Anxieties of Empire: Class, Race, Nation, and the Roots of the Anti-Neoliberal Globalization Movement in the U.S. and Mexico, 1987-2003 By Eric D. Larson B.A. University of Minnesota, 1999 M.A. University of Colorado, 2002 M.A. Brown University, 2004 Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Program of American Civilization at Brown University Providence, Rhode Island May 2011 © Copyright 2011 by Eric Larson This dissertation by Eric D. Larson is accepted in its present form by the Department of American Civilization as satisfying the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Date____________ ________________________________________ Evelyn Hu-Dehart, Advisor Recommended to the Graduate Council Date____________ ________________________________________ Paul Buhle, Reader Date____________ ________________________________________ B. Anthony Bogues, Reader Approved by the Graduate Council Date____________ ________________________________________ Peter M. Weber, Dean of the Graduate School iii CURRICULUM VITAE Eric Larson was born in Bismarck, North Dakota, on April 9, 1977. He graduated from the University of Minnesota with his B.A., and received master’s degrees in history (University of Colorado) and American Civilization (Brown University). While at Brown, Eric taught two undergraduate seminars: “After the ‘60s: Social Movements and Empire” and “Nation, Race, and Class in U.S. Empire, 1898-present.” In 2009 he was awarded the Brown-Wheaton Faculty Fellowship, which gave him the opportunity to teach “After the ‘60s: Social Movements in the Americas” for the Wheaton (MA) College Department of History. He is currently a Lecturer in History and Literature at Harvard University. iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS An innumerable number of people have helped make this project happen, and this brief effort to acknowledge them won’t capture the warmth and friendship of the many who helped me along the way. First, I’d like to recognize Eric Rekeda, Scott Miller, and the staff at the University of Colorado History Department, all of whom helped me recognize the importance of the study of labor, and then helped me gain my own footing in that field and as an aspiring scholar. The funding and related support from the history departments at the University of Colorado and Wheaton College, the Brown University Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, and the Historical Society of Southern California/Haynes Foundation helped make this research happen. At Brown University and in the New England area, I’d like to thank the academic scholars, intellectuals, and activists who helped me understand the academic world, and/or oriented me to what matters and why. In this list I’d like to specifically mention Pedro Malave, Seth Leibson, Amarilis Rodriguez, Roxana Rivera, and all the workers of SEIU 615. Some of those in this group merit special attention for their reading of early dissertation-related material or providing commentary and support: To Joe Clark, Mireya Loza, Margaret Stevens, Stephanie Larrieux, Derek Seidman, Heather Lee, v Gabriel Mendes, Morgan Grefe, Paja Faudree, Jim Campbell, Scott Malloy, Matt Garcia, Jean Wood, Carole Costello, Rosanne Neri, Andrea Casavant, Patricia Balsofiore, Kirk Branch, and Richard Snyder, Thank you. Susanne Wiedemann, José Itzigsohn, and Rhacel Parreñas deserve special thanks for their crucial and timely commentary or encouragement. I’d also like to acknowledge the importance of the scholars who made special efforts to challenge my thinking or offer special guidance: Josefina Saldaña, Phil Rosen, Patrick Heller, Julie Greene, Camille Guerin-Gonzales, and Kathryn Tomasek. Others who are friends, co-workers, intellectuals, and activists helped me with the dissertation in ways beyond what they may realize, but I won’t forget: Alicia Pantoja, Gabriela Sanchez-Soto, Sarah Adler-Milstein, Camilo Viveiros, Ani Mukherji, Gladys Gould, Rachel Miller, Sarah Wald, Maria Hwang, Peter Susag, Michael Siegel, Yvette Koch, the dinner cooperative, and all of 106 Chapin. Several members of the above list passed away long before their time. Rest in peace, Dan Daley, Sali Grace Eiler, Geovany Sian, and Tam Tran. This project would have been impossible without the support of several people and organizations. First, my dissertation committee – Evelyn Hu-Dehart, Anthony Bogues, and Paul Buhle. They steered me through the extended research stages of this project despite their busy schedules or even retirement. Evelyn has been with me from the beginning, and her support in the writing stage – with office space to work, editing, letter-writing, teaching opportunities, and patience – was particularly critical. Thank you, Evelyn. vi The Jobs with Justice network and other union activists have been abundantly generous in supporting this project. Former or current national staff like Laura McSpedon, Ricardo Valadez, and Allison Fletcher-Acosta always went far beyond what I asked of them. Sarita Gupta, the national director, has been remarkably supportive. Steve Early and Bill Fletcher have never failed to help, and I thank Joe Uehlein and Rand Wilson in particular for their unsparing assistance. In Oaxaca, I’d like to thank the scholars Jorge Hernández-Díaz, Benjamin Maldonado Alvarado, Angeles Clemente, and Michael Higgins for their encouragement, thoughtfulness, and effort. Thanks to Alba Sederlin and funding from the Institute of Anarchist Studies for help translating drafts of this into Spanish. I can’t express enough my gratitude to all the people in Oaxaca who guided me through the process of researching and writing this. This project could never have happened without the support of the current and ex-members of the Popular Indigenous Council of Oaxaca – Ricardo Flores Magón. The extent of that support was something I couldn’t have imagined. The help of current organizers and leaders of CIPO- RFM, CODECI, OIDHO, UCIZONI, and CODEP was simply incredible. The support and friendship of the people of Plan de Zaragoza, Oaxaca – and, most importantly, Alfonso Perez – was unparalleled. Finally, I dedicate this thesis to my parents, Don and Joyce Larson, for their ongoing love and support. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction 1 Chapter 1. Labor, Class, and Nation: Jobs with Justice in the Early Years, 1987-1989 22 Chapter 2. The “Neoliberal Hurricane” and the Southern Mexican Roots of the Anti- Globalization Movement: The Popular Indigenous Council of Oaxaca - Ricardo Flores Magón in the 1990s 92 Chapter 3. American Anxieties and the ‘Battle of Seattle’: Jobs with Justice and Grassroots Anti-Globalization, 1992-1999 175 Chapter 4. Sovereignty under Fire: The Magonista Social Movement and a New Popular viii Indigenous Council of Oaxaca, 2000-2003 258 Conclusion 329 Bibliography 336 ix INTRODUCTION As the Cold War order collapsed and the “New World Order,” as U.S. president George H.W. Bush called it, emerged in the 1990s, few North Americans would have believed that in less than a decade, a wave of massive, direct-action protests would shake the cities of the Americas. The protestors’ mission: to monkey-wrench the gears of the globalized world order that Bush so favored. According to an emergent globalist ideology shared by many of the dominant political parties of the U.S. and Mexico in the 1990s, the economic globalization that characterized the Bush world order was an ambiguous force, an inevitable result, and an imminent condition. The peoples of the world, according to the multinational companies and market- liberalizing politicians, should understand it as modernization, and celebrate it as progress. For many of the globalists, globalization meant new circulations of ideas through the Internet, satellite networks, and global media.1 It meant new circulations of people through mass tourism and massive human migration. It meant new networks of goods through niche marketing, transnational trade, and Wal-Mart, with its 1 Josée Johnston and Gordon Laxer suggest that this ideology is best identified as “globalism.” See “Solidarity in the Age of Globalization: Lessons from the Anti-MAI and the Zapatista Struggles,” Theory and Society, 32:1 (February 2003): 39-91. 1 multinational commodity chains and global reach. Globalization meant the end of “closed,” union- and state-regulated economies and new, “open” markets. Indeed, whole new markets emerged, as the Berlin Wall fell and the Iron Curtain dissolved, and state-regulated or communally held goods like water, land, and seed were now on the auction block to private bidders. Unencumbered by inefficiencies – like unions – which increased the cost of goods, the entrepreneurs who could most nimbly position and re- position their assets – like their workers – in the global flows would take the biggest prize. These and related stories about globalization shaped government, economics, and culture in the Americas in the last few decades of the twentieth century, and the way they stressed the newness and the inevitability of the changes at hand enabled them to position whole populations as simply ill-equipped for the “creative destruction” of the “free market” era. In the U.S. and Mexico, no one moment signaled the onset of globalization better than the day leaders of the two countries and Canada signed the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1992. The treaty dissolved decades of state protections of the respective national economies, and converted the region into the world’s largest “free trade area.” In the U.S. and Mexico, the dominant political groups of the day – the Ivy League-educated liberalizers and technocrats in Mexico and the free trade, business-friendly globalizers in both major political parties in the U.S. – refuted their working-class opponents’ claims by condemning them to the rust pile of the Teflon-lubricated global economy. They weren’t simply wrong, the globalizers claimed, 2 but their positions, jobs, and lifestyles were remnants of an industrial age destined to disappear. In the U.S., unions and their leaders were called “Neanderthals,” as if from another epoch altogether, and the unionized working class was portrayed as “too old and hidebound to use a computer,” as one union leader wrote.