Juárez has over fifty industrial parks. That fact alone didn’t hit me until we started driving through the city, and every few blocks brought another fenced complex, another factory lot, another set of identical buildings humming with fluorescent light and human labor. The scale is staggering. It’s not a detail you pick up on from the comfort of a tour bus or a travel brochure—it’s something you feel. You breathe it in. You see it written on the tired faces crossing the street in work boots and company polos, on the loading docks stacked with pallets, and in the constant movement of a city that works with its hands.
My first impression was that this was a blue-collar town. Not in some abstract, romanticized way, but in the real, physical sense. This is a place of sweat and shift changes, of uniformed workers heading in early and coming home late. In that sense, Juárez reminded me more of places like Toledo or Gary or Akron a hundred years ago than it did a modern international border city. It was like stepping back in time—into the muscle and backbone of the early American industrial boom.
But here, that industrial dream is still alive. Still dangerous. Still demanding. Still essential.
In the States, we like to think of ourselves as post-industrial, having evolved beyond the age of factory lines and foundries. But driving through Juárez, I saw the continuation of that story—outsourced, rebranded, but never truly gone. The same low-slung warehouses, the same smoke-stained skies, the same buzz of machines and men and motion. Only now the signs are in Spanish, and the workers cross international lines to supply American needs.
What struck me was not the poverty—though it exists—nor the gleam of modern buildings among the dust, but the sheer willpower of the place. Juárez moves. It builds. It endures. And it does so quietly, with little of the self-congratulating pride that cities in the U.S. once had when they made steel or rubber or cars. Here, people don’t talk about legacy—they talk about getting through the week.
And yet, beneath it all, there’s dignity. The same kind of dignity you might find in a coal town in Appalachia or a rail hub in Kansas City. A pride not born of wealth but of work. A belief that putting in the hours means something—even if those hours are invisible to the people sleeping soundly on the other side of the border.
When I saw the Leggett & Platt sign earlier that morning, I thought of home—of Carthage, where the factory lots sit quietly now, like aging beasts. But here in Juárez, the beasts are alive. Growling. Grinding. Feeding the engines of commerce that pretend not to notice them. And in some twisted way, it made me proud. Proud that Carthage and Juárez are linked—not just by contracts or products, but by people. By work.
It’s strange. This city, foreign to me in so many ways, felt familiar in others. The factory towns of America may be fading, but their echoes ring loudly here. And we owe places like Juárez more than we let on. Not just for what they produce—but for carrying forward the blue-collar spirit we’ve tried so hard to forget.