Abstract: Environmental Violence and the Socio-environmental (de)Evolution of a Landscape in the San Quintín Valley

 

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Environmental Violence and the Socio-environmental (de)Evolution of a Landscape in the San Quintín Valley

 

by  Nemer E. Narchi, Sula E. Vanderplank, Jesús Medina-Rodríguez, Enrique Alfaro-Mercado

"The social and environmental effects of industrial agriculture in the San Quintín Valley of Baja California are closely related. An environmental history of the valley from European contact to the present demonstrates that modern schemes of globalized agricultural production erode biological diversity while fostering labor exploitation. A critical model drawing on the concept of environmental violence— historically structured asymmetrical power relations that are reproduced and maintained to foster capital accumulation—describes how neoliberalism shapes and exploits agro-industrial landscapes and livelihoods in San Quintín to produce a crisis of underproduction.

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Abstract: Forced Disappearance as a Collective Cultural Trauma in the Ayotzinapa Movement

 

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Forced Disappearance as a Collective Cultural Trauma in the Ayotzinapa Movement

 

by  Tommaso Gravante

The disappearance of 43 students of the teachers’ training college at Ayotzinapa in 2014 has inspired a broad social movement. Ethnographic work and interviews conducted at several of the demonstrations to show solidarity with the parents of the students reveal that their forced disappearance has been framed by participants as a collective cultural trauma. The politicization of this trauma has led to a change in the relationship between citizens and public    institutions and produced a new social narrative.

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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: Female Bodies and Globalization: The Work of Indigenous Women Weavers in Zinacantán

 

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Female Bodies and Globalization: The Work of Indigenous Women Weavers in Zinacantán

 

by  Eugenia Bayona Escat

Women producers and sellers of textile crafts in Zinacantán, Chiapas, Mexico, use one of the few resources they have to enter business: craft production as informal, invisible, and underpaid work. Taking the body as the axis of analysis, three distinct areas of transformation of indigenous women producers by tourism may be identified: the private and domestic body of craftswomen, the social and public body as an icon of ethnic difference, and the commodified body as an extension of the touristic object. The analysis shows that tourism and participation in the international market strengthen gender, class, and ethnic differences and contribute to the perpetuation of existing inequalities.

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Climate Change, Neoliberalism, and Migration: Mexican Sons of Peasants on the Beach

 

by  Tamar Diana Wilson

Climate change and neoliberal policies in Mexico have been fomenting migration by campesinos and their sons. This migration is primarily internal, to cities and tourist centers, where migrants engage in informal and semi-informal income-generating activities. Interviews with 32 beach vendors, sons of campesinos, in Cabo San Lucas reflect these two drivers of migration: while most reported that they would like to farm, they identified drought and lack of government aid as major difficulties for farmers in their hometowns.

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