TY - JOUR
T1 - The Gender, Place and Culture Jan Monk Distinguished Annual Lecture
T2 - Gentrification, assassination and forgetting in Mexico: A feminist Marxist tale
AU - Wright, Melissa W.
N1 - Funding Information:
1. Our project is entitled ‘Landscapes, Barriers, and the Militarization of Everyday Life Along the U.S.-Mexican Border,’ with Dr Hector Padilla and Dr Juanita Sundberg. This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant Number 1023266. ‘Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.’ 2. I would like to thank Dr Mónica I. Cejas for turning my attention to this article and its relevance for my analysis.
PY - 2014/1
Y1 - 2014/1
N2 - In this article, I employ feminist and Marxist tools to expose the struggles over the constant plunder and expansion of global capitalism along Mexico's northern border, specifically in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua. In particular, I examine how an official politics - promoted by the Mexican and US governments - for forgetting the economic and social devastation of a transcontinental drug war contributes to the mechanisms for further exploiting the working poor. By combining a feminist focus on the daily struggle of social reproduction with a Marxist emphasis on accumulation by dispossession, I show how this official 'forgetting' segues with an international gentrification plan in downtown Ciudad Juárez that seeks to expand the rent gap by denying place, legitimacy and legal status to the working women and their families who have made this border city famous as a hub of global manufacturing. As such, I argue that the social struggles against the official forgetting are struggles against a violent political economy that generates value via a devaluation of the spaces of the working poor, even of the spaces of their literal existence.
AB - In this article, I employ feminist and Marxist tools to expose the struggles over the constant plunder and expansion of global capitalism along Mexico's northern border, specifically in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua. In particular, I examine how an official politics - promoted by the Mexican and US governments - for forgetting the economic and social devastation of a transcontinental drug war contributes to the mechanisms for further exploiting the working poor. By combining a feminist focus on the daily struggle of social reproduction with a Marxist emphasis on accumulation by dispossession, I show how this official 'forgetting' segues with an international gentrification plan in downtown Ciudad Juárez that seeks to expand the rent gap by denying place, legitimacy and legal status to the working women and their families who have made this border city famous as a hub of global manufacturing. As such, I argue that the social struggles against the official forgetting are struggles against a violent political economy that generates value via a devaluation of the spaces of the working poor, even of the spaces of their literal existence.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84907574399&partnerID=8YFLogxK
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U2 - 10.1080/0966369X.2014.882650
DO - 10.1080/0966369X.2014.882650
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:84907574399
SN - 0966-369X
VL - 21
SP - 1
EP - 16
JO - Gender, Place and Culture
JF - Gender, Place and Culture
IS - 1
ER -