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RETERRITORIALIZING BORDERS: TRANSNATIONAL ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE MOVEMENTS ON THE U.S./MEXICO BORDER
Abstract: In the turbulent restructuring of the global economic order, North America has seen the emergence of a neoliberal regime of accumulation, in which the ideologies of free markets and transnational production accompany practices of uneven development and the exploitation of natural and human resources. In this context, the U.S./Mexico border, and especially the San Diego/Tijuana area, has been a site of intensive political contradictions: rapid growth and industrialization, yet extensive immiseration and environmental destruction. However, the border also has been the site of an emergent group of community-based environmental justice movements which have worked to build trans-issue and trans-national coalitions in opposition to the abuses of corporate capital and unrepresentative government in the region. Through extended interviews with several environmental justice organizers, this study explores the possibilities and limitations of their coalitional endeavors, as well as their eco-populist and radically democratic vision of globalization from below.
Keywords: environment justice, neoliberalism, US./Mexico border, coalition building, radical democracy.
Epigrams: When people talk about this period in history...they talk about the capitalist revolution sweeping in the world. They witness a growing awareness worldwide that states cannot direct economic activity, but must rely on private markets and competition to find the way forward. People will continue to speak with tremendous optimism about this period. They will marvel at how, if this capitalist revolution continues, this will have been the era during which 3 billion people got on a rapid escalator to modernity. When the history books are written that change will rank with the industrial revolution, and with the renaissance, in terms of its significance to human affairs. Because the Mexican model has been so widely watched, and so widely emulated, and is so salient in the minds of investors, what happens in Mexico has implications that go far beyond Mexico, or even Latin America. (former Chief Economist for the World Bank, Lawrence Summers, in Henwood 1995:3)
If socialism is to arrive one day in North America, it is much more probable that it will be by virtue of a combined, hemispheric process of revolt that overlaps boundaries and interlaces movements.... It is necessary to begin to imagine more audacious projects of coordinated action and political cooperation among...