Mexico’s Detroit?

Throughout the mountainous regions of central Mexico, dozens of quaint, Spanish colonial-era towns dot the landscape featuring beautiful, European-style architecture and stunning views of the countryside.

As a college student, more than 20 years ago, I spent an amazing summer studying Spanish and visiting many of them. If you’d asked me then to pick which city would spend the following decades transforming itself from an economy built on tourism and agriculture into a manufacturing powerhouse, I doubt I’d have picked Guanajuato.

Getting off the bus, my professor stressed four things about the picturesque town – the steep streets make running a bad idea, we would be visiting muralist Diego Rivera’s boyhood home, the Callejon del Beso is an alley so narrow that people can lean across balconies and kiss each other, and the city’s name comes from a pre-Colombian language and loosely translates as “The Place of the Frogs.”

Those aren’t Guanajuato’s selling points anymore.

In a country where 16% of the people work in manufacturing, more than 25% of people in Guanajuato make things for a living, according to Mexico’s Secretaría de Economía. About 28% of the region’s 2013 gross national product came from manufacturing, compared to 18% for the nation. Neighboring Querétaro has similarly transformed into a manufacturing-led economy.

During the past 18 months, major automakers have invested heavily in Mexico – opening plants or announcing future sites worth more than $10 billion (details on page 26). Three of those plants are in the state of Guanajuato, and the region will be the future home of many suppliers as well. And unlike many of the investments made in Mexico’s auto industry decades ago, high-precision, high-tech, fuel-saving technologies will be at the center of this growth.

On Aug. 26-27, 2015, engineers and officials from automakers will gather in Querétaro to discuss the future of Mexico’s automotive economy. Speakers at the conference (www.autopartmanufacturing.com) – coordinated by Carvajal Medios B2B, a Mexico-based partner company of Today’s Motor Vehicles’ publisher GIE Media – will examine the growth of composites and other lightweight materials in automotive manufacturing, advanced metal-cutting techniques, and the state of Mexico’s components industry.

Between higher fuel costs and rising wages, many manufacturers are finding it more expensive to produce in China than had been projected a decade ago, and Mexico is winning much of the work that leaves Asia. Those trends, coupled with expected growth in North American automotive demand, will make Mexico a popular destination for global manufacturers for years to come, making the Autoparts Manufacturing conference an opportunity to explore the country’s industrial prowess.

For me, the conference will be a chance to see firsthand the industrial transformation of what had been a quiet, quaint region. People in the industry have been telling me for years first about the growth of Guanajuato and Querétaro and later about how mature those areas have become in terms of manufacturing sophistication. In August, I’m looking forward to getting a first-hand look.