Professor Buchanan begins her paper by questioning whether
recent economic and political shifts towards notions of
"globalization" (e.g., the NAFTA) have failed to consider the
politics or economics of change in particular places. Her prime
example of a "place" where integration is illogically forced against
a background of differentiation is the U.S.-Mexico border region.
Through the scope of a "regulatory complex" (a complex of legal,
institutional, regulatory, and social orderings), she departs from the
common view of the NAFTA as a productive tool of North American
integration, and instead views the NAFTA as exacerbating
"differences between localities, industries, and labor markets." She
argues that the debate over the NAFTA underemphasized its
different local, sectoral, and regional impacts. In places such as
the US.-Mexico border region, the various forces of labor, capital,
and regulation interact in complex ways; the complexities (and
realities) of these interactions were perhaps overlooked during the
NAFTA debates. The author briefly examines this growing region,
focusing primarily on the social and economic aspects of the
maquiladora industry, including labor migration into the United
States and the potential for increased migration because of the
NAFTA. She concludes by arguing for a shift in perspective from
the outdated, territorial concept of "borders" to the richer, more
complex concept of "borderlands."
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/ruth_buchanan/47/