Research Catalog

Title

Subsidizing capitalism : brickmakers on the U.S.-Mexican border / Tamar Diana Wilson.

Author

Wilson, Tamar Diana, 1943-

Publication

Albany : State University of New York Press, c2005.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Holdings

Details

Description

xiv, 213 p. : ill.; 24 cm.

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."--Jacket.

Series Statement

SUNY series in the anthropology of work

Uniform Title

• Project Muse UPCC books
• SUNY series in the anthropology of work.

Subject

• Brickmakers > Mexicali > Social conditions
• Brickmakers > Mexicali

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references (p. 185-204) and index.

Processing Action (note)

• committed to retain

Contents

"The ladrillera" -- Approaches to the "informal sector" and to the brickmakers of Mexicali -- Petty commodity producers in the informal sector : the peasant adaptation of the brickmakers in Colonia Popular, Mexicali -- "The old brickmaker, 1993" -- "Invisible" women and children workers on the Mexicali brickyards -- "Mexicali brickmaker's wife" -- Gender considerations among the brickmakers -- "Brickmaker's daughter, brickmaker's wife" -- The heterogeneity of subsidies to the capitalist system : the case of the garbage pickers -- Are the brickmakers counterhegemonic? -- "Don Rafael's desire".

ISBN

• 0791465071 (alk. paper)
• 9780791465073

LCCN

^^2004018104

Owning Institutions

Harvard Library