The U.S. plant moving production south has become the classic symbol of the NAFTA era. But many Mexican plants are moving north, proving cheap wages aren't only on the southern side of the border. Now immigrant workers in Los Angeles have targeted the world's largest tortilla producer -- Mexico's Mission Foods. PNS associate editor David Bacon writes regularly on labor and immigration issues.

LOS ANGELES -- Some of the biggest Mexican businesses are moving north in the new NAFTA era. As a result, many of their U.S. employees are wondering which side of the border they're living on.

Ramon Alvarez drives a delivery truck in Los Angeles and even belongs to a union. His family's standard of living, however, isn't much better than if he were working the same job in his native Mexico. Now Alvarez and 150 other drivers have gone on strike.

Ironically, they've made a Mexican monopoly the latest battlefront in the ongoing labor upsurge among California's immigrant work force. Mission Foods moved north and became the world's largest tortilla producer. In the process, the Mexican firm has turned on its head the classic NAFTA symbol of the U.S. plant moving south in search of low wages.

Alvarez, like the company's other delivery drivers, routinely puts in 60 to 80 hours a week. Paid piece-rate with no overtime, he earns an average of $180 per week -- sometimes as little as $108.

"My children are always asking for things I can't give them," he explains. "Meanwhile, I'm working 12 to 15 hours a day, six days a week. I don't even see my youngest son except on Sundays."

When Alvarez parked his truck on August 3 and picked up a picket sign, he took on more than a local food processor. Mission Foods is the U.S. arm of a deep-pocketed Mexican monopoly with extensive ties to that country's ruling elite, including the current Mexican president and his predecessor. Its largest and newest U.S. plant, in Rancho Cucamonga, will have 50 assembly lines and 1,200 workers when it reaches full production, and will supply tortillas to the U.S. Army, as well as a number of fast-food chains, including Pollo Loco, Taco Bell, Del Taco and Carl's Jr.

"The popular stereotype that tortillas are produced in small storefronts is wrong," says Joel Ochoa, organizing director of the Los Angeles Manufacturing Action Project, which is supporting the strike. Over 25,000 workers nationwide produce $2.5 billion worth of tortillas each year. They are almost all immigrant workers, in the same economic situation as the drivers. About a quarter of that production is concentrated in southern California, and most of that belongs to Mission Foods.

Mission, a division of Grupo MASECA (or Gruma) belongs to Roberto Gonzalez Barrera, the Mexican tortilla king who has amassed a fortune in excess of $1.1 billion, including banks, brokerage houses and fast food franchises. Gruma has 10 plants across the U.S., and $400 million in total U.S. tortilla sales.

When it moved into the Los Angeles market, it was already one of the largest food producers in Mexico. Gonzalez grew rich on government tortilla subsidies, and the vast growth of his industrialized tortilla production put thousands of small producers, the nixtamaleros, out of business.

Grupo MASECA was rewarded with an illegal payment of $7 million from the government enterprise CONASUPO, according to the New York Times, at a time when Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo was its secretary of budget and planning. Gonzalez loaned $50 million to Raul Salinas, brother of ex-president Carlos Salinas de Gortari. Raul Salinas is now in a Mexican prison, accused of masterminding the assassination of Juan Francisco Ruiz Massieu, a government official who opposed construction of a Gruma plant.

As the corruption of the Salinas administration began to unravel after Zedillo took office, Carlos Salinas fled Mexico City aboard Gonzalez Barrera's jet.

Gruma has received subsidies in the U.S. as well. Rancho Cucamonga's redevelopment agency gave it over $400,000 to build a plant in the city. Governor Pete Wilson's administration assembled a team of corporate officials to provide assistance.

But despite its wealth and influence, Mission has good reason to fear the labor action in Los Angeles. "Their prime concern obviously is not money," says Hector Fernandez, business agent of the drivers' union, Teamsters Local 63. "It's about breaking the union before it spreads to the workers on the production lines in the plants themselves." Over 1100 workers walk through the gates of Mission's two local tortilla plants every day.

The tortilla walkout extends a key battlefront in Southern California, where factories and workplaces have become pressure cookers for immigrant workers. NAFTA-induced poverty pushes more and more people north across the border. Proposition 187 and similar anti-immigrant measures make them more vulnerable and their labor cheaper. It's a recipe for a labor war.

Mission Foods drivers like Alvarez are doing what over 20,000 immigrant workers have done in southern California over the last decade -- organizing a union and going on strike. The Los Angeles Manufacturing Action Project was set up to coordinate these efforts among the city's 700,000 industrial workers.

"We can all see that the stakes are very high in this strike for the strikers themselves -- and for the right of all immigrant workers to organize and live a decent life," says Ochoa. "If this strike is won, it will make that right real, and easier to achieve, for thousands of others."