Commentary on Donna Chollett’s renegotiating gender and class in the berry fields of Michoacán, Mexico

Abstract

Donna Chollett's paper makes a vigorous contribution to analyses linking commodity production for global markets to disrupted regional class relations, to disrupted households and gender ideologies. Firmly ethnographically and histori? cally grounded, she insightfully traces neoliberalization processes within the Los Reyes region1 and shows how the costs of these processes have differentially accrued to local workers; how what was always a minimalist social wage has been further shredded as the political power of labor declines; how women's entry into a low wage labor market created by transnational agribusiness constitutes a problem as much as it offers a 'solution' in a context of shrinking opportunities; how the impact of class fragmentation, declining incomes and rising insecurity re-orders households while reaffirming the household as the site where economic and affective responsibilities for immediate burdens rest. The paper's focus on a 'disordered past to a disordered present' avoids the kind of retrospective idealization of post-revolutionary "state-led" development which critiques of neoliberalization sometimes imply; while caneros (cane producers) and ex-mill workers can readily point to a tangible depreciation of income, political power and worsening relations of production, such perspectives evade consideration of state protection as itself a form of domination, and of the oppressiveness of the paternalistic and clientelistic techniques of rule which characterized the pax priista and the modus operandi of the priista unions. Indeed, the cane producer's unions in a sense contributed to class fragmentation by confining their attentions to issues affecting relations of cane production, largely to the exclusion of broader class issues such as peasant landlessness and rural poverty, and continued throughout