The proliferation and impunity of organized crime groups involved in drug trafficking in recent years is one of the most pressing public concerns in Mexico and the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. While the vast majority of this violence remains concentrated within Mexico, it has raised very serious...

Will the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) decrease Mexican migration?

This study sought to take a close-up look at cross-border Mexican migration by collecting detailed information about one binational migratory village-based community. five major findings have resulted from this investigation: 1. Migrants are generally poor rural or urban dwellers who depend on...

In this chapter, we analyze the expectations and the realities about the economic impact of NAFTA on Mexico in terms of economic convergence, trade, investment, employment, wages, and income distribution. We show that NAFTA has basically failed to fulfill the promise of closing the Mexico-U.S....

Although a severe economic crisis has rocked Mexico since 1981, neither left-wing political parties nor the organized working class and urban popular movements have managed to mount any serious challenge to Mexico’s political and economic system. A closer look at developments since 1981,...

Contributors to this volume examine how rural restructuring in Querétaro affects the organization of agroindustries and the productive strategies of small farmers in the ejido and private sectors, reshapes labor markets, and changes state-campesino relations. Contributors: Manuel Carlos,...

The U.S. and Mexico have been neighbors for more than two centuries. Despite intermittent attempts by Mexico to distance itself from the US out of a concern of US protectionism and its political, cultural and economic hegemony, a process of progressive economic and social integration has taken...

Based on fieldwork conducted during 1981 in Ventura County, California, this study helps to explain the relationship between the relative abundance of Mexican nationals willing to pick citrus crops and the institutional forms which U.S. unions, employers, and governments have created to deal...

Under the new agrarian policies and economic rules of Article 27, implemented in January 1992, the customary patters of political patronage and loyalty in the countryside no longer operate as before. Campesions now are challenged to think and act like entrepreneurs who assume investment risks in...

The Zapatistas, in 1994, forced the world and certainly people within Mexico to pay attention to longstanding problems in land inequities and dissatisfaction with the December 1991 modifications to the agrarian reform codes embodied in Article 27 of the Mexican Constitution. To facilitate the...