The industrial history of the Bajío

There is a short version of this history that begins in 1995, when General Motors opened the Silao Complex. It is a real date and a real turning point. It also leaves out almost everything that explains why GM chose that spot.

First wave: the obrajes

Before there were factories there were obrajes — colonial textile workshops, concentrated above all in Querétaro from the seventeenth century onward. They produced woollen cloth for the domestic market, with indigenous and, to a considerable degree, forced labour. They were not industry in the modern sense, but they were organised manufacturing at scale, selling beyond the locality.

What matters here is not the cloth. It is that the region learned early to organise labour in volume and move product overland to distant markets. That organisational capacity does not get lost.

Second wave: the granary

For nearly three centuries the Bajío's principal business was agricultural, and it was a regional export business: wheat and maize to feed the mining cities of the north, which could not grow their own food. The grain haciendas of the plain existed as a function of mining Zacatecas and Guanajuato.

That agriculture left two legacies still in operation. One is the hydraulic infrastructure — dams, canals, and later wells — built to irrigate the plain. The other is the settlement pattern: mid-sized cities spaced a cart-day apart along the main road. That spacing is today's corridor.

Third wave: petrochemicals and agro-industry

The Salamanca refinery came online in the mid-twentieth century and brought what refineries bring: heavy chemistry, fertilisers, an industrial supplier base and a workforce with technical trades. Celaya developed food processing. Irapuato built an export agro-industry on strawberries and frozen vegetables.

By the end of this stage the Bajío had the three things a vehicle assembler needs: power, piped water, and people who knew how to work in a plant. What was missing was a reason to come.

Fourth wave: assembly

NAFTA supplied the reason. General Motors' Silao Complex began trial production in April 1995 and was formally inaugurated on 27 July of that year. It was the first link in Guanajuato's automotive cluster, and from there the sequence accelerated.

Guanajuato is the only state in the country with five automotive assembly plants. A dense network of tier-one and tier-two suppliers installed itself around them, a good part of it Japanese, specialised in stamping, transmissions, interiors and precision components. Volkswagen produces engines in Silao. Ford built a transmission plant in Irapuato.

The sector organised itself into nodes: Silao–León concentrates assembly, engines and logistics; Irapuato–Salamanca gathers manufacturing and supply; Celaya–Apaseo el Grande groups Honda, Toyota and their suppliers.

The fragility that comes with specialisation

In October 2025 Honda's Celaya plant suspended production indefinitely over a semiconductor shortage originating in the Dutch government's sanctions on Nexperia and the Chinese export restrictions that followed. A plant of 200,000 units a year, sole source of the HR-V for North America, stopped by a regulatory dispute ten thousand kilometres away.

The lesson for anyone evaluating a site is not that the corridor is fragile — four industrial waves suggest otherwise. It is that the sectoral concentration which makes the Bajío attractive also synchronises its risks. A tier-two supplier dependent on a single assembler is exposed to decisions it can neither foresee nor influence.