Contraband Corridor : Making a Living at the Mexico--Guatemala Border / Rebecca Berke Galemba.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Galemba, Rebecca Berke, Author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Smuggling--Mexican-Guatemalan Border Region.

Smuggling.

Border security--Mexican-Guatemalan Border Region.

Border security.

Mexican-Guatemalan Border Region--Commerce.

Mexican-Guatemalan Border Region.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (302 pages)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Stanford, CA : Stanford University Press, [2020]

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

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.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: A Paradise for Contraband?

Chapter 1. Border Entries and Reentries

Chapter 2. Documenting National Life

Chapter 3. Corn Is Food, Not Contraband

Chapter 4. Taxing the Border

Chapter 5. Phantom Commerce

Chapter 6. Inheriting the Border

Chapter 7. Strike Oil

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

Notes

References

Index

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 23. Jul 2020)

ISBN:

9781503603998

1503603997

OCLC:

1178769479