Bordering the Future: Resisting Neoliberalism in the Borderlands

Abstract

In the last twenty years, and especially since NAFTA, the U.S.-Mexico border has been a site of intensive neoliberal development, particularly in the growth of 2,340 export-processing plants (maquiladoras), ninety percent U.S.-owned. The economic growth this has helped to promote has been both rapid and uneven, and the burdens it has placed on local communities through impoverished conditions of work and life have been immense -no where more so than in Tijuana. Although much of this growth and the associated social and environmental problems have been the subjects of many policy, academic, and journalistic discussions, Tijuana's local community organizations, which have attempted to meet local needs and formulate alternative development paradigms, have not. Based on interviews with community organization representatives in the San Diego/Tijuana region, this text argues that a more complete understanding of these movement e V orts to resist neoliberalism, especially the alternative visions for development they construct, are crucial to any understanding of neoliberalism generally, transnational social movements, and more democratic labor and environmental policy. These alternative paradigms di V er radically from those promoted by capital and states on both sides of la frontera, and potentially o V er a more participatory, democratic, and sustainable form of transnational development, for Mexico and all of North America.

Emphasizing the ‘Complex’ in the ‘Immigration Industrial Complex’

“…Beginning in the 1960s, however, neoliberal policies and large migrant labor flows have become coterminous. These policies have recreated the border as a stage for neoliberal development where ‘free trade zones’ and maquilas indirectly recruit and generate new migrant streams (Bandy, 2000). The next section discusses how neoliberal policies have encouraged undocumented migration from Mexico and how the state (policy makers and policy) have created new opportunities to benefit from ‘illegality’.…”

Contemporary Research on Social Movements and Protest in Latin America: Promoting Democracy, Resisting Neoliberalism, and Many Themes in between

“…Moving toward more narrow lines of inquiry, scholars regularly draw on case studies to examine how movements respond to neoliberalization and globalization, more generally. Bandy (2000) studies the actions of community organizations in Tijuana, Mexico, and Martins (2000) looks at the Landless Workers Movement in Brazil to uncover the variety of strategies and tactics that specific groups use to resist change. Similarly, Williams (2001) looks at the cases of two Mexico groups – miners and steelworkers, and farmers – to argue that the ways movements challenge neoliberal reforms can only be understood through close examination of local histories and context.…”

Place-based communities and neoliberalism: a study of the artisanal fishing community of Chorrillos, Peru

“…From these tensions, traditional institutions, resources, agencies and resistances were formed and developed within accumulation processes of a wider scope, but were shaped differently at particular moments and spaces (Agrawal 2010;Harvey 2006Harvey , 2010. Nevertheless, despite the nature of state-society relationships, these traditional cultures are in a clearly disadvantaged role before global forces striving to capture and re-colonize local instances, inciting innovative social solutions by the affected communities (Bandy 2000;Dujon 2002;Panitch 1997).…”