Bordering the Future: Resisting Neoliberalism in the Borderlands

Abstract

In the last twenty years, and especially since NAFTA, the U.S.-Mexico border has been a site of intensive neoliberal development, particularly in the growth of 2,340 export-processing plants (maquiladoras), ninety percent U.S.-owned. The economic growth this has helped to promote has been both rapid and uneven, and the burdens it has placed on local communities through impoverished conditions of work and life have been immense—no where more so than in Tijuana. Although much of this growth and the associated social and environmental problems have been the subjects of many policy, academic, and journalistic discussions, Tijuana's local community organizations, which have attempted to meet local needs and formulate alternative development paradigms, have not. Based on interviews with community organization representatives in the San Diego/Tijuana region, this text argues that a more complete understanding of these movement efforts to resist neoliberalism, especially the alternative visions for development they construct, are crucial to any understanding of neoliberalism generally, transnational social movements, and more democratic labor and environmental policy. These alternative paradigms differ radically from those promoted by capital and states on both sides of la frontera, and potentially offer a more participatory, democratic, and sustainable form of transnational development, for Mexico and all of North America.