Subsidizing Capitalism : Brickmakers on the U.S.-Mexican Border

by Wilson, Tamar Diana

• ISBN13: 9780791465073
• ISBN10: 0791465071
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2005-07-07
• Publisher: State Univ of New York Pr

Summary

In Mexico, self-employed brickmakers support capitalist enterprise by providing bricks to build hotels, factories, office buildings, and shopping malls at low costs based on profit-making principles. Combining Chayanovian and neo-Marxist approaches, Subsidizing Capitalism asserts that the economic activities of these self-employed brickmakers may be considered counterhegemonic because they avoid proletarianization in the formal sector. Tamar Diana Wilson discusses the similarities between peasants and brickmakers, the structural position of garbage pickers in relation to brickmakers, the trajectory from piece worker to petty commodity producer to petty capitalist, the economic value of women's and children's work as part of the family labor force, and how the neopatriarchal household is intrinsic to petty commodity production. Interspersed throughout are short stories and poems that offer the brickmakers' perspectives and provide a rarely seen look into their lives. Book jacket.

Author Biography

Tamar Diana Wilson is Research Affiliate in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Missouri at St. Louis

Table of Contents

Preface	ix
Acknowledgments	xiii
Introduction	1	(14)
``The Ladrillera''	15	(20)
Approaches to the ``Informal Sector'' and to the Brickmakers of Mexicali	35	(22)
Petty Commodity Producers in the Informal Sector: The Peasant Adaptation of the Brickmakers in Colonia Popular, Mexicali	57	(10)
``The Old Brickmaker, 1993''	67	(8)
``Invisible'' Women and Children Workers on the Mexicali Brickyards	75	(24)
``Mexicali Brickmaker's Wife''	99	(2)
Gender Considerations among the Brickmakers	101	(8)
``Brickmaker's Daughter, Brickmaker's Wife''	109	(8)
The Heterogeneity of Subsidies to the Capitalist System: The Case of the Garbage Pickers	117	(24)
Are the Brickmakers Counterhegemonic?	141	(12)
``Don Rafael's Desire''	153	(4)
Epilogue	157	(8)
Appendix: Scott Cook and I: Ambiguity and Ambivalence in Approaches to Brickmaking	165	(10)
Notes	175	(10)
References	185	(20)
Index	205