NEWS & REPORTS

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Peñón de los Baños

By Betsy Bowman, Research Associate, Center for Global Justice

Peñón de los Baños is an ejido that used to be where the Mexico City airport is now, but it moved north of Los Rodriguez in the 1970s when the airport was being built.  The original inhabitants from Mexico City soon dispersed, and the ejido Peñón de los Baños needed inhabitants.  People from the Celaya and Salvatierra areas came to live on the ejido. 

Today there are 50 or 60 families living on the ejido with their 500 head of cow.  They live by selling the cows’ milk and subsistence farming.  It’s not a luxurious lifestyle, but they are independent:  they don’t work for a boss and they don’t work for wages.  Only a few centuries ago, in Europe, people who had to work for wages were pitied.  Not today of course. 

A group of six members of the ejido have banded together to figure out a way to generate more income.  Some of them have children who want to go to college; all of them have children in the U.S.  They dream that someday their children will be able to return to their ejido.  The Center for Global Justice has helped them with their dream.  They decided to build a greenhouse and grow organic tomatoes.  The Center for Global Justice’s revolving loan fund loaned them some money as did the Bernie Weissman Foundation.  Their greenhouse is built; they will plant next month; the first crop should be ready by  May.

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