What is the Bajío?

The Bajío does not appear in the Constitution. It has no governor, no budget, no official boundary. It is a region that exists because people name it, and the maps that draw its edges rarely agree with one another.

The geography, by contrast, is precise. The Bajío is an alluvial plain on the Mexican Central Plateau, between the foothills of the Sierra Madre Occidental and the Sierra Madre Oriental, drained mainly by the Lerma river and its tributaries. It sits between 1,700 and 2,000 metres above sea level. The name means exactly what it says — lowland — but low only relative to the ranges around it, not to the sea.

Where it starts and where it ends

This is where the definitions part ways. The core is not in dispute: the southern half of Guanajuato, including the León–Silao–Irapuato–Salamanca–Celaya corridor. Beyond that, it depends on who is drawing.

• The narrow definition stops at Guanajuato and western Querétaro
• The broad definition takes in Aguascalientes, Los Altos de Jalisco, southern Zacatecas, western San Luis Potosí and northern Michoacán
• The commercial definition — the one promotion agencies use — tends to stretch as far as the sales argument requires

None of them is wrong. They are answers to different questions. The historian draws the line where the wheat-hacienda economy ended; the geographer, where the basin ends; the promoter, where the client list ends.

The definition that helps you decide

For anyone about to sign a ten-year lease, none of those boundaries is the relevant one. The operative question is not is this the Bajío? but where can I service this from in a single working day?

That question has a measurable answer: drive time. And it answers very differently depending on where you stand. From Irapuato, León is 45 minutes away, Salamanca 25, Celaya 45, Silao 35, Querétaro and Aguascalientes an hour and a half. From Querétaro, the western end of the corridor is more than two hours out. From León, so is Querétaro. The geometry of the corridor is not symmetrical.

Why the plain matters

Flat ground is cheap to build on and cheap to cross. That is the whole economic explanation of the Bajío, repeated across three different eras.

In the colonial period the plain produced wheat and maize for the mining cities to the north. In the twentieth century it produced vegetables for export — Irapuato became known as the strawberry capital for reasons of soil and water, not marketing. Since the nineties it has produced vehicles, on the same ground, along the same highway, with a good part of the same labour force.

The continuity is not coincidence. A flat valley with surface water, crossed by a road running from the centre of the country toward the north, is useful for almost anything you want to move in volume. What changed is what gets moved.

What geography does not solve

The plain that makes building easy is also the one that concentrates water demand onto a limited number of aquifers, and concentrates electrical load onto a limited number of substations. The same feature that attracts the investment produces the constraint.

Which is why a site study in the Bajío cannot stop at whether industrial space is available. Space exists. What has to be verified is whether the ground it stands on still has concessionable water, and whether the substation feeding it still has contractable capacity. Those two questions are the subject of two later entries.