Domesticated responsibility: The making of the United States-Mexico border environment

This thesis explores how state and non-governmental environmental policies and programs expressed the tensions of rule within Mexico's neoliberal transformations. The fieldwork for this study was based on four years of research in several residential settlements in and around the municipal garbage dump in Ciudad Juarez, the largest manufacturing city on the U.S.-Mexico border. The study examines how residents of the dump negotiate between individual and social strategies for household betterment as they face discourses and material changes of the 1990s that situate responsibility for the environment upon individual subjects.; Changes in both the realm of production and reproduction have contributed to a reshaping of gendered relations of social reproduction within households. Throughout the 1990s, shifting state policies have coalesced with industrial recruitment practices that favor individualizing men over socially-embedded women for new worker training and advancement programs. During this period, women in Ciudad Juarez increasingly have been held accountable for failures of the state and industry to safeguard environmental health in the domestic domain. The thesis uses Michel Foucault's concept of governmentality to explore how the allocation of urban public works' infrastructure, coupled with a dual labor market strategy among export-processing firms, have encouraged gendered senses of self which privilege individual over collective identities. At the same time, however, collective strategies for household betterment continue to prevail in communities such as those around the dump.; By linking marxist theories of the state and space with anthropological, post-structuralist and feminist theories of subjectivity and personhood, the research presented in this thesis highlights some of the central contradictions in neoliberalism and contemporary transnational environmentalism. The thesis shows how transnational environmental activism, rather than derailing Mexico's neoliberal agenda, paradoxically provided a legitimating discourse for state withdrawal of social services, including those that contribute to environmental protection. In attending to emerging senses of self among residents of Juarez's dump, the thesis shows how processes of capital accumulation on the border have taken advantage of the state's conversion of shared environmental problems into matters of individual household management.; The thesis makes two significant theoretical and analytical contributions; First, it contributes to a body of literature that theorizes the state by developing a detailed analysis of the relationship between the neoliberal state form and Foucault's concept of governmentality. Second, this investigation expands anthropological studies of personhood to illuminate how changes in governmentality meet with subjects' efforts to pursue both socially-embedded and individualized strategies to confront the dangers and to take advantage of the opportunities presented by neoliberalism. The thesis argues that the domestication of the environment becomes refracted through language and practices of social relations that encourage men and women to approach personhood in different ways.