Abstract: Enrique Mendieta and the Ghosts of Leftism Past: The Aftereffects of Mexico’s Dirty War in Élmer Mendoza’s Detective Fiction

 

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Enrique Mendieta and the Ghosts of Leftism Past: The Aftereffects of Mexico’s Dirty War in Élmer Mendoza’s Detective Fiction

 

by  Michael K. Walonen

The continuance of the revolutionary strife of Mexico’s dirty war into the present day, both as a legacy and in the form of its survivors, resonates strongly in the work of the novelist Élmer Mendoza. Mendoza’s early novel Janis Joplin’s Lover uses its protagonist to portray a 1970s Mexico torn between a revolutionary path of collective social amelioration and the corrupt, mercenary self-interest embodied by Mexican narco-traffickers, with the country pushed toward the latter through the repression of student activists by the Mexican state. Mendoza’s five subsequent novels that center on the exploits of detective Lefty Mendieta focus on the fallout from this period of repression, using the figure of Lefty’s brother Enrique, a former leftist guerrilla, to represent a lost (but not totally lost) egalitarian and socially just alternative to the neoliberal political economy that has ravaged the living conditions of most Mexicans for almost four decades.

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Abstract: Fast-track Redevelopment and Slow-track Regularization: The Uneven Geographies of Spatial Regulation in Mexico City

 

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Fast-track Redevelopment and Slow-track Regularization: The Uneven Geographies of Spatial Regulation in Mexico City

 

by  Jill Wigle

Some of the increasingly evident contradictions between spatial planning and social policy in Mexico City are apparent in the way land use regulation folds into and articulates with exclusion and marginality. In downtown areas, regulatory approvals and various planning measures have facilitated the escalation of land and housing prices and more exclusionary forms of urban development. At the periphery, land use regulation now conditions access to urban services, property titles, and even some social programs for settlement areas designated as “informal.” Comparing the state’s role in planning at these distinct sites uncovers a pattern of selective and uneven spatial regulation in different socioeconomic territories of the city, characterized by “fast-track” development approvals in downtown areas and “slow-track” regularization of settlements in peripheral areas. The analysis suggests how this pattern of uneven spatial regulation contributes to (re)producing urban space in ways that call into question the local government’s stated support for the “right to the city.”

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Abstract, Constructing Indigenous Autonomy in Plurinational Bolivia: Possibilities and Ambiguities

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Constructing Indigenous Autonomy in Plurinational Bolivia: Possibilities and Ambiguities 
by Aaron Augsburger and Paul Haber 


The municipality of Charagua recently became the first autonomía indígena originaria campesina (autonomous indigenous peasant community) in Bolivia under the 2009 plurinational constitution. A coalition of indigenous leaders backed by a majority of voters embraced the change as a vehicle for bolstering local control over key decisions, thereby advancing local preferences for indigenous forms of governance, values, and control over the development model with special attention to natural resources. The possibility remains, however, that it may operate to incorporate the indigenous community into the governing apparatus, thus making it more legible to the state and open to new forms of regulation, management, and control. Examining the state as a historically contingent and socially determined relationship helps make sense of this situation.

Abstract, Globalization, Governance, and the Emergence of Indigenous Autonomy Movements in Latin America: The Case of the Caribbean Coast of Nicaragua

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Globalization, Governance, and the Emergence of Indigenous Autonomy Movements in Latin America: The Case of the Caribbean Coast of Nicaragua 
by Luciano Baracco


A revisiting of Salvador Martí i Puig’s approach to globalization and the turn toward governance in explaining the roots and impact of the political mobilization of Latin America’s indigenous peoples since the 1990s recasts governance as a disciplinary regime that in the case of Nicaragua co-opted potentially radical oppositional movements into the neoliberal project that accompanied Latin America’s democratic transition. The discussion takes as its empirical case the autonomy process on Nicaragua’s Caribbean coast, which in its twenty-fifth year represents the most sustained devolution of power to indigenous peoples in Latin America. 

Abstract, Marking “Preemptive Suspects”: Migration, Bodies, and Exclusion

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Marking “Preemptive Suspects”: Migration, Bodies, and Exclusion
by Seth M. Holmes 


The dynamics of inclusion and exclusion are central to public perceptions and policy responses to transnational immigrants, including those arriving from Latin America in the United States. Scholars have shown in various contexts that even official inclusion by a nation-state involves important gradations of exclusion on social, economic, political, and symbolic levels (e.g., Blommaert and Verschueren, 1998; Castañeda, 2012). Social scientists have analyzed the metaphors through which different variations of exclusion are promoted and enacted, including the dichotomy of the undeserving voluntary economic migrant versus the (relatively) deserving forced political refugee (e.g., Holmes, 2013; Holmes and Castañeda, 2016; Yarris and Castañeda, 2015). Lynn Stephen analyzes the “preemptive suspect” as a metaphor of exclusion in the treatment of unaccompanied Central American minors arriving in the United States in 2014. She builds on her previous work on indigenous Mexican families (2007), resistance (2002; 2005; 2013), and transborder life (2007), synthesizing and organizing substantial scholarship and placing it in historical context. At the same time, her diverse experiences as ethnographer, activist, expert witness, and comadre add local color and thick description to her rigorous analysis. She develops her analysis explicitly in honor of Michael Kearney, who examined theoretical understandings of immigration and conducted ethnographic work focused on indigenous Mexican migrants in the United States and especially on their health (e.g., Kearney, 1986; Kearney and Nagengast, 1989). His focus on health, health care, and bodies seems especially important here. After all, for many transnational migrants the gradations of exclusion encountered in the process of displacement can easily become a matter of life and death. 

Abstract, Interrupting Green Capital on the Frontiers of Wind Power in Southern Mexico

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Interrupting Green Capital on the Frontiers of Wind Power in Southern Mexico
by Scott A. Sellwood and Gabriela Valdivia 


Harnessing the power of wind is commonly understood as a “green”—cleaner and more sustainable—alternative to conventional extractive practices. An examination of the unfolding of wind energy projects and their contestation in southern Mexico shows that, despite the seeming immateriality of wind farming, wind energy requires epistemological and material enclosures to capture its value. The unreflexive push for these energy frontiers ignores this requirement and, in doing so, sidesteps the processes of dispossession that follow the widening and deepening of capitalist relations, green or otherwise.

Abstract, Environmentalism and the Globalization of the Oil Industry in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

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Environmentalism and the Globalization of the Oil Industry in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
by Maria Guadalupe Moog Rodrigues


The state of Rio de Janeiro has become a hub for oil and gas production and infrastructure since Brazil entered the global oil market in the 2000s. Observers have anticipated increasing tensions between environmental activists and oil companies. These predictions have not been fulfilled, despite increasing evidence of environmental degradation caused by oil production. What could be hindering environmental mobilization in defense of the environment and affected populations and against the unrestrained expansion of oil infrastructure in the state? A longitudinal case study of environmental activism in defense of the Guanabara Bay ecosystem suggests that answers must consider the combined effects of democratization, political and regulatory decentralization, and neoliberal reforms on socioenvironmental activism—specifically, its weakening as civil society organizations confront increasing burdens of participation in policy making, deeply fragmented institutional and regulatory frameworks for environmental governance, and the expansion of opportunities to engage in collaborative arrangements with corporations.

Abstract, Neoextractivism and Indigenous Water Ritual in Salar de Atacama, Chile

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Neoextractivism and Indigenous Water Ritual in Salar de Atacama, Chile
by Sally Babidge and Paola Bolados


Latin American governments are neoextractivist: they promote exploitation of natural resources as central to economic development while acting to mitigate some of the excesses of extractive activity. In the space left open by the neoliberal state in the Salar de Atacama in northern Chile, the mining industry creates its own regulatory mechanisms and provides infrastructure and “improvement” projects to indigenous communities. While these projects gain a degree of consent to water extraction and the value of water for development, indigenous people also resist the neoextractivist project. The contradictions of extractivism-as-development are evident in everyday life and articulated in ritual and cultural practice. We take the example of a ritual and work event, the limpia de canales (canal cleaning), to narrate something of local responses to neoextractivist conditions.

Abstract, Tracing the Political Life of Kimsacocha: Conflicts over Water and Mining in Ecuador’s Southern Andes

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Tracing the Political Life of Kimsacocha: Conflicts over Water and Mining in Ecuador’s Southern Andes
by Teresa A. Velásquez


In 2009, farmers in the highlands of Ecuador challenged a proposed water law by staging public rituals to venerate their watershed, called Kimsacocha, as the embodiment of the Pachamama (Mother Earth). They rejected the proposed law because it allowed for mineral extraction in communal watersheds. They argued that human and nonhuman entities are interconnected and that the state should designate communal watersheds as no-mining zones to defend the right to life. While some scholars have argued that indigenous ontologies decolonize the political realm, in fact they have uneven outcomes when mobilized in contentious mining politics. Indigenous ontologies enabled farmers to build a multiethnic movement in defense of life, but this did not lead to the implementation of their demands. Instead, the state appropriated the language of the Pachamama to produce a revised water law that promoted piecemeal environmental conservation.

Abstract, Indigenous Peoples and the New Extraction: From Territorial Rights to Hydrocarbon Citizenship in the Bolivian Chaco

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Indigenous Peoples and the New Extraction: From Territorial Rights to Hydrocarbon Citizenship in the Bolivian Chaco
by Penelope Anthias 


A growing body of literature examines how the rise of “neo-extractivist” states in Latin America is reconfiguring the relationship between resources, nation, territory, and citizenship. However, the implications for indigenous territorial projects remain underexplored. Ethnographic research in the Bolivian Chaco reveals the ways in which indigenous territorial projects are becoming implicated in and being reimagined amidst the spatializing struggles of a hydrocarbon state. The tension between indigenous peoples’ desire for inclusion in a hydrocarbon-based national development project and their experiences of dispossession by an expanding hydrocarbon frontier has given rise to competing modes of “hydrocarbon citizenship” in the Guaraní territory Itika Guasu, where a vision of corporate-sponsored indigenous autonomy is pitted against new forms of state-funded development patronage. These dynamics challenge resistance narratives and resource-curse theories, revealing how resources act as conduits for deeper postcolonial struggles over territory, sovereignty, and citizenship.

Abstract, Part-Time Miners: Labor Segmentation and Collective Action in the Peruvian Mining Industry

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Part-Time Miners: Labor Segmentation and Collective Action in the Peruvian Mining Industry
by Omar Manky


Over the past two decades, besides the transformation of the organizational structure of the mining industry, there has been a shift in the spatial organization of production, expressed by the replacement of mining towns with mining hotels. Two case studies in Peru show that these changes have produced new forms of labor segmentation affecting workers’ capacity to mobilize by turning those who are directly employed by the company into a minority. While subcontracted miners have managed to overcome organizational segmentation by organizing across companies, the spatial segmentation of the mining hotel model has made local coordination difficult. Workers are not, however, necessarily defeated, as greater spatial mobility may offer possibilities of networking with new actors.

Abstract, Moving Glaciers: Remaking Nature and Mineral Extraction in Chile

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Moving Glaciers: Remaking Nature and Mineral Extraction in Chile
by Fabiana Li


The controversial Pascua-Lama mining project, straddling the border between Chile and Argentina and operated by Canada’s Barrick Gold, gained international notoriety when the company proposed to “move” three glaciers located at the mine site. The glaciers variously appeared, changed form, and disappeared as the project was developed, presented to the public, subjected to various modifications, and ultimately put on hold. The environmental impact assessment process created an inventory of the landscape that turned nature into an object of environmental management. At the same time, the element of public participation embedded in Chile’s environmental impact legislation helped to mobilize local and international activism.

Abstract, International Financial Capital and the Brazilian Land Market

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International Financial Capital and the Brazilian Land Market
by Maria Luisa Mendonça and Fábio Teixeira Pitta


International financial capital stimulated the production of industrial agricultural supplies in Brazil during the foreign debt crisis of the 1980s. In the mid-1990s new financial sources became available for debt rollovers, and this fueled a new cycle of industrialization in agriculture. This trend intensified in the years that followed, when commodity prices were high on the international markets. It led to an increase in the concentration of capital in agricultural assets such as machinery and land, which in turn generated a new cycle of indebtedness for agribusiness. This process of crisis accumulation was marked by the overexploitation of labor and predatory control over natural resources.

Abstract, From Food Production to Commodity Production in Argentina’s Agricultural Sector

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From Food Production to Commodity Production in Argentina’s Agricultural Sector
by Tomás Palmisano


An analysis of the semiotic and productive transformation of food crops under Argentina’s agribusiness model through a study of the diffusion of the term “commodity” in the discourse produced/reproduced by the rural sections of the hegemonic media, combined with statistical data that allow a dialogue between discourse and measurable quantities, concludes that defining the Argentine countryside as a place for commodity production is linked with increasing crop production for export that leads to the erosion of food sovereignty and food security.

Abstract, Extractive Capital, Imperialism, and the Colombian State

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Extractive Capital, Imperialism, and the Colombian State
by Kyla Sankey


Since the turn of the century, Colombia has become increasingly dependent on mining exports to drive economic growth. While the surge in mining investments in Colombia and the problems associated with this form of economic development have received much attention from scholars and policy analysts, the common explanation is that the state has been undermined or eroded by emergent global forces. However, nation-states should be seen not as victims but as authors and enforcers of new processes of capital accumulation. The Colombian state has acted as the principal guarantor of the political and territorial conditions necessary for this form of extractive capitalism by reconstituting property and contract laws, signing free-trade agreements, reconfiguring the internal state apparatus. and expanding military forces.

Abstract, Foreign Direct Investment Policy and Development in Bolivia under Morales

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Foreign Direct Investment Policy and Development in Bolivia under Morales
by María J. Paz and Juan M. Ramírez-Cendrero


Since 2006, Bolivia has made major changes to its economic policy and development strategy, especially with regard to the treatment of foreign capital. Analysis of the change in foreign direct investment policy as applied to the oil and gas industry reveals that it has produced greater state involvement in and control of oil revenues but no great strides in gas investment, production, or industrialization. This result contributes to the current debate on whether foreign direct investment policy is the best means of development for resource-rich countries.

Abstract, Alternatives for Latin American Integration: Beyond Racial Fusion and Multiculturalism

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Alternatives for Latin American Integration: Beyond Racial Fusion and Multiculturalism
by Jorgelina Loza


Latin American integration is a core issue in Rodolfo Stavenhagen’s “Seven Erroneous Theses about Latin America.” A critical reading of the sixth thesis suggests an alternative interpretation. Changes in the past 50 years with regard to Latin American ethnic integration, for example in Mexico and Colombia, have called into question the model of integration through assimilation. The current challenges to integration in Latin America point to an alternative approach that attributes positive value to hybrid status as a path toward overcoming internal colonialism.

Abstract, Stavenhagen and the Nation: Ethnicity, Community, and Political Project

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Stavenhagen and the Nation: Ethnicity, Community, and Political Project
by Jorgelina Loza


There is consensus in Latin America that the modern states of the region emerged from a communal project based on the existence of pre-national societies. It remains important, however, to ask who the actors behind this construct are and how they understand the discourse of the nation promoted by those states. Rodolfo Stavenhagen, who took a critical view of the processes of construction of this modern organizational form, approached the concept of the nation as a construct that took into account the coalition of prevailing forces and could be disputed by those seeking to play a leading role in it.

Abstract, “Seven Erroneous Theses about Latin America” and the Emergence of a New Mexican Anthropology

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“Seven Erroneous Theses about Latin America” and the Emergence of a New Mexican Anthropology
by Emanuel Rodríguez Domínguez


Mexican social anthropology was established as a practical tool for combining field studies with proposals for government action. From its inception it was closely related to the revolutionary project of national integration, but by the end of the 1950s academics had begun to question indigenista policy and its relationship with anthropological practice. Rodolfo Stavenhagen’s “Seven Erroneous Theses about Latin America” was one such critique. During the 1970s and 1980s it led to a debate that influenced many areas of anthropological study, nurturing a new kind of Mexican anthropology.

Abstract, Latin America’s Domestic Market and the Maintenance of Capitalism

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Latin America’s Domestic Market and the Maintenance of Capitalism
by Berenice Patricia Ramírez López


Rodolfo Stavenhagen, in his classic essay “Seven Erroneous Theses about Latin America,” addressed the narrow domestic market, indicating that it was basically a matter of income distribution. It has become clear that the priorities of the Latin American ruling class are focused on the world market rather than the local-national one. During the past 40 years, this class has become more determined to play the role of intermediary, taking its place in the field of trade, commerce, and mainly speculative financial transactions that allow for immediate returns. It does not promote domestic productive investment or the strengthening of education, innovation, or development technology and therefore secure and protected employment. Inequality has increased across the region, along with increasing labor precarity (notably informal employment), and thus the internal market reflects productive and social segmentation and inequality.