Neoliberalism, Transnationalization and Rural Poverty: A Case Study of Michoacan, Mexico.

• Author: Whooley, James

John Gledhill (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1995) 243 pp. Reviewed by James Whooley

In Neoliberalism, Transnationalization, and Rural Poverty: A Case Study of Michoacan, Mexico, author John Gledhill examines the impact of the global economy as it expands into the deepest reaches of rural Mexico. The issue is certainly timely: Mexico's peasantry is currently facing a purge of "inefficient" producers that some have likened to the Depression-era migration of millions of families from U.S. farms. More generally, the book offers a critical assessment of the type of neoliberal reforms that have been prescribed for developing countries around the world. The author, a reader in anthropology at University College, London, explores a myriad of topics ranging from Mexican political culture to U.S. immigration policy to the marriage patterns of migrants. Gledhill addresses most of these with great clarity on an individual basis, but often at a cost to the larger topic at hand. With a tendency to lose sight of the big picture, the author presents a piecemeal analysis, requiring the reader to fill in the gaps. Nevertheless, Gledhill offers revealing research, deep insights, and even eloquence at times. His book represents an important contribution to the study of neoliberalism and its impact on the powerless.

From the outset, Gledhill makes clear that from his perspective, the inexorably expanding neoliberal order has all manner of negative implications trailing in its wake, particularly for the rural poor. His argument is convincing. The "lost decade" of the 1980s, he writes, was characterized by increased income inequality, unemployment, poverty and social marginalization in the "first" and "third" worlds alike. In Mexico, the vision of development nursed by the country's elite (and encouraged by their U.S. counterparts) entailed an industrial, service-based economy, with an agricultural sector of arguable importance. The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was widely considered to be the culmination of this ideal, but Gledhill argues that its passage was only one step of many in a larger international process of labor division and capital concentration. For the campesinos who are the focus of Gledhill's case study, the process diminishes the viability of small farming and disrupts social patterns founded on the ejido, the small plots granted by the government to Mexicans seeking land. Mexican policymakers have argued for the creation of a "modern" ejido, but Gledhill maintains that the transformation has already taken place:

(It) makes little sense to talk about "modernizing

the ejido" in abstraction from the international political

economy of food production, particularly in

the case of Mexico, which has long been integrated

into transnational systems of production and social

reproduction. From this point of view, the ejidos

as they exist today are already "modernized."

(p.25)

In 1992, President Carlos Salinas de Gortari modified Article 27 of...