Trabajadores fronterizos para el flujo mercantil global entre México y Centroamérica

Abstract

In this study, I analyze the everyday life and labor experiences of local people at the border between Tecún-Umán (Guatemala) and Ciudad Hidalgo (Mexico). Through this, I describe how they, through their services and commercial networks, transform their cities a mercantile node of global scale between North and Central America, and how they reproduce their local mobility mechanisms. The mercantile dynamism and agglutination of global distribution networks are intercepted in these small cities. However, this is not because of modern communication technologies and multimodal transportation, which are necessary for global capital circulation, but due to the combination of “formal” and “informal” economic mechanisms. This combination is located at specific places and contributes to the extraction of local and migrant workers. The worker´s narratives and ethnographic data shed light on the close relationship between social inequality in the local population and prosperous global-scale mercantile activities.

Keywords

• Global commerce
• border integration
• Mexico-Guatemalan border
• (in)formal economy