Of Information Highways and Toxic Byways: Women and Environmental Protest in a Northern Mexican City
Affiliation
Pima Community College, Department of Social and Cultural StudiesIssue Date
2002Keywords
Women -- Political activity -- Mexico -- HermosilloEnvironmental protection -- Citizen participation -- Case studies
Environmental protection -- Mexico -- Hermosillo -- Citizen participation
Social networks -- Mexico -- Hermosillo
Protest movements -- Mexico -- Hermosillo -- Case studies
Women political activists -- Mexico -- Hermosillo
Hazardous waste sites -- Mexico -- Hermosillo
Metadata
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The MASRC Working Paper Series © The Arizona Board of RegentsCollection Information
The goal of the Mexican American Studies & Research Center's Working Paper Series is to disseminate recent research on the Mexican American experience. The Center welcomes papers from the social sciences, public policy fields, and the humanities. Areas of particular interest include economic and political participation of Mexican Americans, health, immigration, and education. The Mexican American Studies & Research Center assumes no responsibility for statements or opinions of contributors to its Working Paper Series.Abstract
Women’s involvement in collective struggles for environmental quality has surged in recent years, as has research focusing on this phenomenon. Consistent with this research, a feminist lens is useful in revealing a model of community struggle that features women’s activities and strategies to expose environmental insult. I use a case study of community protest in Hermosillo, a city in the Mexican state of Sonora, to feature social networks as a means of politicizing the placement of a toxic waste dump six kilometers outside the city. A feminist perspective reveals these social networks to be more than a way to mobilize resources. It allow us to see the ways in which gender interacts with globalized relations of power, political ecology, and environmental policy, and to validate a creative way in which women can out-maneuver the gendered constraints to political participation. An analysis of how social networks served in this particular struggle suggests that they are an important component in the process through which women gained voice and authored oppositional discourse in contexts where these have been previously denied, and ultimately deconstructed the political authority that sanctioned the dump.Identifiers
0732-7749http://hdl.handle.net/10150/219212
793456038
Series/Report no.
MASRC Working Paper Series; 30Additional Links
http://mas.arizona.edu/node/658Collections
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