Living Next Door to the Giant Is a Full-Time Job
Every Mexican president wakes up, checks what Washington said overnight, and plans the day around it. Every American president discovers Mexico roughly eighteen months before an election. It is the longest-running telenovela in geopolitics, and we have seen every plot twist twice.
The current season is called nearshoring, and the script is flattering: the factories are coming home — home being, in this telling, anywhere that is not Asia. Industrial parks bloom along the northern border like desert flowers after rain. The Americans bring the purchase orders; we bring the workers, the welders, the engineers who actually know how to build things. Washington calls it “friend-shoring.” We call it Tuesday. Mexico has been the affordable, reliable neighbor for decades — the maquiladora did not invent itself last year.
But here is what the telenovela never shows: the neighbor's mood swings. One administration signs a trade deal and calls it the model of the century; the next threatens tariffs on the same goods because a border state needs a headline. The USMCA — the deal that replaced the deal that replaced the deal — is up for its scheduled review, and everyone in Mexico City is reading the same tea leaves: will the giant honor the contract, or renegotiate it on camera? We have learned to build the factory and hedge the politics in the same spreadsheet.
And then there is the third character in this drama, the one Washington pretends not to see: the East. Chinese firms are not theorizing about Mexico; they are leasing the industrial parks, quietly, through intermediaries, building the very supply chains the decoupling was supposed to dismantle. The Americans want the goods without the geopolitics. The Chinese want the geography without the lecture. Mexico, meanwhile, wants the one thing neither offers unconditionally: an energy grid that can power the boom. Our own energy reform — promised, delayed, half-built — is the plot hole that could sink the season. The factories are coming. The question is whether the lights stay on when they arrive.