Description
Book SynopsisNeoliberalism, Social Exclusion, and Social Movements critically examines struggles for social justice in an era of neoliberal globalization. Its framework makes significant connections between debt restructuring, privatizations, free-market policies, and grassroots efforts to create alternatives to social and economic exclusion.
Trade ReviewDonna Chollett’s analysis of the protracted but ultimately unsuccessful local struggles to continue milling cane at the Puruarán sugar mill makes a contribution of broad comparative and theoretical significance to understanding how the intersections of contemporary local, national, and global conditions, along with legacies of history, shape social movement dynamics as people try to construct their own alternatives to the future neoliberal capitalism offers them. Her rich ethnography, based on 15 years of research, unflinchingly explores contradictions at every level, but also humanizes its subjects and avoids blaming the victims of the unequal power relationships that she so insightfully explores. -- John Gledhill, The University of Manchester
Donna Chollett’s Neoliberalism, Social Exclusion, and Social Movements offers a vigorous and meticulous analysis of the complexities of local political struggles as they are both shaped and constrained by disjunctures in global regimes of accumulation and continuities in the nature and uneven dispersal of political power. What emerges is an attentive, historically informed understanding of how marginalized people contest their material, cultural, and political dispossessions. This book powerfully illustrates how the messiness of everyday political processes is not something which social movements virtuously transcend, but is integral to their struggles. This book is an invaluable addition to the literature on neoliberalization and rural politics in Mexico; Chollett offers a compelling example of why sustained and committed ethnographic work matters. -- Kathy Powell, National University of Ireland Galway
Donna Chollett’s admirable history of the Mexican sugar cane industry documents the ruinous impact of state-sponsored economic policies on entire rural communities. Neoliberalism, Social Exclusion, and Social Movements chronicles in great detail the struggles of the inhabitants of one sugar cane town, Puruarán, to keep its mill working. In part due to internal conflicts and contradictions, the movement to operate the mill ultimately failed. However, the movement’s decade-long existence offers incisive testimony to the desires of peasants and workers to preserve a place for themselves in the face of neoliberal policies that define them as expendable. -- Arthur Leigh Binford, College of Staten Island and Graduate School, City University of New York
Table of ContentsList of Illustrations and Tables Acknowledgments Introduction 1. Theorizing “Global-Local” Relations 2. Constructing the Cultural-Historical Matrix of Cane Production 3. The Cultural Construction of Cane Production in Puruarán 4. The Neoliberal Turn & Privatization of Mexico’s Sugar Industry 5. NAFTA and the Neo-Globalization of Sugar 6. Reclaiming Power and Forging Alternatives 7. The Legal Interlude and Regeneration of the Social Movement 8. The Precarious Fate of Ingenio Puruarán 9. Resistance under Circumstances Not of Their Own Choosing 10. “Like an Ox Yoke:” The Myth of Intrinsically Virtuous Social Movements Notes Acronyms and Spanish Terms References Index About the Author
