Contraband Corridor

Making a Living at the Mexico--Guatemala Border

Rebecca Berke Galemba (Autor)

Buch | Hardcover

320 Seiten

2017
Stanford University Press (Verlag)
978-0-8047-9913-3 (ISBN)

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The Mexico–Guatemala border has emerged as a geopolitical hotspot of illicit flows of both goods and people. Contraband Corridor seeks to understand the border from the perspective of its long-term inhabitants, including petty smugglers of corn, clothing, and coffee. Challenging assumptions regarding security, trade, and illegality, Rebecca Berke Galemba details how these residents engage in and justify extralegal practices in the context of heightened border security, restricted economic opportunities, and exclusionary trade policies. Rather than assuming that extralegal activities necessarily threaten the state and formal economy, Galemba's ethnography illustrates the complex ways that the formal, informal, legal, and illegal economies intertwine. Smuggling basic commodities across the border provides a means for borderland peasants to make a living while neoliberal economic policies decimate agricultural livelihoods. Yet smuggling also exacerbates prevailing inequalities, obstructs the possibility of more substantive political and economic change, and provides low-risk economic benefits to businesses, state agents, and other illicit actors, often at the expense of border residents.

Galemba argues that securitized neoliberalism values certain economic activities and actors while excluding and criminalizing others, even when the informal and illicit economy is increasingly one of the poor's only remaining options. Contraband Corridor contends that security, neoliberalism, and illegality are interdependent in complex ways, yet how they unfold depends on negotiations between diverse border actors.

Rebecca Berke Galemba is Assistant Professor at the Josef Korbel School of International Studies, University of Denver.

Introduction: A Paradise for Contraband?

1. Border Entry and Reentries

2. Documenting National Life

3. Corn Is Food, Not Contraband

4. Taxing the Border

5. Phantom Commerce

6. Inheriting the Border

7. Strike Oil

Conclusion: The Illicit Trio: Drugs, Arms, and Migrants

Erscheinungsdatum	17.02.2018
Zusatzinfo	2 figures, 15 halftones, 2 maps
Verlagsort	Palo Alto
Sprache	englisch
Maße	152 x 229 mm
Themenwelt	Naturwissenschaften ► Geowissenschaften ► Geografie / Kartografie
	Sozialwissenschaften ► Ethnologie ► Völkerkunde (Naturvölker)
	Sozialwissenschaften ► Politik / Verwaltung ► Europäische / Internationale Politik
	Sozialwissenschaften ► Soziologie
	Wirtschaft ► Allgemeines / Lexika
	Wirtschaft ► Volkswirtschaftslehre
ISBN-10	0-8047-9913-X / 080479913X
ISBN-13	978-0-8047-9913-3 / 9780804799133
Zustand	Neuware