CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico — “This is a difficult Christmas. It is very sad,” Maria Duran said, tears welling in her eyes.

Rather than spending Christmas Eve with her husband and four children in their small home in Juarez’s southeastern edge, Maria was sitting inside a makeshift shelter at the gates of a factory that belongs to her former employer, Lexmark.

“I was fired suddenly; I had hoped to maintain the job. Everything happened very quickly,” she explained. “I don’t have any money.”

Still, Duran and dozens of other former workers have established an encampment here to protest poor working conditions and low wages and to demand that Kentucky-based Lexmark allow workers to form an independent union.

The protests at Lexmark were sparked earlier this month after the company allegedly broke a promise to increase pay by 35 cents to $4.38 a day. The decision angered employees of the printer giant, prompting demands that they be allowed to form a union — something activists here say hasn’t happened in some 50 years.

Now, some of them are on the leading edge of what activists hope will bloom into an historic unionization push in a city that for decades has been known for it’s business friendly tax policies, low wages, and willingness to bus in tens of thousands of Mexico’s poorest residents to work.

“In 15 years, they didn’t raise the wages,” said Susana Prieto Terrazas, a Juarez labor attorney who is representing former workers at Lexmark and Eaton Bussmann, a second maquiladora that protesters have targeted.

On Dec. 8, 700 workers at the Lexmark plant participated in a work slow-down — a remarkable act of defiance in a city where workers are easily replaced.

The reaction was swift: Lexmark officials fired 90 workers, including all of those who had asked for a union.

“The people are poor, they are suffering,” Prieto said. “This is the first time this has happened in Juarez, and they know that.”