Volume 60, No. 2, Summer 2001
Close-Ups of Postnationalism: Reports from the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands
Robert A. Hackenberg and Robert R. Alvarez
Postnational globalization invents forms of production and creates urban landscapes to contain them. One locus for this process is the indistinct border zone between the United States and Mexico. The forbidding physical character of the region, and its lack of conventional resources, has been counterbalanced by locational advantages for industry and trade, tourism and recreation. The borderlands exemplify forces contributing to an evolving marginal political ecology linking nation-states at unequal levels of development. In the south (Mexico), it combines rapid industrialization with a flood of youthful economic refugees seeking work in a set of “instant border megacities” with horrendous levels of pollution. Equally rapid growth is found in retirement havens to the north (U.S.), superimposed on an older stratum of border cattle ranches, timber concessions, tourism centers, and mineral claims. This special collection provides in-depth snapshots of selected features of the western half of the 2,000-mile boundary between the United States and Mexico. It also examines possible development options for the region’s exploding urban centers. It opens with a broad overview of the post-NAFTA landscape, seen from an anthropological perspective.
Key words: postnationalism, political ecology, borderlands, NAFTA, globalization
Time, Space, and Articulation in the Economic Development of the U.S.-Mexico Border Region from 1940 to 1990
Thomas Weaver
Concepts of world-system and articulation of modes of production are used to analyze the economic development of the U.S.-Mexico border region. The designation of centers and of periphery, semiperiphery, and core depends on the nature of the economic activity, where it takes place, and the destinations of the value derived. Assignment of periphery and semiperiphery changes, depending on where the resource is produced, distributed, consumed, and where capital accumulation occurs, as well as to the nature of the commodity. For example, maquilas that assemble products in peripheral regions are tied to plants (semiperipheries) on the U.S. side of the border, from which they receive components to assemble and where they deliver the finished product, but also to transnational corporations in other parts of the U.S. where profit accrues in centers. Production, distribution, and consumption centers exist in the core, periphery, and semiperiphery, where these activities take place. The following topics are reviewed as commodities and articulatory mechanisms: agricultural development, urbanization, labor, the retail and tourism industries and the contraband trade, and the establishment of the Border Industrialization Program.
Key words: economic development, world-system, modes of production, globalization, U.S.-Mexico border
Beyond the Border: Nation-State Encroachment, NAFTA, and Offshore Control in the U.S.-Mexican Mango Industry
Robert R. Alvarez
Although the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) controls the entrance of fruits and vegetables at the U.S.-Mexico border, the encroachment of this agency into Mexico and its offshore control of commodity production and distribution are not often a subject of investigation. This paper traces the development of the current USDA certification of mangos for U.S. import, focusing on the current hot water treatment of mangos and its controlling effects at local sites of production and distribution. Implications of a broader hemispheric system of control in other mango-producing export areas are also discussed.
Key words: U.S.-Mexico border, transnational markets, NAFTA, offshore control, mango industry
Class and Classification at the U.S.-Mexico Border
Josiah McC. Heyman
U.S. immigration and nationality law is viewed as a set of classifications that contribute to the transfer of value between classes. An anthropological approach to the symbolic classificatory process is outlined, emphasizing its performance in situations of state power. Ethnographic observations document the actual practice of Immigration and Naturalization Service classification and reveal covert symbolic categories and plausible constructs about migrants. However, migrants are accorded an active role in struggling with and responding to dominant classifications. Three important results of immigration classification are the increased exploitation of undocumented immigrants, categorized as outlaws and obliged to undertake the risk of crossing a heavily enforced boundary; the complex maneuvering and segmentation within immigrant communities induced by the rewards of legal visa categories; and the confirmation of stereotypes about migrants in the dominant society that underwrite their employment as inexpensive labor.
Key words: immigration, labor, class, U.S.-Mexico border
Cows, Condos, and the Contested Commons: The Political Ecology of Ranching on the Arizona-Sonora Borderlands
Thomas E. Sheridan
Despite the rapid urbanization of the Arizona-Sonora borderlands, cattle ranching continues to play a major, if increasingly contested, political, economic, and ecological role in the region. Unlike other industries, technological manipulation has failed to increase productivity in the range cattle industry. The constraints of aridity and climatic variability have not been overcome. Ranchers on both sides of the border therefore need access to large tracts of land to secure the natural forage their cattle need. Spain and Mexico both recognized communal as well as private forms of tenure, even though neoliberal reforms are weakening comunidades and ejidos. The United States, in contrast, has no communitarian tradition, and U.S. homestead laws never allowed individuals to preempt enough of the public domain to support a cow outfit. Instead, grazing allotments on both federal and state lands provide ranchers with exclusive rights to forage. Those rights are increasingly challenged by some environmentalists, who want cows off public lands. Faced with rising land prices, unstable markets, an unpredictable climate, enormous estate taxes, and increasing political uncertainty over their access to public lands, many ranchers choose or are forced to sell their private land to real estate developers or subdivide it themselves. The resulting fragmentation of the landscape and increasing densities of people deplete water resources and make large-scale ecosystem management, including the preservation of wildlife corridors and the reintroduction of fire, difficult if not impossible.
Key words: grazing commons, ranching, environmentalism, real estate development, water, Arizona-Sonora borderlands
The Future of an Imagined Community: Trailer Parks, Tree Huggers, and Trinational Forces Collide in the Southern Arizona Borderlands
Robert A. Hackenberg and Nick Benequista
Surviving small towns in southern Arizona have diversified to occupy a variety of specialized niches. Each responds to the needs of the nearby urban centers or to sectors of the broader and more remote public of visitors, vacationers, and transients. Benson, Arizona, a former market town and transportation center located on the San Pedro River, is seeking its niche in the “new economy.” Options run the gamut from RV park communities through specialty-crop agricultural markets to psuedo-Western “frontier towns.” But Benson’s choices are now limited by an array of increasingly powerful public and private interests that see the San Pedro Valley as either a national environmental treasure to be preserved or an exploitable set of resources for international commercial development.
Learning to Clap: Reflections on Top-Down versus Bottom-Up Development
Douglas H. Keare
This paper draws on the experience of the World Bank in rural and urban development during the 1970s and 1980s to explain why neither predominantly top-down nor bottom-up approaches have succeeded—nor indeed deserved to or can be expected to succeed in the future. It then proceeds through a selection of related innovations initiated in the latter 1980s and through the 1990s; notes their failure to promote significant breakthroughs to date; and suggests improved initiatives that blend top-down and bottom-up approaches and, beyond their general efficacy, would seem to be particularly suitable for confronting many of the principal problems in the Mexico-U.S. borderlands.
Key words: World Bank, development, top-down, bottom-up
Co-Opting Justice: Transformation of a Multiracial Environmental Coalition in Southern Alabama
Mark Moberg
Between 1996 and 1998, plans to construct one of the nation’s largest phenol plants near Mobile, Alabama, generated intense local opposition. Mobile Bay Watch, a movement originating among upper-middle-class whites, sought support from a nearby African American community to stop plant construction. In the process, it changed its focus from property values to the public health concerns of low-income residents. Yet, its strategies to encourage minority participation found mixed success. This paper examines how grassroots activists respond to regulatory policies that delegitimate their concerns and to new opportunities arising from federal environmental law, in the process transforming the strategies and claims of their movement.
Key words: environmental justice, NIMBY, social movements, grassroots, Alabama
The AIDS Epidemic in Malawi and its Threat to Household Food Security
Mike Mathambo Mtika
AIDS is one of the factors that threaten household food security in rural Malawi. Interviews with respondents from a random sample of 65 rural Malawi households suggest that the threat of AIDS to household food security lies in its impact on social immunity, the collective resistance against problems. Social immunity is rooted in social capital endowments, the reciprocity and redistribution opportunities embedded in networks of interpersonal ties. Favorable social capital endowments engender significant sharing of labor, food, income, and time among households, and mitigate the negative effect of AIDS on the food security of any specific household. However, when the spread of AIDS reaches an epidemic threshold, it makes illness and death so extensive that ties in the extended family networks get fractured, social capital endowments become unfavorable, reciprocity and redistribution are undermined, social immunity is weakened, and food security gets compromised. Results of this research suggest that, as of 1996, there were signs that the epidemic was approaching threshold levels in rural Malawi. The results also suggest that the analysis of the impact of AIDS and initiatives aimed at controlling that impact should not just be undertaken at the household level but, more importantly, at the extended family level.
Key words: household food security, social immunity, social capital endowments, reciprocity, AIDS, Malawi
Commentary
The World Bank and Its Emerging Knowledge Empire
Lyla Mehta
This paper critically examines the emerging knowledge agenda at the World Bank. From the publication of the World Development Report 1998-99 on “Knowledge for Development” to present discussions around the Global Development Gateway, the World Bank is attempting to carve a niche for itself as the “Knowledge Bank.” In doing so it appears to have shifted from merely focusing on the transfer of capital. Instead, it seeks to be a leader in development expertise and knowledge transfers in international development. The paper examines the Bank’s conception of knowledge, the rise of knowledge enterprises at the Bank, and the various tensions in its knowledge discourses. It argues that the Bank’s knowledge agenda often tends to be centralized and absolutist and draws on economistic and technocratic models. These trends contribute to the emergence of a narrow knowledge agenda that both neglects sociocultural issues and those concerning a wider political economy. Thus, the plural nature of knowledge is denied and the Bank’s own problematic role in knowledge generation is not reflected upon.
Key words: World Bank, Knowledge Bank, World Development Reports, informational society
