Reterritorializing Borders: Transnational Environmental Justice Movements on the U.S./Mexico Border

In the turbulent restructuring of the global economic order, North America has seen the emergence of a neoliberal regime of accumulation, in which the ideologies of free markets and transnational production accompany practices of uneven development and the exploitation of natural and human resources. In this context, the U. S./Mexico border, and especially the San Diego/Tijuana area, has been a site of intensive political contradictions: rapid growth and industrialization, yet extensive immiseration and environmental destruction. However, the border also has been the site of an emergent group of community-based environmental justice movements which have worked to build trans-issue and trans-national coalitions in opposition to the abuses of corporate capital and unrepresentative government in the region. Through extended interviews with several environmental justice organizers, this study explores the possibilities and limitations of their coalitional endeavors, as well as their eco-populist and radically democratic vision of globalization from below.