"Sustaining the Borderlands in the Age of NAFTA" provides the only
book-length study of the impact on residents of the US-Mexico
border of NAFTA's Environmental and Labor Side Accords, which
required each state to enforce labor and environmental regulations.
Through field research in Matamoros, Tamaulipas, anthropologist
Suzanne Simon tests the premise that the side accords would
encourage Mexican grassroots democratization. The effectiveness of
the side accords was tied to transparency and accountability, and
practically bound to opportunities for Mexican border populations
to participate in the side accord petitioning and civil society
input mechanisms. Simon conducted sixteen months of fieldwork with
both a group of environmental activists and a group of those
fighting for labor justice in Mexico. Both of these groups became
enmeshed in the types of cross-border advocacy networks and
coalition building efforts that are typical of the NAFTA era.
Although the key to the side accords' anticipated success lay in
their ostensibly generous encouragement of a participatory politics
and sustainable development opportunities, "Sustaining the
Borderlands" reveals that the Mexican border populations for which
they were largely created are effectively excluded from
participating due to the ongoing online, territorial, class, and
cultural barriers that shape the borderlands. Rather than
experiencing the side accords and their companion institutions as
transparent and accessible, residents experienced them as opaque
and indecipherable. Simon concludes that the side accords have
failed to deliver on their promise of bringing democracy to Mexico
because practical mechanisms that would ensure their effective
implementation were never put in place.
NAFTA took effect at a time when Mexico was undergoing a democratic
transition. The treaty was supposed to encourage this transition
and improve environmental and labor conditions on the US-Mexico
border. This book demonstrates that, twenty years later, the
promises of NAFTA have not come to pass.
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