The maquiladora program, offering tax incentives to in-bond foreign-owned manufacturing plants, was first introduced in Mexico in the 1960s. In the early 1990s, the program was used as prototypical of the fiscal incentives required to attract foreign investment.  Several legislative changes and NAFTA provisions were modeled after it. One key argument in favor of the program was that maquiladoras were necessary to fight local poverty and advance Mexico's economic and social development. This paper estimates the local impact of maquiladora activity on various non-income measures of standard of living in Mexico, namely literacy rate, school enrollment rates, basic housing ammenities, life expectancy, infant mortality, and an overall index of human development. The main data set used is from the population and housing censuses of 1980, 1990, and 2000. The study controls for the effect of non-maquiladora economic activity and prior growth. To remove the endogeneity, maquiladora activity is instrumented with a measure of road transportation time to the nearest major border city in the United States. Robust IV-TS-LS regression is used to estimate the effects.