General Motors' First Manufacturing Plant in Nuevo Laredo, Mexico

"On September 16, 1981, I was in Nuevo Laredo for the ground breaking ceremony at the plant site. Our supervising GM construction engineer, Art Collins, and our purchasing agent, Herb Ball were there with me. We had driven to the plant site on unpaved Nuevo Laredo roads—with promises having been secured that a paved road would soon reach our site in Nuevo Laredo’s first industrial park.  This was the time of  Ronald Reagan, the “Urban Cowboy" movie, disruptive years of the 80’s. We wanted to be the “Texans” of the movies—and we enjoyed wearing cowboy boots and jeans to work; going to honky tonks at night, and legally driving down Texas highways drinking beer. Governor Ann Richards had not yet civilized Texas, and driving distances were still measured by how many beer bottles you needed in your cooler to reach your destination without thirst.

. In 1981, GM had already constructed four maquiladora plants in Ciudad Juarez, across from El Paso, Texas, and three plants in Matamoros, across from Brownsville, Texas. El Paso is 600 miles from Laredo, and Laredo is 200 miles from Brownsville—all three cities situated on the Rio Grande River. The Rio Grande is known as the Rio Bravo in Mexico—and since both names are in Spanish, I have never been able to discover why the difference. In terms of distances between the cities, El Paso is nearer Los Angeles, California, than it is to Brownsville. Laredo was chosen by GM primarily so as not to have too large a presence in any one city. GM had gone through a “southern strategy” during the 1970’s of trying to have union free plants in the U.S.. They had built plants in Mississippi, Georgia, and Louisiana—trying to keep out the UAW and IUE unions that populated GM plants in the North, and to thereby reduce wages and work rule related costs. The southern strategy cracked when a GM plant in Monroe, La., voted for UAW representation, and the domino effect took hold—with all the other GM southern plants becoming unionized. GM’s new strategy in the 80’s was a deep southern strategy—Mexico. To avoid wage pressures by Mexican unions, GM did not want a concentration of its plants in any one Mexican city—thus Nuevo Laredo got its opportunity to be home to GM’s newest plant in 1981.

The plant in Nuevo Laredo was named “Delredo”-- a combination of the GM Division’s name, Delco Products, and Laredo. It sounded great to the English only speakers in Ohio and Michigan. Unfortunately, Delredo, sounds like the name for a bar to Spanish speakers. After some initial recruiting problems—because of the plant’s name, the locals accepted “Delredo” as a maquiladora, and it lasted for 17 years until it was changed in 1998.

Delredo was built on 10 acres of virgin desert like land in less than a year--quick for a plant built of pre-stressed concrete sections with 165,000 square feet of floor space. Production shipments of strontium ferrite magnets, for use in automotive electrical motors, started in August of 1981".-- from "Maquiladora" by E.C. Sherwood