Word.ws English Dictionary

maquiladora

/ˌmɑkɪləˈdɔːɹə/

maquiladora noun: an assembly plant in Mexico owned by a company from the United States or another foreign country, using cheap local labour and imported components, and which then exports its products to the company's country of origin; also (by extension) similar factories in other countries.

Noun

maquiladora (plural maquiladoras)

  1. An assembly plant in Mexico owned by a company from the United States or another foreign country, using cheap local labour and imported components, and which then exports its products to the company's country of origin; also (by extension) similar factories in other countries.
    • If such maquiladora projects are to be the model for Haiti's economic future, they will simply create future generations of sweatshop labor at subsistence wages.2013, Amy Wilentz, Farewell, Fred Voodoo, Simon & Schuster, page 114
    • The girls were invariably captured while running errands in the centre of town, or on their way to or from work in the hundreds of maquiladoras: sweatshop assembly plants that constitute the economy of Juárez, manufacturing (for rock-bottom wages) the goods that America and Europe deem essential to...2014 May 4, Ed Vulliamy, The Guardian

Forms of maquiladora

pluralmaquiladoras

Origin of maquiladora

Borrowed from Mexican Spanish maquiladora, from maquilar (“assemble”).

Questions about maquiladora

What does maquiladora mean?
Maquiladora means an assembly plant in Mexico owned by a company from the United States or another foreign country, using cheap local labour and imported components, and which then exports its products to the company's country of origin; also (by extension) similar factories in other countries.
What part of speech is maquiladora?
Maquiladora is a noun.
How do you pronounce maquiladora?
Maquiladora is pronounced /ˌmɑkɪləˈdɔːɹə/.
What is the plural of maquiladora?
The plural of maquiladora is maquiladoras.

Words near maquiladora in the dictionary

  1. maquetting
  2. maqui
  3. maquia
  4. Maquiapo
  5. maquila
  6. maquiladora
  7. maquiladoras
  8. maquilas
  9. maquillage
  10. maquillages
  11. Maquiritare

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: maquiladora (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “maquiladora.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/maquiladora. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.