Browsing by Subject "Mexico"

Despite decades of study, the question of how to achieve sustainable small-scale fisheries is unresolved. Because small-scale fishing is diverse and hard to control, one management approach places fishers at the center of decision-making. Common-pool resource theory has assembled a large body of evidence that resource users, without top-down state control, are able to devise and enforce rules that lead to long-term sustainable resource harvest. The social and ecological characteristics (“design principles”) are well known for systems where this collective action is predicted to spontaneously emerge. However, it is poorly known what precipitates collective action when these design principles are absent. This dissertation draws insights about this question from a seemingly successful case from Baja California Sur, Mexico, where fishers have voluntarily created no-fishing areas (“Fish Refuges” or “Zonas de Refugio Pesquero”) in collaboration with the government fisheries agency and a non-governmental organization, Niparajá, in the absence of the design principles. This work is based on an in-depth study of these Fish Refuges including 180 days in the field from 2016-2018, participant observation, informal interviews, journaling, and semi-structured interviews (n=66). First, I found that collective action was possible because stakeholders had three competing visions about what the Fish Refuges were, each associated with criteria and evidence of whether the Fish Refuges were effective. This implies that policy flexibility to accommodate competing goals and evaluation criteria could facilitate collaboration for fisheries management. Second, I found that fishers’ knowledge was integrated in a process that did not recognize its legitimacy though what I call “ping-pong hybridization”, where the locus of decision making moved between stakeholders who could draw on their own knowledge systems. This implies that policies may be able to integrate multiple knowledge systems if the locus of decision-making moves back and forth. Third, I found that the property rights regime change away from de facto open access was possible because fishers were able to trade formal fishing rights for informal management rights, closing a fishing area to gain government trust and partnership. This work implies that insecure, unofficial, and tenuous property rights may be a first step of property rights regime change to achieve sustainable fisheries. In conclusion, bottom-up approaches to fisheries management may benefit from processes where different stakeholders can define the goals and methods used, and draw on their own knowledge systems to assess success. Shifts away from open access may be precipitated when fishers demand decision-making rights, even if these rights are tenuous.

This dissertation explores the influence of anarchism on the development of modern art in Mexico and the Americas from 1910 to 1950. It argues that art was an integral component of anarchist movements and that the philosophy and politics of anarchism guided major aesthetic debates about modern art in Mexico. Two key figures anchor this study: Ricardo Flores Magón (1874-1922) was an anarchist writer, activist, and head of the Junta Organizadora del Partido Liberal Mexicano, an anarcho-communist group of exiled Mexican anarchists living in the U.S. Dr. Atl (1875-1964) was a landscape painter, early proponent of muralism, and promoter of Mexican folk art. These figures are a starting point for unveiling a wide network of well-known and marginalized artists, writers, and intellectuals who engaged with anarchist philosophies. Using previously unexplored archival sources, correspondence, and unpublished manuscripts, this study examines a range of different artistic works—paintings and murals, cartoons and drawings, correspondence and book illustrations—that ranged in form and style from realism to impressionism and expressionism. By examining the reproduction and translation of these works throughout Mexico, the U.S., and South America, this dissertation also shows how anarchist art production transcended linguistic and cultural divides and furthered efforts to construct a hemispheric network of transborder solidarity.

As one of the windiest places in the world, it is no surprise that companies have flocked to Mexico's Isthmus of Tehuantepec, a narrow neck of land connecting the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Primarily foreign corporations have installed more than1500 wind turbines in less than ten years' time. While wind energy appears an ethereal, amorphous, and limitless resource, the wind can only become electricity through turbines that require vast tracts of land. The question of land ownership — a historical flashpoint in the region — has amplified tensions between residents, straining the already frayed web of social relations that have long bound this indigenous Zapotec community to one another.

Many of the indigenous Zapotec residents are thrilled these once bothersome winds are becoming productive — as profits, job security, and perhaps their shot at progress. Landowners are among the most ardent supporters of wind energy development, tending their livestock in the morning, leveraging their land in exchange for more favorable lease agreements with executives in the afternoon. Opponents of the industry liken their boosters to an earlier colonial power, asking, "What are we going to eat if you turn everything into gold?" – depicting wind energy as merely the latest in a long history of dispossessions. For them, the wind has always been productive, an actor in their everyday lives: it awakens the fruits of the sea, sustaining fishermen and feeding their families; it causes illness and destroys property, and it conjures residents to recall the joys of living in this place. What Istmeños are aware of are the stark geopolitical realities that have brought wind turbines to their doorstep.

In a moment when Mexico's oil reserves are dwindling and the state searches for alternative revenues, the case of wind energy development on the Isthmus of Tehuantepec complicates the utopian narrative that industry and government advocates recount regarding the so-called win-win possibilities for green energy development across the global South. What happens when the wind is transformed from its unruly natural state into a natural resource? Far from an isolated case, this dissertation draws upon broader theories of power, both electrical and economic, to show how individuals, institutions, and experts are laying claim to nature's force. Neither the fable of green techno-optimism nor a return to some mythical nature adequately explains the messiness of the everyday realities I observed. Based on more than 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork, I trace the generative possibilities of the wind, reconfiguring social relations through technological change. Ultimately, however, it is the imponderability of the natural world, its scale and power, and the very real consequences that efforts to mitigate global climate change are having in one particular place that I hope to convey in this work.

"Capitalizing Subjects: Free African-Descended Women of Means in Xalapa, Veracruz during the Long Seventeenth Century" explores the socioeconomic worlds of free women of means. I find that they owned slaves, engaged in cross-caste relations, managed their estates, maintained profitable social networks with other regional elites, and attempted to secure the economic futures of their children. Through an examination of notarial, ecclesiastical, and viceregal sources, I highlight the significant role this group played in the local economy and social landscape. My work demonstrates that free women of African descent engaged in specific types of economic endeavors that spoke to their investments in particular kinds of capital (economic, social, and cultural) that allowed them greater visibility and social legitimacy than previously documented. This dissertation, further, challenges a historiography that has over-emphasized the roles of race and gender in determining the lives of all people of African descent in colonial Latin America.

Contests over Contraception in Late Twentieth-Century Mexico follows how the birth control pill became immoral and centers Mexican Catholics in this history. From the early 1960s to the early 1970s, Mexican Catholic bishops, priests, and married couples debated the morality of the pill. Because the pill was primarily a hormonal invention, as opposed to a barrier method, it inspired many questions and debates about the purpose of sex. In the 1960s, the Church was reevaluating its doctrine—including its approach to sex and marriage—amidst modernization, social change, and cultural upheaval. Instead of assuming a monolithic Mexican Church, Contests over Contraception centers on the diversity of Catholic actors and their ideas. I argue that at the heart of these pluralistic debates about the morality of the pill was the contested place of nonprocreative sex in marriage, otherwise known as conjugality, marital intimacy, and pleasure. My work places the question of marital intimacy at the center of these debates, unsettling many of the dominant narratives about the Church in Mexico and Latin America in this period: a critic of economic oppression or a defender of family values. Just as much as the very real economic circumstances led many Mexicans to be concerned with family size, this concern was not mutually exclusive with concerns over marital intimacy and pleasure, as often inadvertently assumed. The fear of couples resorting to abortion was powerful enough to reconcile many of these different concerns and push Mexican Catholics to consider approving the pill.This dissertation demonstrates that this history is much more than one of Catholic dissent or obedience in response to the Pope's prohibition of the pill in 1968. When we turn to Mexico, we see that these debates were about how couples, not individuals, made these decisions about their reproductive lives together. And so, marital intimacy—when and why couples should have sex and whether the pill could facilitate this process—was an important one. Concerns over economic circumstances only raised the stakes. This research suggests that the question of birth control is distinct from abortion, and invites a different set of questions, especially when studied in Mexico. Contemporary terminology used to discuss sexuality and reproduction (such as left/right or pro-life/pro-choice) did not apply to these complex debates in the 1960s. Centering on how Mexican Catholics conceived of conjugality, or pleasure between spouses, moves away from the equally important focus of individual rights and autonomy when discussing reproduction and sexuality. Historicizing how and when the pill became immoral in Mexico suggests reproductive matters were politicized at different rates across the world.

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This dissertation is the collection of three essays aimed to evaluate the empirical performance of dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models in explaining the behavior of macroeconomic dynamics in emerging countries.

Chapter 1, which is joint work with M. Uribe and R. Pancrazzi, investigates the hypothesis that a real business cycles model driven by permanent and transitory productivity shocks can explain well observed business-cycle fluctuations in emerging countries. The model is estimated using more than a century of Argentine data.

In Chapter 2, a comprehensive real DSGE model of an emerging country is estimated using Bayesian techniques, expanding the data set used in Chapter 1. The goal is to characterize the relative relevance of ten different business cycles' drivers: three sectorial technology shocks, embodied and disembodied non-stationary technology, terms of trade, the world interest rate, trade policy, government expenditures and the country premium.

Finally, Chapter 3 estimates (using Mexican data) a DSGE model of an emerging country containing many frictions, as has been recently argued, that impose non-trivial constraints for monetary-policy design. In particular, the framework features a sectorial decomposition of the productive sector, intermediate inputs, imperfect pass-through, endogenous premium to finance capital accumulation, a liability-dollarization problem, currency substitution, price and wage rigidities, and dynamics driven by eleven shocks.

This study is a comparative historical analysis of the link between environmental activism and state-society relations in 20th century Russia and Mexico. It explores the three main currents of environmentalism that originated in these two countries under non-democratic political systems that originated in the social revolutions of 1910 (Mexico) and 1917 (Russia) and the roles that each current has played in the process of democratization that began in the 1980s. It is based on critical evaluation and synthesis of the following theoretical fields: collective action, social movements, political regime change and democratic transition. Scholarly literature and press sources are used to corroborate and evaluate findings from in-depth qualitative interviews with environmental activists, researchers, lawyers, and journalists as well as data from participant observation conducted by the author in Russia and in Mexico. The main findings of the study are two-fold. 1) Environmental activism affects social rather than political democratization. 2) The type of environmental activism that has the most significant impact on social democratization is social environmentalism - the current that emphasizes the synergy between the struggles for social justice and civil rights on the one hand and against environmental degradation on the other.