When Vicente Guerrero reported to work at the shoe factory, he had to leave his yo-yo with the guard at the door. Then Vicente, who had just turned 12 years old, was led to his post on the assembly line: a tall vertical lever attached to a press that bonds the soles of sneakers to the uppers.
The lever was set so high that Vicente had to shinny up the press and throw all his 90 pounds backwards to yank the stiff steel bar downward. It reminded him of some playground contraptions.
For Vicente this would have to pass for recreation from now on. A recent graduate of the sixth grade, he joined a dozen other children working full time in the factory. Once the best orator in the school and a good student, he now learned the wisdom of silence: even opening his mouth in this poorly ventilated plant meant breathing poisonous fumes.
Vicente’s journey from the front-row desk of his schoolroom to the factory assembly line was charted by adults: impoverished parents, a heedless employer, hapless regulators, and impotent educators. “I figure work must be good for me, because many older people have helped put me here,” says Vicente, shaking his hair out of his big, dark eyes. “And in the factory I get to meet lots of other boys.”
Half of Mexico’s 85 million people are below the age of 18, and this generation has been robbed of its childhood by a decade of debt crisis. It’s illegal in Mexico to hire children under 14, but the Mexico City Assembly recently estimated that anywhere from five to ten million children are employed illegally, often in hazardous jobs. “Economic necessity is stronger than a theoretical prohibition,” says Alfredo Farit Rodriguez, Mexico’s Attorney General in Defense of Labor, a kind of workers’ ombudsman.
Young Vicente Guerrero’s life exemplifies both the poverty that forces children to seek work and the porous regulatory system that makes it all to easy for them to find jobs. IN the shantytown where Vicente lives, and throughout the central Mexico state of Guanajuato, it is customary for small and medium-sized factories to employ boy shoemakers known as zorritas, or little foxes.
“My father says I was lucky to have so many years to be lazy before I went to work,” says Vicente,. His father, Patricio Guerrero, entered the shoe factories of Guanajuato at the age of seven. Three decades of hard work later, Mr. Guerrero lives in a tumbledown brick shell about the size and shape of a baseball dugout. It is home to 25 people, maybe 36. Mr. Guerrero himself isn’t sure how many relatives and family friends are currently lodged with him, his wife, and six children. Vicente, to get some privacy in the bedroom he shares with eight other children, occasionally rigs a crude tent from the laundry on the clotheslines crisscrossing the hut.
School was the one place Vicente had no problem settling him apart from other kids. Classmates, awed by his math skills, called him “the wizard.” Nearly as adept in other subjects, Vicente finished first among 105 sixth-graders in a general-knowledge exam.
Vicente’s academic career reached its zenith during a speaking contest he won last June on thee last day of school. The principal was so moved by the patriotic poem he recited that she called him into her office to repeat it just for her. That night, Vicente told his family the whole story. He spoke of how nervous he had been on the speaker’s platform and how proud he was to sit on the principal’s big stuffed chair.
After he finished, there was a strained silence. “Well,” his father finally said, “it seems that you’ve learned all that you can in school.” Mr. Guerrero then laid his plans for Vicente’s next lesson in life. IN a few weeks, there would be an opening for Vicente at Deportes Mike, the athletic shoe factory where Mr. Guerrero himself had just been hired. Vicente would earn 100,000 pesos a week, about $34.
Last August Vicente was introduced to the Deportes Mike assembly line. About a dozen of the 60 workers were underage boys, many of whom toiled alongside their fathers. One youth, his cheek bulging with sharp tacks, hammered at some baseball shoes. A tiny 10-year old was napping in a crate that he should have been filling with shoe molds. A bigger boy was running a stamping machine he had decorated with decals of Mickey Mouse and Tinker Bell. The bandage wrapped around the stamper’s hand gave Vicente an uneasy feeling.
Showing Vicente the ropes was the plant superintendent’s 13-year old son, Fransico Guerrero, a cousin of Vicente’s who was a toughened veteran with 3 years experience in shoemaking.
When a teacher came by the factory to chide school dropouts, Francisco rebuked her. “I’m earning 180,000 pesos a week,” he said. “What do you make?” the teacher, who’s weekly salary is 120,000 pesos, could say nothing.
Vicente’s favorite part of his new job is running the clanking press, though that usually occupies a small fraction of his eight-hour workday. He spends most of his time on dirtier work: smearing glue onto the soles of shoes with his hands. The can of glue he dips his fingers into is marked “toxic substances…. Prolonged or repeated inhalation causes grave health damage; do not leave in the reach of minors.” All the boys ignore the warning.
Impossible to ignore is the sharp, sickening odor of the glue. The only ventilation in the factory is from the slits in the wall where bricks were removed, and from a window near Vicente that opens only halfway. Just a matter of weeks after he started working, Vicente was home in bed with a cough, burning eyes and nausea.
What provoked Vicente’s illness, according to the doctor he saw at the public hospital, was the glue fumes. Ingredients aren’t listed on the label, but the glue’s manufacturer, Simon S.A. of Mexico City, says it contains toluene, a petroleum extract linked to liver, lung, and central nervous system damage. The maximum exposure to toluene permitted under Mexican environmental law is twice the level recommended by recently tightened US standards. And in any event, Deportes Mike’s superintendent doesn’t recall a government health inspector coming around in the nine years the plant has been open.
When Vicente felt well enough to return to work a few days later, a fan was installed near his machine. “The smell still makes you choke,” Vicente says, “but el patron says I’ll get used to it.”
El patron, the factory owner, is Alfredo Hidalgo. “These kinds of problems will help make a man of him,” Mr. Hidalgo says. “It’s a tradition here that boys grow up quickly.” Upholding tradition has been good for Mr. Hidalgo’s business: Vicente and the other zorritas generally are paid less than adult workers.
Mr. Hidalgo doesn’t see that as exploitation. “If it were bad for Vicente, he wouldn’t have come back after the first day of work,” he says. “None of the boys would, and my company wouldn’t be able to survive.”
Matt Moffett is a staff reporter for The Wall Street Journal. This is excerpted from his article in the April 8, 1991 issue.