Labor in the Americas: Surviving in a World of Shifting Boundaries

Capital Moves: RCA'S Seventy-Year Quest for Cheap Labor. By Jefferson Cowie. (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1999. Pp. 273. $29.95 cloth.)

From Puerto Rico to Philadelphia: Puerto Rican Workers and Postwar Economics. By Carmen Teresa Whalen. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001. Pp. 309. $74.50 cloth, $24.95 paper.)

Immigrant Women. Edited by Rita James Simon. (New Brunswick, N.J., and London: Transaction Publishers, 2001. Pp. 198. $24.95 paper.)

The Economics of Gender in Mexico: Work, Family, State, and Market. Edited by Elizabeth G. Katz and María C. Correia. (Washington, D.C.: The World Bank, 2001. Pp. 297. $22.00 paper.)

Labor Unions, Partisan Coalitions, and Market Reforms in Latin America. By María Victoria Murillo. (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Pp. 250. $59.95 cloth, $21.95 paper.)

From the Finca to the Maquila: Labor and Capitalist Development in Central America. By Juan Pablo Pérez Sáinz. (Boulder and Oxford: Westview Press, 1999. Pp. 189. $65.00 cloth.)

Beyond Smoke and Mirrors: Mexican Immigration in an Era of Economic Integration. By Douglas S. Massey, Jorge Durand, and Nolan J. Malone. (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2002. Pp. 199. $29.95 cloth.)

Operation Gatekeeper: The Rise of the "Illegal Alien" and the Making of the U.S.-Mexico Boundary. By Joseph Nevins. (New York and London: Routledge, 2002. Pp. 286. $17.95 paper.)

 

The control of space is an integral part of power relations. The state, as the preeminent power container, necessitates the control of space and the construction of territory, and therefore requires the construction of boundaries in both the physical (between national territories) and social senses (between citizens and "aliens"). (xx)

Joseph Nevins, Political Geographer

Recently, practitioners in the fields of history, economics, anthropology, sociology, and geography have contributed a wealth of works dedicated to trying to comprehend, if not resolve, the seeming contradictions presented by contemporary phenomena relating to boundaries as they exist in a "globalized" world. Such contradictions include the undercutting of the sovereignty of nation-states through transnational institutions such as the World Trade Organization; the intensification of the power of nation-states through the militarization of boundaries; the transnationalization of capital; the constriction of the power of labor through geographical bounding; the often centuries-old pattern of migration flows; and the dynamics between these phenomena and the social and metaphorical boundaries formed by the categories of race, class, and gender. With capital more mobile than ever before, how is labor to survive and flourish in the "globalized" world? ¹ Are there ways that labor can use geopolitical boundaries to its advantage? Or is labor's only hope to match the mobility of capital (either through the age-old strategy of migration or through the still largely unproved strategy of cross-boundary organization)?

All the works considered in this essay treat the theme of relations between labor and capital within the broader context of global North-South relations in the Americas. ² All of the authors recognize the importance of the phenomena of spatial bounding and the crossing of boundaries, sometimes by capital, sometimes by labor. Jefferson Cowie offers a treatment of capital moving continually southward throughout the United States until it crosses the final boundary from North to South. In Carmen Teresa Whalen's From Puerto Rico to Philadelphia: Puerto Rican Workers and Postwar Economics, we see labor moving North, precisely in response to capital moving South. Whalen's is an historical study treating the period of the 1940s to the 1970s. Immigrant Women, edited by Rita Simon, is a contemporary treatment of labor in the North, having arrived in the United States from a wide spectrum of points in the global South. Meanwhile, the works by Juan Pablo Pérez Sáinz, Elizabeth G. Katz and María C. Correia, and María Victoria Murillo are all set...