Globalizing Social Violence: Race, Gender, and the Spatial Politics of Crisis

Abstract

Globalization has been both heralded and decried, celebrated and debated. The critical discussion is often about the dynamics of global capital mobility and the power of transnational corporations, with the focus usually on capitaldriven changes in global cultures or on the plight of labor in international wage competition. In contrast, the argument I present here looks away from corporations and technologies and points to globalization as referring to certain political strategies to resolve the crisis of the capitalist state. I stress two organizing dimensions of this strategy: the process of globalization includes a set of spatial rearrangements, and, second, space is reconfigured through race and gender formation. My contention is that, far from signaling a dimunition of boundaries, globalization more often than not reinforces and fortifies geo-political and racial borders. I pursue this argument by bringing together two distanced but strongly connected spaces in North America: the inner city and the borderlands. By exploring the formation of these spaces in the era of global capital, the connections between them will demonstrate my thesis that undergirding globalization is a spatial strategy that relies on the interfacing of race and gender processes. The focus here is on those people and communities on whose backs the global political economy is built. From this perspective, then, urban (re-)development and the politics of global capital on the international frontier between Mexico and

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