Community Profile
The Colonia Chilpancingo neighborhood in Tijuana was founded in 1940 as an “ejido” collective community. The colonia began to change with the free trade regime initiated in the 1960s, and was transformed by the boom in the maquiladoras that accompanied the implementation of NAFTA in 1994. Once a quiet area where families would swim and fish in the Río Alamar running through the neighborhood, Colonia Chilpancingo today faces severe problems of pollution, impoverishment and lack of infrastructure.
Over 100 maquiladoras are located in Tijuana’s largest industrial park on the Mesa de Otay hill above Colonia Chilpancingo. About 40,000 laborers work in the maquiladoras, assembling electronics, metals, plastics and wood products in what are among the most toxic industrial processes.
Many workers come from distant parts of Mexico, drawn by the promise of jobs. Yet two adults working full-time in the maquilas making consumer goods for the U.S. market can cover only 2/3 of the basic needs of a family of four. Maquila workers live in dwellings made of scraps, without piped water, 
plumbing, electricity or trash pickup, along the Río Alamar, now a fetid stew of industrial and biological waste.
Unpaved streets, truck traffic past schools and homes, and streams of industrial runoff from the Mesa de Otay down into the community below, add to the pollution created by the lack of infrastructure, poverty and overcrowding. Colonia Chilpancingo (and the adjacent Colonia Campestre Murúa and Nueva Esperanza) are neighborhoods where environmental justice activists with the Colectivo have made a difference. Among other projects, the historic cleanup of the Metales y Derivados toxic site is a landmark in environmental justice history.
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