Free Trade: Informal Economies at the U.S.-Mexico Border

In the aspiring global cities of Ciudad Juarez and El Paso, people generate income and develop their housing informally on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border. Staudt analyzes women and men in low-and middle-income neighborhoods in the core and in the old and new peripheries of two cities that straddle an international border. Residents counter national and international influences to build shelter and incomes, albeit meager. But the political machinery of both the U.S. and Mexico constrains the ability of these quintessential free traders to build political communities and organize around self-sufficient work and housing in visible ways. Experiences at the border, along a central gateway for capital, job, and labor movements, offer insights to readers as the globalized economy spreads and engulfs the heartlands of both the U.S. and Mexico. People’s everyday victories in countering petty regulations can counter or feed the grand global hegemonies. Author note: Kathleen Staudt is Professor of Political Science at the University of Texas, El Paso. She is the author or editor of Political Science and Feminisms: Integration or Transformation?(with William Weaver), Managing Development, and Women, International Development, and Politics: The Bureaucratic Mire, first and second editions. (Temple).