Policing the Environmental Conjuncture: Structural Violence in Mexico and the National Assembly of the Environmentally Affected

In this article, I contextualise the emergence and describe the political processes of a grassroots mobilisation against the structural violence of neoliberalism in Mexico in order to suggest the necessity of re-thinking conjunctural analysis in a posthegemonic direction. The National Assembly of the Environmentally Affected (ANAA) is a nationwide network of Mexican communities and organisations that has operated since 2008. ANAA's most notorious achievement has been the opening of a Mexican chapter at the Permanent People's Tribunal, the final verdict of which established the legal responsibility of the Mexican State for structural violence against the Mexican people. My account of ANAA's intervention in the Mexican conjuncture recuperates Stuart Hall's emphasis on complexity and singularity by narrating, through multiple critical voices, the cultural and political conjuncture in which some of the most environmentally affected groups of the Mexican population have been able to organise and strike alliances with critical academic communities or socially concerned scientists. In terms of theoretical elaboration, I reflect on the limits of conjunctural analysis as a response to the deeper crisis of representation – what I call a 'disjuncture' – that concerns the scale of socioenvironmental violence in neoliberal Mexico. In order to think beyond issues of cultural representation, I propose to inform a situated practice of environmentally affected cultural studies with the posthegemonic turn in Latin American thinking of the political.

Modernization or Betrayal: Neoliberalism in Mexico

This paper examines the effects of neoliberalism in Mexico undertaken during the administration of Carlos Salinas leading to the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1994. The effects of neolibralist policy on common people as well as resistance to the administration’s policies are examined in depth.

Comparative Topographies of Neoliberalism in Mexico

The author presents a comparative study of neoliberalism in two Mexican localities, Monterrey and Oaxaca, using the analytical lens of a ‘topography’. Although in theory a common set of ideas underpins neoliberal ideology and policy, in practice the way in which neoliberal projects are materialized in specific locations is differentiated, segmented, and highly uneven. Reflecting this, neoliberalism appears to have exacerbated regional differences in Mexico. An emphasis on topography draws attention to the political–economic processes that produce such difference. This destabilizes commonsensical representations of regional difference in Mexico, which pit a modern, industrialized, and increasingly democratic North against an impoverished, traditional, and authoritarian South. Furthermore, drawing analytical linkages across place allows the production of situated political responses to neoliberalism to be brought into coalition.