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Description
The economic history of Mexico has been accompanied by a parallel history of consequential biological events that have vastly enabled the intentions of colonization and development. These events created conditions that ruined local economies, instituted wage dependency and class disparity, destroyed the environment and forced of millions of indigenous people into migration. Extreme economic asymmetry remains the status quo in Mexico, at the precise moment in history when the exponential effects of climate change and economic globalization stand to recreate this history on a vast scale. Precedent would suggest that culturally and economically, the United States is positioned more to exploit this perpetual disaster than we are to mitigate or even acknowledge it. This thesis examines these parallel histories and argues that over time the disparity created by these events evolved from unintended consequence to engineered goal. Policies and language concerning trade, immigration, security and the environment have evolved to re-enforce and naturalize that asymmetry. I argue that laws and their contextualization constitute an authorized ideological re-telling of our national stories that criminalizes dependency and punishes dissent, and in so doing validates necessary imposition as beneficence or protection. Militarization of US immigration and border policies then serve not to mitigate against trafficking in drugs and laborers, but rather to capitalize on their illegality so as to perpetuate a message that re-validates the imposition. Finally, I make the case for small-scale agriculture, education, food and water sovereignty and protection of natural systems in Mexico as a tactical approach to mitigating the effects of climate change via basic poverty reduction and social re-integration. The United States and Mexico could be supporting immigration, labor and border policies that help migrants to "stay home." This concept serves as well to contradict the ideological framing of labor migration as criminal and its production as beneficent. This contradiction then offers Americans an opportunity to re-claim our own story of freedom and democracy and so negate the popular perception that climate change is a political hoax and migrants are terrorists.
