Consuming Mexican Labor: From the Bracero Program to NAFTA, by Ronald L. Mize and Alicia C.S. Swords, University of Toronto Press, 2011, 294 pp., $28.95 (paperback)
Mexican immigration is often presented in the mainstream media as a threat to the U.S. economy and national integrity. The authors of Consuming Mexican Labor attempt to discredit this claim with a historically grounded analysis of how U.S. consumer needs and consumption have shaped patterns of Mexican immigrant labor from the 1950s to the present. Their work reveals the connections between U.S. “consumptions, capital accumulation, and Mexican labor exploitation” in a way that reframes the study of Mexican immigration by contextualizing it within a neoliberal political economy that has eroded the social contract “in favor of hemispheric agreements.”
The authors also analyze new forms of resistance employed by Mexican workers tired of suffering the consequences of being criminalized in times of economic downturn. Worker resistance is presented through examples of successful campaigns organized by groups like the United Farm Workers, together with student organizations and churches. These campaigns, such as boycotts and the shaming of certain brands, aim to raise awareness about labor exploitation and to demand human and immigrant rights. According to the authors, such grassroots responses open up possibilities to envision and enact “the Zapatista idea for ‘new’ worlds.”
The Allure of Labor: Workers, Race, and the Making of the Peruvian State, by Paulo Drinot, Duke University Press, 2011, 310 pp., $24.95 (paperback)
Historian Paulo Drinot argues that the incorporation of indigenous Peruvians into the workforce in the early 20th century was as much a cultural project as an economic one. Peruvian policy makers and intellectuals of the era represented labor as an “agent of civilization” and the incorporation of indigenous workers as an effort to purge the nation of “backward” forces. Drinot builds his argument by analyzing labor policies as the means through which the state attempted to remake the nation as a modern industrial society.
Employing a cultural analysis, Drinot attempts to overcome what he sees as the narrow interpretations of Peruvian labor policy that fail to acknowledge the assumptions about indigenous and rural populations that shaped those policies. Such assumptions, he argues, are built into Peru’s official history. The most important of these is the old dichotomy between “civilization” and “barbarism”—that is, between Peru’s white-mestizo culture (premised on modernity, industrialization, and a “healthy” workforce) and indigeneity, seen as embodying a kind of counterforce to modernity, an obstacle to creating a civilized nation. Drinot’s study furthermore aims to provide tools for understanding how racism and cultural bias perpetuate and “normalize” socio-economic inequalities that continue to plague Peruvian society.
Solidarity Transformed: Labor Responses to Globalization and Crisis in Latin America, by Mark S. Anner, Cornell University Press, 2011, 213 pp., $17.56 (paperback)
Political scientist Mark S. Anner argues in Solidarity Transformed that new production patterns in the era of corporate globalization have engendered new forms of resistance and solidarity in Latin America. Despite the region’s transition to democracy in the 1990s, the rate of unionization and the power of labor unions have constantly decreased. Responding to the evolving structures of transnational capitalism, new forms of labor resistance operate within a context of formal representative democracy, even as global supply chains are expanded through new production patterns. These patterns, characterized by segmented and deregulated labor markets, hinder traditional forms of labor resistance, such as the strike.
Covering a period of two decades in four countries, Anner documents about 70 labor campaigns in two sectors—the garment industry in El Salvador and Honduras, and the auto industry in Argentina and Brazil. Two kinds of weapons used in today’s labor resistance emerge from Anner’s research: transnational activist campaigns and transnational labor networks. The former depend on alliances between human rights groups and affected workers who orchestrate shaming campaigns, while the latter rely on partnerships with foreign labor unions, especially in the company’s parent country. Both aim to ensure that workers’ rights be respected across national borders.
