A suggestive essay in the current NLR regarding a recent national election, including an incidental list ways in which subjects of other countries (in this case Mexico) express their conclusion that voting might not achieve the changes they believe in. When was the last time you blocked a road? Seized a plaza?
Meanwhile, there's also an efficient summary of what it means to be as well a subject of the United States, even when one is a Mexican citizen, as in the case of
...the North American Free Trade Agreement with the United States and Canada, signed in 1993. The treaty eliminated duties on a broad range of us goods, and opened Mexico’s markets to foreign products, ownership and, notably, agribusiness—destroying Mexican small farmers, who could not compete with heavily subsidized American crops. The exodus from rural areas grew not only toward the United States, but also to Mexico City and the surrounding metropolitan area, to the Caribbean coast of Quintana Roo and other places where a living could be eked out through construction work or subsistence trade in the informal economy. In the northern border regions, two million of the unemployed found precarious, badly paid work in the maquiladoras, where transnational corporations profited from NAFTA's lax labour provisions and climate of corporate impunity.
How does your voting practice relate to this history?
Posted by jane at November 10, 2006 11:45 AM | TrackBack