Mexico in Transition

Mexico in Transition provides a wide-ranging, empirical and up-to-date survey of the multiple impacts neoliberal policies have had in practice in Mexico over twenty years, and the specific impacts of the NAFTA Agreement. The volume covers a wide terrain, including the effects of globalization on peasants; the impact of neoliberalism on wages, trade unions, and specifically women workers; the emergence of new social movements El Barzón and the Zapatistas (EZLN); how the environment, especially biodiversity, has become a target for colonization by transnational corporations; the political issue of migration to the United States; and the complicated intersections of economic and political liberalization.

Mexico in Transition provides rich concrete evidence of what happens to the different sectors of an economy, its people, and natural resources, as the profound change of direction that neoliberal policy represents takes hold. It also describes and explains the diverse forms of resistance and challenge that different civil-society groups of those affected are now offering to a model the downsides of which are becoming increasingly manifest.

Table of Contents

1. Mexico‘s double movement: Neoliberal globalism, the State, and civil society - Gerardo Otero
2. Rebellious Cornfields: Toward food and labour self-sufficiency - Armando Bartra
3. Fruits of injustice: Women in the post-NAFTA food system - Deborah Barndt
4. Conservation or privatization? Biodiversity, the global market, and the Mesoamerican Biological Corridor - Laura Carlsen
5. State corporatism and peasant organizations: Toward new institutional arrangements - Horacio Mackinlay and Gerardo Otero
6. Institutional democratization: Changing political practices and the sugarcane growers unions of the PRI - Peter Singelmann
7. Manufacturing neoliberalism: Industrial relations, trade union corporatism and politics - Enrique de la Garza Toledo
8. Who reaps the productivity growth in Mexico? Convergence or polarization in manufacturing real wages (1988-1999) - Enrique Dussel Peters
9. Labour and migration policies under Vicente Fox: Subordination to U.S. economic and geopolitical interests - Raúl Delgado Wise
10. Community, economy and social change in Oaxaca, Mexico: Rural life and cooperative logic in the global economy - Jeffrey H. Cohen
11. Survival strategies in neoliberal markets: Peasant organizations and organic coffee in Chiapas - María Elena Martínez-Torres
12. The binational integration of the U.S.-Mexican avocado industries: Examining responses to economic globalism - Lois Stanford
13. Convergence: Social movements in Mexico in the era of neoliberal globalism - Humberto González
14. Contesting neoliberal globalism from below: The EZLN, Indian rights, and citizenship - Gerardo Otero

About the Author:

Gerardo Otero is Professor of Sociology and Director of the Latin American Studies Program at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada. He has published over 50 book chapters and articles in scholarly journals such as Rural Sociology, Latin American Research Review, Latin American Perspectives, and Revista Mexicana de Sociolog¡a.