At the sewer's end: The social construction of environmental pollution and the search of hegemony in Brownsville, Texas

This dissertation attributes the rapid growth of the maquiladora industry and its involvement in contaminating the environment along the U.S.-Mexico border to the development of a new world economic order, which began to take shape in the wake of an historico-political movement that the Italian Marxist, Antonio Gramsci, termed a passive revolution, i.e. a strategy that calls for far-reaching economic changes without the active consent of the masses, although it invariably leads to gradual changes in society that lay the foundations for hegemony. The field research that was conducted, therefore, investigated whether there is consent in the border community of Brownsville, Texas for the development model that has turned the border region into a zone of super-exploitation, or conversely, whether this has contributed to a hegemonic or legitimation crisis. As it turned out, a high level of approval for the NAFTA agreement was found, notwithstanding that as a result of liberalized (neo-liberal) development in Mexico the practice of illegal dumping by the maquiladora industry has been allowed to continue virtually unchecked. The bases of this consent are spatially overdetermined ---in other words, they are linked to economic, political, and ideological relations that have been constituted at different spatial scales. Yet, in the final analysis, the consent that was found was attributable more to factors that are specific to this locality and location. The dissertation, thus, highlights an issue that Gramsci underemphasized, i.e. geography matters in the formation of consent .