.
A year and a half later, the phone rang.
“Get to Mexico City. I’m sorry it’s taken this long,” Serrano said.
The Valenzuelas met with representatives of the treasury and the economic development ministry. Officials told them that the ministries had signatory power to change the law, but that it would take time – and more meetings. They would have to come back.
On another trip, another meeting – this time in the boardroom of a 40-story office building - assembled government officials prepared to lay down their verdict. A tremendous clutch of men in suits and ties were laying down business cards.
Valenzuela had a bad feeling.
“I thought, ‘No, no. The more people involved, the worse.’ … It’s an overwhelming bureaucracy.”
“We don’t want Mexico to become a dumping ground,” they told Valenzuela.
“How do we know you won’t just resell these computers, in violation of the law?,” they asked.
Valenzuela almost broke down, thinking it was a lost cause.
“I’m a tough broad. My husband has only seen me cry about three times in 33 years of marriage. I said, at this minute, the people in Fronteras are praying. Can I go home and tell my neighbors that this is their Christmas present?”
They said, “How about sooner? How about September, Independence Day?”
The deed was done.
“In Mexico, you never get anything done on the first trip,” Valenzuela says.
Las Chicas Bravas
Now there is a factory. For the eight women and two men who make up the collective, there are jobs.
But no electricity – the mayor pulled the plug. The state owns the utilities here He’s jealous of the collective, and suspicious, Valenzuela said.
And the women have stood up to him in the past. At a town meeting, the women demanded that he create more jobs because so many people in town were unemployed.
“One of the people in the audience told us to be bravas (fierce),” said Virginia Ponce Mercado who works in the recycling plant. “Because we didn’t give a damn. What we wanted were jobs for Fronteras, to lead dignified lives.”
The name stuck. The women are now known in Fronteras as Las Chicas Bravas.
The power may be off, but the women have cleared the pigeon nests out of the formerly abandoned building. It took three trips to Nogales, Sonora, to secure the proper tax numbers, but the Chicas keep going. They have no other choice.
“We all have to keep going for the same reason,” said Myrta Rico Armenta, who also works in the factory, “So that everything we’ve done is worth it all.”
Looking to the Future
Americans ought to care about what happens in Fronteras, Alice Valenzuela says, it’s on its doorstep. Times are better for the Chicas, but times are still hard. For most of Fronteras, it’s an uphill struggle, she says.
“If you want a job in Fronteras, you can work for a local drug dealer, or jump the border and work illegally,” Alice Valenzuela says.
Many of the Chicas, including Mercado and Armenta, have worked illegally in the United States.
“We needed something to motivate us to stay here in Fronteras,” Mercado said.
Ingenthron hopes to expand the relatively small recycling operation in Fronteras. For now, the plant employs only the Chicas.
“But that’s the way it started up here (in Vermont), five years ago – with me and a truck,” Ingenthron said.
He said he hopes to employ at least 1,000 people, at Fronteras and elsewhere, in the next five years.
“We’re just getting started,” he said.
Even better, the Chicas are 50 percent shareholders in the new company, Retroworks de México.
“I tell them I want them to become executives some day,” Alice Valenzuela says.
But for the Chicas, a steady job is a prayer answered.
“I know I will wake up every morning and I will have enough money to get by,” Armenta said.
“We really didn’t have anything before… I hope in other towns there are chicas bravas like us.”
