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This paper explores the conceptions of specialized physicians regarding intersex child surgery, and contrasts them with the experiences of intersex adults. The gap between the views of health personnel—who affirm that they are "doing their best"—and those of intersex persons—who report the adverse consequences of surgery—highlights the need to stop unnecessary normalization surgeries in children. The findings of this study suggest that bridging the gap between the medical perspective and the experience of intersex people requires opening direct channels of communication among all those involved in the clinical process, incorporating intersex individuals into bioethics committees, encouraging contact with the parents of intersex children, implementing regulations that unambiguously delay or prohibit unnecessary interventions, promoting a debate on relevant ethical principles and human rights to protect the interests of all intersex people, and disseminating the contents of such a debate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How does organized crime affect foreign direct investment (FDI) in developing countries? Some research examines the effects of crime, such as homicide rates, on FDI. However, we know little about how organized crime in particular might affect such investment. This paper examines organized crime and FDI in Mexican states between 2000 and 2018. This case is important because Mexico is one of the top global recipients of FDI. At the same time, criminal violence has killed hundreds of thousands of people in Mexico in recent years, and scholars seek to understand the violence's wider effects. We explain how organized crime competition, as opposed to crime generally, should shape investors' decisions. Analyses using original data on criminal organization territory find that higher numbers of criminal groups are associated with lower levels of new FDI. Other measures of crime, such as homicide rates or crime rates, are not associated with foreign investment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While protests occurring in nationally democratic contexts rarely represent fundamental threats to the central state, they still need management when and where they occur. Thus, this paper suggests that, especially in federal countries, to explain the repression of protest, we must examine subnational politics. Subnational political elites, often tasked with protest management, can engage protesters and call for police restraint, but their capacity and authority affect their ability to carry out these tasks. The paper tests the theory using original event-level data on Mexican protests and responses and leverages within-country variations in democracy and state capacity. The paper shows that where subnational governments have bureaucratic capacity and where citizen linkages to the state cause them to see state agents as relevant, problem-solving authorities, protest events are less likely to be managed using a repressive response. In addition, the paper highlights a key difference between explanations of overall human rights violations and repressive responses to protest, namely, that electoral competition is not a significant factor reducing the likelihood of repressive responses to protest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Do foreign investors have subnational political preferences? The political economy of foreign direct investment (FDI) involves not only choosing among host countries, but also the subnational location of the assets. However, factors affecting investors' decisions about subnational location likely differ from the ones affecting international investment. This paper studies the effect of state-level partisanship on new FDI inflows to Mexican states. I argue that investors prefer states ruled by left-wing governors because they are more likely to invest in human capital. Statistical analyses using new data on subnational allocation of FDI in Mexican states between 1999 and 2017 support the main hypothesis. Given the persistence of authoritarian enclaves in Mexico, I also disentangle the effects of partisanship from subnational democratization. The partisan effect is independent from party turnover and political competition at the subnational level, and it is robust to different model specifications and estimation strategies. Additional evidence supports the plausibility of the argued mechanism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Countries in the Global South are particularly vulnerable to social and political violence. This paper suggests that such violence makes certain recalcitrant economic interests more open to taxes and spending on social welfare. Using results from a survey experiment of business owners and operators in Mexico, we show that relative to more innocuous institutional weaknesses, concerns over violence generally increase support for anti-poverty spending and decrease support for tax cuts. To build a theory, we explore heterogeneous effects and textual data. The findings suggest that business interests see anti-poverty spending as a tool for shoring up costs of violence in consumer markets, with some leaders even extending support to welfare-enhancing taxes. However, violence can create challenges in labor markets that increase operational costs, leading some business interests to resist tax policies that ask them to help fund social programs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The booming business of global surrogacy has come to a halt: one surrogacy hub after the other has started to regulate the incremental flow of intended parents to the Global South hoping to fulfill their desire for a baby with the help of a foreign surrogate laborer. Thailand and Nepal have banned surrogacy altogether; India and Mexico insist on the altruistic nature of their surrogacy arrangements. As the drive for altruistic surrogacy suggests, the baby holds an exceptional position in many societies: ideas about the ‘unique’ maternal bond create public unease about the commercialization of babies in surrogacy markets. Drawing on economic sociology and theories of affect, this paper argues that multiple processes of affective attachment, detachment and reattachment shape transnational surrogacy journeys. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Mexico’s surrogacy industry, the paper studies processes of commodification and decommodification in three instances of market-making: (1) the assignment of value and a price to reproductive laborers’ bodies on the basis of affective postcolonial geographies of beauty; (2) the affective/effective organization of the market encounter through contracts and communication rules and (3) the detachment of the final ‘good’ of the baby from the surrogate laborer. Transnational surrogacy arrangements, the paper concludes, are always forms of partial commodification – no matter whether they are framed as altruistic or commercial – because processes of affective/effective attachment and detachment are fundamental for delineating the intimate boundaries of families that come into life with the assistance of the globally operating surrogacy industry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focusing on 'chronic kidney disease of unknown origin' (CKDu), this paper revisits ethnographic preoccupations with 'thin' and 'thick' descriptions in the context of the unexplained emergence of this unruly disease. CKDu has recently emerged in impoverished sites across the Global South as a 'medical enigma' that defies easy description. Despite growing research efforts from various quarters, however, the search for specific causes using conventional forms of analysis has made little progress. Taking CKDu as a residual category and a contemporary case of society–environment–body entanglements (Latimer and Gomez, 2019; Latour, 2018), we engage Heather Love's descriptive turn as a provocation to examine what it is that is encountered in encounters with 'the enigma of CKDu'. In doing so, we highlight the role of thick and thin descriptions (cf. Love, 2013) in terms of the political relations they make differently visible. We argue both are critical to the 'art of noticing' (Tsing, 2015). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the development of Mexican commercial aviation (and more specifically the trajectory of Compañía Mexicana de Aviación) against the background of Mexico's Second World War alliance with the USA and its post-war economic expansion. USA foreign aid allowed Mexican president Manuel Ávila Camacho (1940–46) to further develop the country's aviation network and personnel. The Second World War's disruption of tourism allowed Mexico to reap the benefits of a rapidly growing vacation industry. The election of Miguel Aléman in 1946 reinforced commercial aviation and tourism as crucial, co-dependent elements in modernising the country and making Compañía Mexicana de Aviación a symbol of national progress. Although the Second World War emerges as a crucial point in the development of Mexican aviation, the same processes that buoyed commercial airlines also reinforced cultural stereotypes that were exploited for USA tourists and masked reckless financial decisions that nearly bankrupted Compañía Mexicana de Aviación's in late 1950s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the dynamics of racialized securitization for transnational migrants across multiple borders—from Central America toward Mexico and the United States. Rather than a singular process where US policies, funding, and attitudes toward border security direct Mexican immigration enforcement, I argue that Mexican state collaboration redirects US xenophobia away from Mexican migrants and toward Central American migrants. Migrants' testimonies point to the ways that US and Mexican discourses are mobilized in different—but complementary—ways that shape them as racialized subjects with differential life chances. This is clearest through a crude mapping of people onto nationalities for deportation based on hair, language, and tattoos. Beyond legal violence, deported migrants describe their vulnerability as constructed within tacit networks of collaboration between actors in the US and Mexico, both licit and illicit, in an effort to extort migrants and their families. While race is a key signifier in border securitization, the differences between these racial states have material consequences in the differential state violence in immigration enforcement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Embodied, embedded, extended and enactive (4EC) perspectives on cognition have gained epistemic legitimacy during the last 25 years in the international arena. They have encouraged new ways to understand the mind. Mexico has not been an exception; rather, it has the potential to provide a fertile ground for the development of 4EC perspectives, as shown by the variety of contributions in this special issue. In this editorial introduction, we discuss recent concerns about a lack of coherence in the inter-relations between these perspectives, and we propose that it is more appropriate to view 4EC as an emerging pluralistic research tradition that shares crucial commitments. Furthermore, we show that this pluralistic tradition has been gaining ground in the specific research context of Mexico, because of the country’s distinctive historical, scientific and philosophical development. We finish by describing the promising research potential of the current heterogeneous explanations as evidenced by the papers in this issue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper tells the story of how a group of fishermen became resilient to face a community crisis in their village caused by the depletion of shrimp stocks, and how they are building transnational social resilience through the creation and operation of an Ecotourist resort to improve their lives, and insure their future well- being. Social change is taking place in some communities in the La Costa region of Chiapas, one of the most impoverished states in Mexico, where people opted to emigrate to the US and came back charged with individual and collective social remittances, new personal narratives which have helped them and their community adapt and change while constructing transnational lives. The development of El Centro Turístico El Madresal in Ponte Duro, Chiapas, provides an interesting case study in how to use the tools of social resilience conceptualization within a transnational context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we conduct a detailed examination of the effects of Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) and the technology gap on local technology dissemination and spillovers. Using unique firm level data from surveys among FDI firms and domestic producer firms and a random sample of their suppliers in the North East of Mexico, we present new evidence showing that the effects of FDI and the technology gap are multi-faceted. FDI firms are significantly more involved in technology transfers. Their suppliers are more likely to experience positive spillovers, even when we control for the support that they receive. A large technology gap has a negative effect on technology diffusion. However, suppliers of FDI firms are more likely to receive several types of technology transfer when the technology gap with their client firms is large. As for local spillovers, we find that a large technology gap fosters positive spillovers, especially among suppliers of FDI firms and among those suppliers that are best suited to absorb new technologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Human geography's longstanding preoccupation with the intersection of time and space resonates with accounts of urban informal settlements which have indirectly highlighted change over time as a key characteristic; recent postcolonial urban research explores the implications of multiple and dynamic temporalities for marginalised groups in cities of the Global South. Drawing on these debates, this paper applies an explicit focus on the temporal dimension of space in the context of urban informal settlements. Despite decades of research into the marginalised, self-built neighbourhoods which house many urban poor residents in Global Southern cities, these settlements continue to be portrayed in terms of a reductive and simplistic formal/informal dualism, meaning they are often treated as outside 'normal' urban considerations. Based on research in two informal settlements in Xalapa, Mexico, this paper explores residents' perceptions of change over time in order to reveal the multiple temporalities that exist within the city and across these neighbourhoods, offering alternatives to dominant marginalising discourses through the construction of identity over time, and time-bound tactics of resistance. These narratives are contextualised by constraints expressed in diverging or ambivalent accounts; but they suggest going beyond dualistic or nostalgic discourses to frame these neighbourhoods as places in the city. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The change from a subsidized zonal pricing system to a full nodal pricing regime in the new Mexican electricity market could improve the efficiency of electricity system operation. However, resulting price modifications might also swing surplus across producers and consumers. In this paper, we calculate nodal prices for the Mexican power system and further analyze how allocations of financial transmission rights (FTRs) can be used to mitigate resulting distributional effects. The share of FTRs to be allocated to different generation plants and loads is studied as a second step of an electricity tariff subsidy reform agenda that includes, as a first step, the change to nodal pricing and, as a third step, the reformulation of actual regressive subsidies in a progressive way. We test our model in a realistic nodal price setting, based on an hourly modeling of the Mexican power system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mexico has a long history of tensions between the government and student activists. This history dates back to student protests that ended with the State's violent repression of students in 1968. These tensions were reignited with the student occupation of Mexico's National Autonomous University from 1999 to 2000, which ended through intervention by the national federal police. In the 21st century, student expression and activism occurs in the physical world as well as on social media sites. For example, the hashtag #YoSoy132 was created by a student movement begun at the Jesuit Universidad Iberoamericana in opposition to the then candidate and now President of the country, Enrique Peña Nieto. In this paper, we conceptualize social media sites as virtual public spaces, and we employ cultural critical visual discourse analysis to examine the case of student ''hashtivism,'' online activism through hashtags, in response to the forced disappearance of 43 students from the Raú l Isidro Burgos Rural Teachers College of Ayotzinapa in September 2014. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A chorus of activists and intellectuals claim that the Zapatista Army of National Liberation has either ceased to exist or become politically irrelevant for Mexico and the world. In this paper I put forward the rather different thesis that despite the enormity of their task, the Zapatista project continues apace and merits careful consideration. To this end, I first argue that much of the confusion regarding the ‘death’ of the Zapatistas arises from a change in Zapatista strategy in response to the decomposition of Mexican society resulting from the contemporary global crisis of capitalism. Next, I detail how, having foreseen this decomposition, the Zapatistas set out to both theorize the nature of contemporary capitalism and reconceptualize anticapitalist politics accordingly. Since the early 2000s this reconceptualization has led to a shift in Zapatista strategy that, although not easily intelligible to contemporary media or much academic discourse, centers on the construction of ‘other geographies’. Finally, I argue that judging from the events of the past few years, this strategy has allowed the Zapatistas not only to persevere but also to pose a concrete alternative to the dominant strains of left political and spatial strategy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article places Mexican migration in the context of the longue durée of Mexican–U.S. political and economic relations. We argue that 21st-century migration not only has its roots in the 19th century, but very much resembles its early predecessor. The latest wave of migration is just the most recent iteration of a process of hegemonic dominance over Mexico, a process that has been for the most part ongoing since the late 1800s. It continues to be rooted in labor migration caused by unequal economic policy between the two countries. The paper builds upon the empire theory of migration literature in lieu of the neutral-seeming “natural” “push–pull” of markets and living conditions or social capital theories, and provides a more power-driven analysis stressing hegemony and domination in which the United States exerts control over Mexico for the purposes of exploiting cheap labor and raw materials. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Although scholars agree that nationalism remains an important aspect of the new vocabulary of neoliberalism, little is known about how these discourses operate on the ground and in particular contexts. In this paper, we investigate how a specific adaption of national identity, one that underscores the values of cultural integrity, is used to naturalize neoliberal shifts in the tequila industry. Tequila has long circulated in the images and myths of Mexican identity. However, in the last two decades, the Mexican government has increasingly relied on tequila's reputation as the nation's 'spirit' to obscure changes in tequila regulatory policies that are linked to broader neoliberal changes in Mexico. Extralocal actors--in particular, multinational companies--have more influence over the direction the industry is taking and the institutions that regulate it, while tequila production is increasingly untethered from the communities and traditions that make it distinct. Here, we examine how private and public actors mobilize the language of authenticity, place, and quality to justify the adoption of neoliberal measures in the tequila industry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the responses to the 2008-09 global financial crisis in Mexico and Turkey as examples of variegated neoliberalism. The simultaneous interests of corporations and banks in the national fixing of capital and their mobility in the form of global investment heavily influenced these states' policy responses to the crisis at the expense of the interests of the poor, workers, and peasantry. Rather than pitching this as evidence of either persistent national differentiation or some Keynesian state resurgence, we argue from a historical materialist geographical framework that the responses of capital and state authorities in Mexico and Turkey actively constitute and reconstitute the global parameters of market regulatory design and neoliberal class rule through each state's distinct domestic policy formation and crisis management processes. The latter is influenced by capitalists' ties to the fixity and motion of capital. While differing in specific content, the form of Mexico's and Turkey's official responses to the crisis ensured continuity in their neoliberal strategies of development and capital accumulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In light of the abstract theorizations of scholars of transnational social movement networks--as exemplified by Hardt and Negri's Multitude--in this paper I argue for the power of grounded, material engagements with the practices of protest of social movements to transform not just political spaces, but our theoretical landscapes. I compare the practice of setting up and maintaining encampments in the Oaxaca and Occupy movements to argue that the spatial dynamics of occupation in a tent city fuels the distinctive style of participatory politics of the assembly, providing a creative means to transform confrontation into cooperation. A point of departure for this comparison is my assertion that the political difference made by these social movements lies not just in whether or not they achieved their political goals, but in the kind of intervention that the physical fact of occupying a public space entails in normative understandings of politics and public spaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores how children in different cultures and socio-economic contexts develop representations about the public sphere. It addresses how contexts of representation shape the form and content of children’s thinking while expressing the two-way transactions between the child and their social world. Drawings by children from two age groups (seven- and 10-year-olds) and two socio-economic milieus (affluent and deprived), in four cultures (Germany, Mexico, Brazil and Romania), supported by observations and interviews, were used to investigate children’s representations of their public world and their position within it. Findings show that public spheres characterised by collectivism, poverty and/or marginalisation: a) accelerate decentration bringing the public world and its complexity to the foreground of children’s depictions, and b) show a strong link between self and the public world. In affluent or individualistic public spheres we recognise the classical developmental pathway proposed by Piaget, with a clear increase in the separation between self and society as children grow. Children’s representations are flexible semiotic systems whose form and content interact productively with the context in which they develop. These results reject conceptions of children’s knowledge as a prototype of adult knowledge, suggesting that children’s societal knowledge evolves through adaptive strategies to specific socio-cultural environments. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines how rural communities on a clandestine road crossing the Mexico-Guatemala border stake claim over this route while delegitimizing state control. Each community delimits its control by erecting a cadena, or chain, across its section of the road, from which it levies tolls on cross-border contraband. The cadenas shape political, economic, and cultural geography by instituting a local sovereign system of morality, economy, and legality. As border residents reimagine and rematerialize the border by displacing it from the geopolitical line to their cadenas, they mark their claims to this space. In a region where the majority of border flows occur through clandestine routes, residents contest the power of the nation-state to determine the border, sovereignty, belonging, and transregional development. Simultaneously, however, residents' border practices mimetically reproduce the relation between territory, power, and identity. I argue that the margins of the state can be critical junctures for examining how everyday people and state actors continuously negotiate and reconfigure the shifting materializations and meanings of territory, state power, and (trans)national space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social uprisings in response to privatization dynamics in the water sector have triggered widespread debate on the social and ecological impact of neoliberal water policies. Much of this debate remains in the urban and domestic water sector, thereby disregarding the struggles of marginalized urban and rural producers who use water for multiple purposes. Furthermore, while private providers are blamed for prioritizing profit over people, it is increasingly clear that while water may be a valuable commodity, the sector as a whole inhibits long-term profitability. Instead, using the concept of "accumulation by dispossession," the current process of privatization is understood as a new round of enclosures of the commons, implemented by a neoliberal state to open up new territories to capitalist development and to capitalist forms of market behavior . The contraction of global markets and the reconfiguration of the public sector as notions of nation and citizenship take on new meanings allow for the commodification and privatization of public goods and assets. Using the case of a Mexican irrigation district the paper shows how notions of scarcity are mobilized during neoliberal reform to reconfigure social relations of agricultural production so as to free up land, water , and labor for the market. This has not only resulted in large-scale dispossession of land and water, but also in stripping a group of their collective rights, and thereby dismantling a collective identity forged on past struggles over land and water. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two population surveys of Mexico City residents were conducted, the first three weeks after the earthquake of September 1985 and the other a year later. We found that: (1) small percentages, because of the size of the metropolitan area population, translated into large absolute numbers for personal disaster behavior; (2) social class (or socioeconomic status) was important as a differentiating factor in earthquake-related behavior; (3) there was little dissatisfaction with organizational efforts to deal with the earthquake consequences along with (4) no noticeable increase in dissatisfaction from the time of the initial impact up to the year's anniversary of the disaster; (5) the earthquake-related sheltering and housing of people was not as problematical as the extensiveness of the activity might suggest; (6) the volunteering pattern of individuals was quite complex; (7) there was extremely heavy mass media usage in the earthquake aftermath; and (8) earthquake victims learned little from their experience on how to prepare for future disasters. The paper primarily uses these generalizations from the survey findings to advance eight basic themes about human behavior in disasters that might be comparatively examined in future cross-societal studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]