Mexico: The Other Side of the Wall

T he Twin Insurgency (Gilman) and Mexico's Fourth Transformation Gilman’s article came to my attention while I was reading Carlos Fazio’s discussion of the plutocratic offensive in Mexico and elsewhere around the world.   The plutocratic offensive is one part of Gilman’s article.   The other is the expansion of international crime.   Both of these developments are closely associated with neoliberal globalization.   The plutocratic offensive can be understood in terms of David Harvey’s discussion of a ruling class offensive against the constraints and regulatory burdens of Fordism in the context of the economic slowdowns of the 1970s.   What all of this comprised was an assault on what Gilman refers to as social modernism, which was built on the foundation of the generating patterns of growth that would benefits broad sectors of the middle classes, including organized workers and the professional middle classes.   A key to this pattern of development w...

        The two books under review here (Grandin 2019 and Miller 2019) form an interesting juxtaposition. Greg Grandin maps the rise, transformation and decline of the frontier myth as the principle ideology of the American nation state while Todd Miller undertakes a journalistic exploration of the edges of an emerging, American-centered empire of borders.   One way to put Grandin in relationship to Miller is to align Grandin’s account along the vertical axis of history in which the collapse of the frontier culminates in the rise of Donald Trump’s reactionary populism.   Miller, on the other hand, can be situated on the horizontal axis of the present, at a moment when the multiplication of border security apparatuses is creating a nationally denominated but transnationally organized police state.     This review is focused how to assess the politics of where these two works intersect and is less concerned with evaluating Miller or Grandin in...