Between Autonomy and Subsistence: Mezcala's Narratives of Neoliberal Governance

Abstract

This research aims to map key trends of the global-regional-local interface of power in the context of neoliberal governance. For this purpose I explore the experiences of the comuneros and a group of young supporters of the indigenous community of Mezcala, who have been raising concerns about the plans of the Mexican state, and Mezcala’s national and transnational migrants, who are forced to leave due to economic, political and social conditions. In order to achieve my objective, I employ an alternative methodology that challenges the epistemic forms of how we produce and validate knowledge and recuperates local knowledges, in this case by means of in-depth interviews, participant observation and collecting media sources. The central objective of this dissertation is to understand how, under the working of neoliberal governance, the global political economic processes—enacted through policies, but mainly via the rhetoric of actors and institutions—shape the lives, projects and identity of the most remote communities. This is supplemented by an exploration of the socio-political dynamics in the national sphere, and via an illumination of the pattern of peculiarities engendered through the inherited political culture. Thus, while this research reveals how people might reproduce hegemonic models, it also traces how some of them are trying to go beyond institutionalised forms of reality construction in order to reshape their circumstances. It is in this context that Mezcalenses are negotiating their identity, positions and projects seeking to reach ‘progress’, thereby participating within and moving beyond the networks of power that sustain—in the era of neoliberal governance—a dynamic established by a capitalist world system cast in the image of modernity/coloniality. In this respect, this study not only demonstrates the connections between the micro and macro levels, but more importantly, it advances the understanding of the functioning of institutional networks, relations and structures of power, and in this way it begins to sketch out proposals for action and paths of social transformation.