The border and social movements in Mexico and the U.S

Contributions of US Mexico Border Studies to Social Theory

The study of borders draws on, and is a significant contributor to, important theoretical developments in the social sciences. We have moved away from envisioning societies and cultures as pure, bounded units, for which we identified inner essences (cultural patterns, social structures), toward envisioning them as internally and externally varied webs of relations, for which we trace connections and changes over time (Wolf 1982). Borders present precisely such mixtures and interactions. The agenda of this chapter, then, is to draw out theoretical lessons from work done on the U.S.-Mexico border. While grounded in a review of the literature on this region, the theoretical lessons are clear and transportable, both to other borders and to complex social and cultural situations generally. My approach derives from place-based science, which rejects abstract, timeless, and placeless theorizing in favor of building theory upward from particular places and times via nested generalizations; those generalizations can be transported and recontextualized for other places and times. I likewise draw on non-dogmatic Marxian theory, attending to the constitutive role of unequal relationships unfolding across historical time. No one border can do justice to all borders, and different lessons would be drawn from other sites; the point is not to hold this region as quintessential but to ask if ideas suggested here are informative and helpful as we range about the social world.

Mexico and the US: The Sixties

It does not take long to discover that the student movements of the year 1968 holds particular interest for world history scholars. The literature on the year"s events tends to share titles as well as themes: The "Global Revolutions," "World Revolution," "The World Transformed," "The Year That Rocked the World." 1 Jeremi Suri, a scholar of the 1960s student movements and the Cold War has noted "The observation that the events of 1968 were global in scope is quite common (almost cliché), but the dominant analytical frame for understanding social and political change remains national in scope." 2 Another writer and 1960s activist, Tom Hayden, in his memoir states, "I know of no historian who has adequately explained the simultaneous nature of these intercontinental developments." 3 In order to try to explain the concurrent and connected student movements of the 1960s, historians have pointed to a number of things from the influence of the media and television and the post-World War II population boom to Vietnam. However, as Suri complains, the nationstate remains as the primary focus. 4 One of the greatest challenges of writing world history is deciding upon the appropriate spatial and temporal dimensions in order to answer a particular question. Part of the question then, when looking at the student movements of 1968, is whether or not the national framework is problematic in forming a world history perspective.

Mexico and Mexicans in the Making of the United States

deadly profitability. Still, U.S. culture proclaims and inflames a "Mexi can" drug problem. The rush to blame Mexico and Mexicans is not limited to migrants hired by U.S. employers and drug cartels that supply U.S. markets. The spring of 2009 brought another wave of worry about Mexican invasion the HINT swine flu. Fortunately, the influenza proved more debilitating than deadly. Mexicans in Mexico suffered most-in disease, death, and daily restrictions. Still, U.S. media regaled a fearful public with visions of a deadly "Mexican" invader poised to kill susceptible "Americans" until it became likely that the virus had jumped from hogs to humans in a Mexi can community where a U. S.-owned industrial slaughterhouse operated with few environmental and health safeguards. Then focus on the virus as another Mexican invader faded, giving way to a more constructive em phasis on global health in a globalizing world. The flu became another episode of U.S. political and public culture constructing Mexico and Mexicans as others, as antagonists, as invaders or worse. When scholars analyze the historical roles of Mexico and Mexi cans in the United States, we too emphasize invasions and problematic migrations: the U. S. invasion of Mexico in the 1840s to claim vast terri tories, followed by rising waves of Mexican migration into regions of the United States that were once Mexican (and far beyond). Others empha size exclusions: the denial of rights of property and citizenship to Mexi cans in territories taken by the United States, despite the promises of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo; later Mexican migrants' exclusion from prosperity and political participation. There can be no doubt that inva sions, migrations, and exclusions, historical and contemporary, matter to the linked histories of Mexico and the United States, and to Mexicans in the United States. But they are not the whole of these histories. This volume aims to depart from established emphases and offer new perspectives on the historical and continuing roles of Mexico and Mexicans in making the United States. We seek to move beyond prevalent perceptions and de bates, public and scholarly, grounded in an enduring but limited under standing of history. Most scholars presume that the nineteenth-century U.S. invasion that turned the Mexican North into the U.S. West led to a pervasive Anglo-American political, economic, and cultural dominance that left peoples of Hispanic ancestry a subordinated and often excluded underclass. Later migrations reinforced that subordination, leaving Anglo ways to persist and predominate. In that context, scholarship about Mexi-0 cn 0 0 N m

Democracy and social movements in Mexico

Mexico has a proud tradition of mobilization, yet it has largely failed to ensure that demands are properly met or that the country's politics, institutions and legal system are transformed.

Mexican mass labor migration in a not-so changing political economy

This article places Mexican migration in the context of the longue durée of Mexican–U.S. political and economic relations. We argue that 21st-century migration not only has its roots in the 19th century, but very much resembles its early predecessor. The latest wave of migration is just the most recent iteration of a process of hegemonic dominance over Mexico, a process that has been for the most part ongoing since the late 1800s. It continues to be rooted in labor migration caused by unequal economic policy between the two countries. The paper builds upon the empire theory of migration literature in lieu of the neutral-seeming ''natural'' ''push–pull'' of markets and living conditions or social capital theories, and provides a more power-driven analysis stressing hegemony and domination in which the United States exerts control over Mexico for the purposes of exploiting cheap labor and raw materials.

Latin American Perspectives, 1994

The study of new social movements in Latin America has proven irresistibly attractive to many scholars. Examining these movements allows us to explore the formation of new identities, the emergence of new political and social actors, the creation of new political space, and the overall expansion of civil society. While all or any of these phenomena seem sufficiently intriguing to claim our attention in their own right, the most common rationale offered for the study of new movements is their apparent link to the democratization process. Through the last decade, in books, articles, and, above all, doctoral dissertations produced around the globe, scholars have justified their interest in new social movements in terms of the presumed importance of these organizations in the consolidation of democratic institutions. Most theorists writing in this field would agree with Alvarez and Escobar (1991) that these movements have "a democratizing impact on political culture and daily life" and "contribute to the democratization process." The problem for most analysts is that we do not know enough about how this takes place, that is, the way in which "grassroots democratic practices [are] transferred into the realm of political institutions and the state." When I look at the gap between the broader theoretical discussions of the question and the specific Mexican reality, I am tempted to attribute the faith in the democratizing powers of new movements displayed by other analysts to the fact that they are, perhaps, generalizing on the basis of South American cases. And yet, it turns out that it is not only students of the transition process in the Southern Cone or Brazil who are claiming that new social movements have this potential. On the contrary, a number of contributors to the most important recent collection on social movements in Mexico (Foweraker and Craig, 1990) depart-albeit with a bit more caution-from the very same premise: that the growth of asocial movement sector is part and parcel of the march toward democracy. In his contribution to this volume Munck (1990: 29), for example, argues that "the demands of social movement. .. necessarily spill over into the political arena, because access to power, or at least influence on-power, given economic conditions, is needed to satisfy their demand for tangible benefits .... From here springs the great potential that the actions of social movements can form a part of a wider democratic project." And in the introduction to the book, Foweraker (1990: 3) writes, "the breadth and impetus of these movements have come to present a strong challenge to the existing system of political representation and control; recent events (and especially the elections of July 1988) have suggested that popular movements might be the wedge that will force an authentically democratic opening within the political system overall." What, precisely, is this "wider democratic project?" What would a "democratic opening

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