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 eVorts 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 diVer radically from those promoted by capital and states on both sides of la frontera, and potentially oVer a more participatory, democratic, and sustainable form of transnational development, for Mexico and all of North America.

Ambivalent Landscapes: Environmental Justice in the US–Mexico Borderlands

“…Our analysis also suggests that while traditional place-based environmental justice movements are critical, and can be a powerful way to organize and enfranchise people in marginalized communities (Cole and Foster 2001), that to affect greater change, these movements must embrace a framework of productive environmental justice (Faber and McCarthy 2005). Such a framework focuses specific attention on the links between rampant consumption in the North and environmental degradation and economic devastation in the South, ensures a regional spatial perspective, and would allow residents in Derechos Humanos to closely align with a wide range of other movements committed to global justice (see also Bandy 2000).…”

“…Our study of this small colonia reveals the normally hidden relationships among production, consumption, waste, and the structures of inequality inherently embedded in this relationship (Bandy 2000), and necessitates a frame of analysis that moves beyond distribution equity to a focus on productive justice. Such a frame demands attention to the relationship between consumption in the North and environmental degradation in the South while also taking into account the spatial breadth of how places and landscapes are interconnected.…”

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'.…”

Alaskan Neo-Liberalism Conservation, Development, and Native Land Rights

“…This transformation can be accomplished through changes in land management policy or simply by reterritorializing land under different jurisdictional entities. The flexible refashioning of land policy and land bases in Alaska resembles other neo-liberal spatializing projects, such as the formation and operation of export processing zones (Bandy 2000;Fernández-Kelly 1983) or the creation of international conservation reserves (Igoe 2003;Igoe and Brockington 2007), each of which facilitates various types of accumulation strategies. These projects transform traditional forms of state sovereignties, establish new sovereign powers, and raise questions about the rights of citizenship.…”