Tracing Neoliberalism in Mexico: Historical Displacement and Survival Strategies for Mixtec Families living on the U.S.-Mexico Border

Abstract

Mexican neoliberalism has systematically undermined Mexico's rural and indigenous populations and created multiple forms of displacement in communities and individual lives. This thesis traces the impacts of displacement in the lives of Mixtec families living and working on the U.S.-Mexico border. As families encounter new circumstances of risk, violation and vulnerability, they develop material, spatial and social strategies to provide safe and meaningful lives, often through contradictory and uneven processes. Central to these processes are power relations and negotiations of class, ethnicity and gender, which both maintain community and continuity as well as further perpetuate systems of inequality and differentiation between groups, families and individuals. The focus on indigenous peoples in Nogales fills important gaps in the literature of indigenous transnational migrants and the U.S-Mexico border, particularly in light of recent border policies, which are pushing more people to the Arizona-Sonora desert region.