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

 

:::::: Abstract ::::::

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.”

CONTINUE READING FULL ARTICLE HERE

Abstract, The Updating of the Cuban Model: Precursor Socialism and Cooperativism

:::::: Abstract ::::::

The Updating of the Cuban Model: Precursor Socialism and Cooperativism
by Ricardo R. Fuentes-Ramírez




Cuba can best be conceptualized as a precursor socialist social formation that has not necessarily begun a transition to capitalism. A case study of nonagricultural cooperatives demonstrates that the current reform process in Cuba has included features that could be foundational with respect to a new socialist formation characterized by participatory planning.

CONTINUE READING THE FULL ARTICLE HERE

SaveSave
SaveSave
SaveSave
SaveSave
SaveSave

SaveSave
SaveSave
SaveSave
SaveSave
SaveSave
SaveSave

Abstract, Community Defense and Criminal Order in Michoacán: Contention in the Grey Area

:::::: Abstract ::::::

Community Defense and Criminal Order in Michoacán: Contention in the Grey Area
by Martín Rodríguez Miglio




The self-defense groups of La Ruana and Tepalcatepec and other communities in the Tierra Caliente of Michoacán, Mexico, emerged to oppose both the extortion and violence of the local parastatal order of organized crime and the central state’s demands for their disarming and dissolution. They represented a form of governmentality at the local level in which various nonstate actors performed the functions of government, control, and security in the grey area between legality and illegality

CONTINUE READING THE FULL ARTICLE HERE

SaveSave
SaveSave
SaveSave
SaveSave
SaveSave

SaveSave
SaveSave
SaveSave
SaveSave
SaveSave
SaveSave

Abstract, Understanding Outsourcing and Subcontracting: An Approach from the Theory of Surplus Value

:::::: Abstract ::::::

Understanding Outsourcing and Subcontracting: An Approach from the Theory of Surplus Value
by Martín Rodríguez Miglio




A critical analysis of outsourcing studies dating from the mid-1980s to the present lays the groundwork for a new understanding of its rationale. Relying on the idea of production in contemporary capitalism as involving both labor and valorization processes, this approach explains outsourcing as arising from the requirements of capitalist accumulation.


CONTINUE READING THE FULL ARTICLE HERE

SaveSave
SaveSave
SaveSave
SaveSave
SaveSave

SaveSave
SaveSave
SaveSave
SaveSave
SaveSave
SaveSave

Abstract, Radical Political Unionism as a Strategy for Revitalization in Argentina

:::::: Abstract ::::::

Radical Political Unionism as a Strategy for Revitalization in Argentina
by Lucila D’Urso and Julieta Longo




 The grassroots union experiment undertaken at the Lear automotive parts factory in Argentina can be seen as a paradigmatic struggle for an understanding of the relationship between unionism and politics. The Lear case reveals that the distinctiveness of radical political unionism lies in the democratic elements of its decision making and its appeal to direct action, its construction of alliances with other social organizations, its linkage of economic demands with broader political objectives, its identification of the management, the state, and the union bureaucracy as adversaries, and its transmission of a leftist political culture. 


CONTINUE READING THE FULL ARTICLE HERE

SaveSave
SaveSave
SaveSave
SaveSave
SaveSave

SaveSave
SaveSave
SaveSave
SaveSave
SaveSave
SaveSave

Abstract, Neoliberal Workfare and the Battle for Grassroots Control in Argentina

:::::: Abstract ::::::

Neoliberal Workfare and the Battle for Grassroots Control in Argentina
by Steven Araujo




While the vast majority of the academic literature on the popular classes and social programs in Argentina revolves around the concept of clientelism, it has largely ignored organizations that administer these programs without participating in clientelist networks and thus giving up their political autonomy. The struggle for grassroots control of an Argentine unemployed workers’ movement known as the Frente de Organizaciones en Lucha depends on the use of neoliberal workfare programs. Its ability to take resources from the state and administer them according to its own principles and priorities challenges the inference that receiving social programs necessarily leads to co-optation.

CONTINUE READING THE FULL ARTICLE HERE

SaveSave
SaveSave
SaveSave
SaveSave
SaveSave

SaveSave
SaveSave
SaveSave
SaveSave
SaveSave
SaveSave

Abstract, Titles of Contention: Sociocultural Change and Conflict over Legalization of Indigenous Lands in Southeastern Ecuador

:::::: Abstract ::::::

Titles of Contention: Sociocultural Change and Conflict over Legalization of Indigenous Lands in Southeastern Ecuador
by Raúl Márquez Porras, María Beatriz Eguiguren Riofrío, and Ana Vera Vera



Shuar communities in southeastern Ecuador are receiving collective property titles to their ancestral lands. This is being done as a way to guarantee their material and cultural survival, but the titling triggers sociocultural changes and conflict and its outcomes depend largely on the way it is implemented. The consequences of the titling process in communities in Nangaritza and El Pangui in which Shuar, Saraguro, and mestizos coexist include both tensions and informal arrangements to resolve the historically conflictive issue of access to the land.

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

:::::: Abstract ::::::

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

:::::: Abstract ::::::

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

:::::: Abstract ::::::

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, Creating Preemptive Suspects: National Security, Border Defense, and Immigration Policy, 1980–Present

:::::: Abstract ::::::

Creating Preemptive Suspects: National Security, Border Defense, and Immigration Policy, 1980–Present
by Lynn Stephen 


Analysis of U.S. immigration, border defense, and national security policies and their impact on individuals, families, and communities from Mexico and Central America who have migrated or fled to the United States as refugees since the mid-1980s suggests that through immigration programs such as Prevention through Deterrence, the United States has crafted a set of policies that creates “preemptive suspects”—categories of people from Central America and Mexico that may be systematically excluded as dangerous, criminal, undeserving, and less valuable than U.S. citizens.