| Grounded in field-based ethnographic research conducted at the end of the 1990s, this dissertation documents the emergence of new political actors and forms of activism in contemporary rural Mexico. Specifically, it elucidates how economic globalization impelled small-scale farmer cooperatives to challenge deep-seated norms about who governs and how in the Mexican countryside. In some cases these cooperatives became outspoken opponents of traditional authoritarian patterns of governance. In others, they became proponents of highly unorthodox forms of political self-governance. In all instances, however, organizations that had originated as strictly economic endeavors became sites for developing and enacting new collective understandings of citizen rights and duties in the political sphere. Comparative analysis across three such cases reveals that peasants mobilized politically because economic globalization redistributed material resources in ways that discredited exclusionary patterns of governance even as it engendered discourses that helped rural citizens envision alternative modes of state-society relations. |
