For them, as for other indigenous migrants in Mexico, the sale of traditional and tourist crafts has been an economic mainstay. Today, some of the most popular tourist items sold throughout Mexico are the rag dolls dressed in archetypal peasant garb with no strong regional identity. Mixteco women vendors sell them in Tijuana. They formerly made the dolls but now buy them, along with other traditional crafts, from other migrants in Tijuana, who come from the western Mexican states of Jalisco and Guanajuato as well as from Guatemala. The traditional and tourist crafts displayed on a Mixteco vendor's cart represent the labor of many cultural groups on the border and the entrepreneurial skill of Mixtecos who make a living in this market created by short-distance tourism.
Mexican immigrants continue to seek economic opportunities.
Workers have been attracted to the border area by the 1961-65 Mexican National Border Economic Development Program followed in 1965 by the Industrialization Program of the Border, which introduced the maquiladora assembly plants to the region. In her article, Maria Eugenia de la O records testimonies of several maquila workers in Ciudad Juarez. From the 1980s onward, economic and political refugees from Central America have swelled populations at the border and migrations across it. Individuals, groups, and corporate bodies continue to be attracted to the border to exploit niches in an environment created by difference and marginality. What they have constructed, appropriated, abandoned, and reconstructed fill the social landscape of the border region.