Chihuahua

Silver founded Chihuahua in 1709; manufacturing replaced it, but the extraction logic never changed. A local Indian discovered rich silver veins at Santa Eulalia in 1707, triggering a rush that required a supply town. Governor Antonio de Deza y Ulloa convened 16 notables to vote on a location—the result was an 8-8 tie, broken by the governor's casting vote for the river valley. Real de Minas de San Francisco de Cuéllar was born from a deadlock, like so many founding decisions that lock in centuries of path dependence. Santa Eulalia has produced over 500 million troy ounces of silver across three centuries of nearly continuous mining—one of the largest carbonate replacement deposits on Earth.

The commodity shifted from mineral to labor, but the center-periphery relationship persists. Chihuahua state leads Mexico in exports—$76.5 billion in the first nine months of 2025, a 38.3% increase over the prior year, representing 16% of national manufacturing exports. Over 1,200 maquiladora plants employ an economically active population of 1.8 million, running facilities for Ford, ZF, Lear, and BorgWarner. The state operates as a specialized metabolic pathway: extraordinary throughput in automotive, electronics, and medical devices, but fragile when the pathway constricts. When Texas border crossings slow, the entire supply chain starves—an army ant colony whose foraging network depends on uninterrupted trail pheromones.

The Rarámuri people—100,000 'light-footed ones' in the Copper Canyon system—complicate this industrial narrative. Drug cartels exploit their legendary endurance and remote territory for smuggling, with arrests of Rarámuri drug mules on US soil doubling to 200 annually. Forced displacement has driven families from ancestral lands as La Línea and Los Salazar fight over Sierra Madre corridors. This is parasitism layered on colonial extraction: the same mountain routes that carried Spanish silver now carry fentanyl precursors, and the same indigenous population is conscripted into service.

Nearshoring intensifies Chihuahua's growth. US-China trade friction drives manufacturing investment toward Mexico's border infrastructure, and Chihuahua absorbs this flow through established workforce and logistics—Kanata North-style industrial parks and a modernized Jerónimo-Santa Teresa port of entry. But the dependency deepens with every new plant. Pancho Villa launched the Mexican Revolution from Chihuahua in 1910 partly because the state's mineral wealth never reached its workers. The maquiladora economy generates the same structural tension: $76 billion crosses the border while the communities producing it capture a fraction, a camel that carries water for others through the desert without drinking.