THE CHURN.(Cameron County, Texas narrative)(Fruit of the Loom Inc. plant closure)

An interview with Katherine Boo, with photographs by Gilles Peress

Last August, in a corner of South Texas where local newspapers still call businesses "corporate citizens," an emergency vehicle paid a visit to a highly fortified underwear mill. The hundred-and-fifty-three-year-old Fruit of the Loom company, owned by Warren Buffett's Omaha-based Berkshire Hathaway, had just announced that its Cameron County factory would close by the end of the year. Much of its production would be shifted to Honduras. The news brought the county government's mass-layoff response squad to the scene.

The first task of the Rapid Response Unit (actually, one spiky-haired twenty-six-year-old named Mario Maldonado) was to buffer the shock of the eight hundred workers who, only weeks before, had been sure that their jobs were safe. The second task was tougher: to convince those workers, in the face of double-digit unemployment and thirty-three-per-cent poverty rates, that this economic equivalent of an axe blow was in fact a main chance.

Rapid-Response Mario, a local himself, had grown deft at drawing out this line of reasoning. The factories that had closed here in the past four years evoked an informal history of middle-class sartorial choice: Levi's and Wrangler jeans; Carter baby clothes; Converse sneakers; Dickies uniforms; Vanity Fair lingerie; North Face parkas; self-belted Haggar slacks. Mario exudes solidity, from his broad chest to his black, unflinching eyes, and though he suspected that many of the workers would never again have jobs as good as the ones they were losing, sentimentality was not part of his commission. He was here to help workers figure out what happens next.

Fruit of the Loom had chosen a few veteran laborers to go, briefly, to Honduras to train the cheaper workers who would replace them. Some of the others would board the meat- and poultry-industry buses that idled outside the county employment office, luring those sufficiently desperate to take short-term slaughterhouse jobs in the Ozarks. But, as Fruit of the Loom's cutting machines and bleaching vats were cranked up on pallet jacks, loaded onto flatbeds, and hauled to the Port of Brownsville, many of the company's workers pocketed a month's severance and filed into Mario's van. They applied for unemployment assistance equal to roughly half their former wages, took aptitude tests, and studied the twenty training brochures that were taped to the van's walls. And thus they joined the Rio Grande Valley's eight thousand other former inseam, watch-pocket, and waistband experts in what economists call capitalism's necessary churn.

Mario knew a little about revising life expectations, having taken this job when he could no longer afford tuition at the University of Texas. He and his wife had just had their first child, a daughter. If he occasionally felt his resourcefulness flag as he helped middle-aged men with six children type up resumes that said, "Willing to take entry level," he consoled himself with the thought that Fruit of the Loom, a factory nearly the size of Madison Square Garden and one of the county's largest private employers, might be globalization's final local casualty. "Honestly," he said, "there's not much left to close."

Cameron County, which has a population of three hundred and thirty-five thousand, sits at the southernmost tip of Texas and consists of a smattering of small towns and two cities, Harlingen and Brownsville. The shuttered factories bear polite signs on their doors: "At this time we are not accepting applications." Its laid-off workers still speak of their former employers with affection--their loyalty reiterated on the back pockets of their jeans, the neckbands of their T-shirts, and in the form of pet Chihuahuas named Chuck Taylor and 501. But Cameron County's textile workers are now, as units of labor, generic. After forty-one straight months of job loss in the American manufacturing sector, they are a class of obsolescents in need of repurposing.