The novelties of the present period of decisive change have had notable

Transcription

1 ABOUT THIS ISSUE The novelties of the present period of decisive change have had notable effects on the vocabulary of the human sciences. The -isms of the Second World War and the cold war now are represented with the prefixes neo- or post- ; clear signs of supposed historical expiration dates for their former referents. Terms like globalization and flexibilization have begun to displace the key words nationalism and modernization in the vocabulary of politicians and intellectuals. Anecdotal and whimsical descriptions of these new referents abound. There is, however, a common message in them all: terms like globalization or its more cultural counterpart in romance languages mundialización, point to changes related to new communications technologies and their transforming implications for the organization of life and, in particular, forms of livelihood. The concrete consequences of such transformations are only scarcely beginning to be perceived. It is not surprising, therefore, that there exists notable disagreement over the reasons to be cheerful or sad when faced with a world so full of novelty. Could it be that when the contemplation of an historical period requires new terms of reference, the terms of endearment also change? Happily, the articles and essays presented in this issue examine our contemporary situation as a concrete and substantive problem requiring analysis and description. The phenomenon treated in the thematic section is of vital interest for Mexico; namely, the transmigrant labor of Mexicans in the United States. The use of the prefix trans- with migrant reflects, in part, the postnational condition of the current Mexican labor market. Nevertheless, all of the studies presented here insist on examining the continuities that lead to the changes in this market and condition the terms of participation of Mexican labor power in it. The articles by David Griffith and Sandy Smith-Nonini clearly demonstrate that the transmigrant labor market does not operate according to the processes of the economic market but rather depends on arrangements made between the United States government and agrobusiness corporations. Both studies offer important findings about the

2 ways in which the North American State serves as a broker for the exploitation of transmigrant labor. Griffith presents evidence that the economic market in itself, the supposed free market, is an abstraction. As an example, he notes the incapacity of the market as a mechanism to advance capital through wages for work that is particularly onerous and also seasonal. His examples come from the United States program of seasonal foreign workers with H2 visas (a program initiated in 1943 for cane cutters and later expanded to include other seasonal work, such as tobacco picking, fruit and vegetable gathering, and seafood processing ). Griffith examines the origins of the H2 program for sugar cane harvests in Southern Florida and then its expansion as the H2A program (after 1986) that involved Mexican workers in seafood processing at plants in the Mid- Atlantic States. The cases studied cover more than fifty years of transmigrant labor organized through informal networks, collusion between governmental organizations in the home countries of the workers and agroindustrialists, and the use of tactics (black lists, local police, confiscation of documents,) to control workers who question working conditions (especially the corrupt systems of piece-rate pay, automatic deductions from salaries and inadequate housing). He documents the abuses of the H2 program, the mobilization of civic groups against these injustices and the United States government s inquiries into them. Nevertheless, the central point of Griffith s study is inescapable: transmigrant labor power advances capital in United States agroindustry but not by means of economic market mechanisms. Smith-Nonini s study complements Griffith s. With a focus on the intersection between corporate power, transmigrant labor and the state, Smith-Nonini examines the politics and the immigration laws in their concrete implementation and their consequences in the fields and packing plants of North Carolina. She documents a contentious fact: the historical absence of just compensation, security and adequate work conditions are the central factors that make possible transmigrant worker programs as well as the presence of brokers for contracting and controlling Latino manpower in the H2A program. There is no shortage of manpower in the United States, but only a long history in which a segmented labor market (for example, along sex, gender and ethnic lines)

3 suffers adjustments when one segment (for example the Afroamerican population) seeks to improve its position and leave behind the onerous and seasonal work in the fields. The H2A program is a response to the adjustments in this segmented labor market: currently in North Carolina, an agricultural state built on Afroamerican labor, Latino laborers account for 90% of the work in the fields. Another surprising statistic is that the North Carolina Growers Association (the NCGA, a supposedly non-profit organization) and its director Stan Eury control approximately 40% of the transmigrant labor for the entire Federal H2A Program. Smith-Nonini presents this context in order to then describe in detail the bonds of interests and their consequences for the H2A workers. A point underlined by Griffith and Smith-Nonini is how the reduction of controls over the movement of capital in the countries of North America and the Caribbean during the last decade of the twentieth century contrasts with the selective increase of controls for the movement of people in the same region. In a study of the processes of segmentation of the labor market for transmigrant workers in the West-Coast States of the US, Lynn Stephen reviews the politics about which criteria for qualifying foreign workers should be applied in order to grant permanent work rights in the United States. She notes that a common strategy in such politics is to secure a captive supply of manpower for agroindustry. Stephen also describes the consequences of these policies for workers and their families by examining the case of Mixtec immigrants in Oregan who work as residents, illegal or seasonal workers with H2A visas. Finally, another aspect of transmigrant labor revolves around its role in the construction of locality (the communities of origin). There exists, for example, an extensive literature about the effects of the remittances of migrants in their communities of origin. We close the thematic section of this issue with an article by Leigh Binford that re-examines such studies, though not exclusively from the point of view of the communities of origin. Binford observes that remittances are part of an international phenomenon and that their study now demands comparisons of the effects of transmigrant labor in Mexico and in the United States. Binford identifies the structuralist, functionalist and transnationalist positions in the study of such processes. In addition, he examines the indirect

4 effects (the multiplier effect) of the remittances in the communities of origin and of migrants expenditures in the community of destination. He finds that such effects are more important for the United States economy than for Mexico. Faced with this finding, Binford reflects on the effects of transmigrant labor for neo-liberal development and argues that a central question for Mexico is whether remittances and their effects contribute to changes that diminish the need to migrate and work in the United States. Inasmuch as the answer to this question is no, the last fifty years of transmigrant labor are part of a process of subdevelopment in the communities of origin. Another present-day reality, the new initiatives for the self-definition and re-vindication of the collective rights of subalternate groups, is also part of a globalized world where the necessity to continue with projects for building modern nation-states is now questioned. At least, when the cultural, social, legal and economic boundaries of nation-states have become not only complex but fuzzy, it becomes difficult to imagine and make sacrosanct those goals of modernity which value only the rights of each individual as a member of a national society supposedly free of traditional authority. As Luis Ramírez indicates in his introduction, the document published in this issue is a proposal for a law concerning the collective rights of native groups (original peoples) in the State of Michoacan. The proposal is, in itself, an important initiative but, at the same time, it is also a testimony to the current aims of an important group of P urhépecha leaders and intellectuals. Our General Section includes two essays in anthropological critical analysis. Again, both review contemporary processes of great relevance for our comprehension of the world in the twenty-first century. These works demonstrate the power of anthropological analysis when it takes as its point of departure the connections of local and regional processes in larger and more extended relations. The essay by John Gledhill examines, first, the political transition in Mexico. He describes the settings for the collapse of what Vargas Llosa characterized as the perfect dictatorship. Each setting or version is presented as a necessary context for contemplating the beginning of the twenty-first century with the government of Vicente Fox. In this analysis, Gledhill examines the networks and links of power revealed in moments of crisis during the transition

5 towards a new process of power in the organization of the Mexican State. He thereby makes visible a shadow state that persists during the process of transition within the formal state organization. Gledhill then analyzes the case of Chiapas and neo-zapatismo in order to demonstrate how such regional historical processes constitute integral parts of wider national and international relations and are, therefore, inseparable from the analysis of the Mexican political transition. The second essay, by Bruce Kapferer, is a fascinating, critical, review of the book Empire, by Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt. As Kapferer notes, Negri and Hardt s book has been treated as a manifesto concerning liberation at the dawning of this century of globalization; a manifesto similar to that famous one of yore that postulated liberation at the commencement of modern industrialization. The book confronts the new terms of reference of the twenty-first century with their implications for the terms of endearment in the lives of a multitude that is complex and heterogeneous, but each day more plugged in to novel networks built on global technologies. Kapferer reviews the central arguments of the book and their foundations by means of a critical anthropological analysis. Thus he offers a critically important means of access to an equally important book. His analysis invites us to develop critical grounds for reflecting on the new terms of reference in the twenty-first century as well as for trying to grasp their implications for ways of living and being in contemporary society. Relaciones is pleased to announce the following awards: Best article on prehispanic Mexican History 2000 (Comité Mexicano de Ciencias Históricas) Phil C. Weigand, La antigua ecumene. Mesoamérica: un ejemplo de sobre-especialización?, núm. 82, vol. XXI, primavera 2000 Best article on nineteenth Century Mexican History (Comité Mexicano de Ciencias Históricas) Juan Ortiz Escamilla, La ciudad amenazada, el control social y la autocrítica del poder. La guerra civil de 1810 a 1821 núm. 84, vol. XXI, otoño 2000.