They didn’t know it at the time, but they were the fathers of what would become the greatest industrial model in the world.

      Depending who you talked to, they were either flying by night, of flying by the seat of their pants, but the pioneers of the maquila industry developed the prototypes and wrote the best practices being used today by manufacturers across the globe. They proved companies didn’t have to be home-grown to succeed and in the process introduced production sharing to the world.

      Today’s maquila industry has come a long way in the four decades since its creation. But it wasn’t always that way. In the late 1960s, you could tell how much confidence companies had in the maquila industry by looking at their parking lots.

      A.C. Nielsen, considered one of the first maquilas in Mexico, didn’t even locate in an industrial park, choosing instead to buy an old hospital building in Ciudad Juárez. It built just two spaces for the location. General Motors, which today employs more than 55,000 workers in México, had only 15 parking spaces.

      “Everybody was flying by the seat of the pants then,” says Don Michie, one of two UTEP marketing professors collaborating on a book about the maquila industry pioneers.

      Michie and Gary Sullivan are collaborating on a book that will bring the history of the industry to life. They have spent three years taping interviews with who they call stalwarts of the maquila industry. They recently identified 89 people as “stalwarts” and “associate stalwarts” of the maquila industry during the years 1962 to 1972 and earlier this year they gathered more than 40 of the surviving pioneers for an event in El Paso to honor them.

      “No one foresaw the impact of what they were doing,” Michie says of the pioneers’ early work. Yet as partner Sullivan says, they created the blueprint for what is happening in China, India and the rest of the world’s developing nations...

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