Border Report: A Fight to Unionize Baja California Truckers Gets an Audience

After six years spent hauling Hyundai auto parts from Baja California to Alabama, Jesus Iturbero wanted a raise and better working conditions for himself and his fellow Mexican camioneros. But when he tried in 2021 to organize an independent labor union, he told me he was fired from his job at a cross-border trucking company.

Out of work, he continued his union organizing efforts but “we were getting nowhere,” Iturbero said  last week. He’s now the secretary general of the Supply Chain Transporters Union (SITRABICS), which advocates for a highly specialized group of Mexican workers: long-haul truckers who carry goods between Mexico and the U.S. interior.

In June, SITRABICS joined forces with a Washington, D.C.-based research and advocacy nonprofit – Rethink Trade at the American Economic Liberties Project – to file a labor complaint through the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), a trilateral trade treaty signed in 2020.

Their petition, made through the USMCA’s Rapid Response Mechanism, is the first involving a Baja California company. It’s also the first involving cross-border truckers. 

SITRABICS and Rethink Trade allege that managers of a trucking facility “controlled by multinational company Hyundai…has fired union organizers, intimidated workers, and blacklisted fired leaders in response to a union organizing campaign,” according to their press release.

When Iturbero and some fellow drivers first tried to form a union, they were surprised to learn that there was already a union at their company. But nobody had informed the employees, and the union wasn’t advocating on their behalf, he said.

The drivers not only wanted pay raises, but also better benefits and working conditions. Iturbero cited the case of a driver who broke his lower leg in the United States; rather than offer him immediate treatment north of the border, his bosses opted to drive him back to Mexico to receive lower-cost treatment there.

Confusion as to who exactly was their employer added to the difficulty in pushing for changes. Though Liber Gennesys is directly named in the complaint, “in the end, there was a mess of companies, and we didn’t really know who was really our boss,” Iturbero said. 

Liber Gennesys did not respond to my requests for comment. A spokesman for Hyundai said Monday that the time difference with Korea prevented an immediate reply from the company’s headquarters.

But earlier this month, the U.S. government found merit to the claims that workers at Tijuana-based Liber Gennesys “and its affiliates and successor companies that provide cross-border transportation services….are being denied the right to freedom of association and collective bargaining.” 

Last week, Mexico consented to the U.S. request for a Mexican government investigation, with findings expected by the end of next month. If Mexico agrees that the company violated the workers’ rights, the two governments may craft a remediation plan, in accordance with the mechanism. 

“We have seen how this mechanism has delivered tangible gains for workers in other cases,” Daniel Rangel, research director of Rethink Trade, told me. “We have been able to get companies to reinstate and give back pay for workers fired in retaliation for their union activities, so we hope to get at least that, but we also need a commitment from the company to organize an independent union.”

Independent unions like SITRABICS have long struggled to gain a foothold in Baja California. For years, companies operating in Mexico for years typically negotiated “protection contracts” with business-friendly unions that did little to protect workers.

In 2019, a labor reform in Mexico made it easier to form independent unions, guaranteeing workers the right to vote by secret ballot, and approve any collective bargaining agreements. But even so, Iturbero said it’s been an uphill struggle: it wasn’t until last year that SITRABICS was even able to gain recognition as an independent union from Mexico’s Federal Center for Labor Conciliation and Registration.

Born in the state of Guanajuato, Iturbero, 56, comes from a family of Mexican truckers, and has been driving 18-wheelers since the age of 21. 

“My uncles, my father, my cousins, my only brother, we’re all camioneros,” he told me when I interviewed him last week in Otay Mesa.

After moving to the border in the late 1990s, he began making cross-border deliveries in 2012. In 2015, he began working for a company that provides transportation services between Hyundai’s facilities in Rosarito Beach and its auto plant in Montgomery, Alabama. After dropping off the auto parts, he’d often drive to a second U.S. location to deliver the trailer itself, and return to Mexico with a shipment of wood.

Iturbero is pleased with the progress so far through the Rapid Response Mechanism, but is not yet ready to celebrate victory.

He remains unemployed, and says his union activism has cost him. 

“I’ve gotten rid of my belongings to pay for all this,” he told me. He accepts occasional help from friends, and continues to fight to get back his job, both through the Rapid Response Mechanism and through a petition to a Baja California labor board.

To date, his petition in Mexico for reinstatement has not moved forward. “The fact is that four years have passed and I haven’t even had a conciliation hearing.”

The French Artist Who Became a Tijuanense

Danielle Gallois was a prolific painter who moved from France to Tijuana in the mid-1960s–and never left. Her small surrealist pieces show lovers, swimmers, fish, serpents, castles, princesses–compelling and colorful figures drawn from her rich imagination.

Nearly two decades after her death, her life and her work resonate in the region. I was among dozens crowded into Tijuana’s Galeria de Arte Pop on a recent Friday night for a Gallois retrospective. There were artists, actors, dancers, arts promoters, a broad cross-section of the city’s rich and varied cultural world.

There are so many pathways to telling the story of the San Diego-Tijuana border–and as a news reporter I spent years pursuing topics of migration, political change, economic growth. drug violence, infrastructure,  environmental crises. The arts were typically a subject for feature writers–and largely overlooked by news organizations–yet fundamental to the region’s story. 

My own fleeting memory of Danielle Gallois is from the mid-1990s. She had walked into a curio shop on Avenida Revolucion as I was talking to the merchant. As he shooed her away, I was struck at the sight of this woman disheveled woman who spoke with a French accent.

I soon learned she was an artist from France–some say the daughter of a diplomat–born in the medieval village of Bar-Le-Duc. She moved to Mexico after meeting her husband, the Tijuana artist Benjamin Serrano, while studying in Paris. When they eventually  divorced, she remained in the area, refusing the entreaties of family members that she return to France.

She died in 2006 in Rosarito Beach. Those who remember her say she was reclusive, suffered from alcoholism and often lived hand-to-mouth. “She’d carry a folder with five or six paintings, and say, ‘Won’t you buy it for $100 so I can settle my account?” said Pedro Ochoa, director of Galeria de Arte Pop.

“She wasn’t looking for recognition, ” said Oscar Marban, a Gallois collector who is lending about half of his collection of 100 pieces for the Galeria Pop exhibit, which will remain open through September. “She’d simply create works and sell them.”

Among those attending the show was Ruth Vargas Leyva, a retired university professor and poet. “She was a French Tijuanense who painted the world of dreams,” Vargas told me. “There are various painters of her generation, but she was the most original.”

The Eagle and the Condor

The morning after the Gallois opening, a very different arts inauguration took place at the border fence in Playas de Tijuana. The occasion was a celebration of “El Abrazo Mutuo,” (The Mutual Embrace), a giant mural that features two birds in flight–an eagle and a condor.

The piece was created by the Tijuana-born artist Alfredo “Libre” Gutierrez (now based in Mexico City) together with a collective of local students and artists. It was inspired by an ancient indigenous prophecy of the coming together of the eagle (symbolizing the north) and the condor (symbolizing the south) and the resulting peace in the Americas.

The project was primarily funded by Mozaik Philanthropy, a Los Angeles-based foundation, with assistance from the nonprofit Friends of International Friendship Park. The July 19 ceremony brought dozens of participants, which included a Kumeyaay blessing that honored the original inhabitants of the region.

“Our whole vision is for there to be no walls and there to be an international park, and part of the strategy is to support and create as many cultural activities as we can on this side,” said Daniel Watman, founder of the Binational Friendship Garden. 

Libre, the artist, hopes the piece inspires similar efforts all over Tijuana. “Imagine Tijuana filled with sculptures, arts murals everywhere, would we see it differently?” he told the crowd. He issued a call to fellow artists: “Let’s go out into the street, show what we’ve got. We’re a culture thousands of years old, with incredible artistic expressions.”

Fond farewell: This is my final Border Report. I’m grateful to my editors at Voice of San Diego for giving me free rein to explore so many topics. What drew me to the border in 1994 was curiosity (listen to my podcast) but what has kept me here are the brave, creative and independent people I continue to come across each day. I can still be reached at sandradibblenews@gmail.com

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