| This dissertation is about Mexico's "work crisis." Drawing on ethnographic material I gathered throughout a two-year period in Mexico City at the zenith of President Vicente Fox's term (2000-2006), I interrogate how middle-class professionals have experienced neoliberal economic restructuring, and the myriad ways in which they have worked out such restructuring "on the ground." Thus, on an empirical level, this dissertation offers interpretative answers to the questions: In what specific ways have structural changes in the realm of work impacted Mexican professionals? What strategies have they adopted to cope with work instability and insecurity? And, what have increasingly precarious work lives meant for how they understand themselves in relation to the state and to the political process? These questions and their answers take on particular poignancy insofar as they look beyond the poor and the dispossessed---on which research has heavily concentrated---to the presumably more "comfortable," and challenge assumptions long-held by proponents of the neoliberal model of economic development. The chapters collected here largely speak of a paradox: on the one hand, Mexico's dramatic educational expansion, and on the other, the increased precarization of the work lives of its most educated citizens for whom it was theorized that, under labor market liberalization, job opportunities would increase. This dissertation examines this paradox in the context of contemporary Mexico, but the insights it offers, and the questions it raises on the relationship between work and the democracy, resonate and have applicability beyond its borders. |
