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Driving the State: Families and Public Policy in Central MexicoPublisher:Ithica, NY: Cornell University Press
Copyright:2003
Pages:x + 219
Review:
'Driving the State is, in part, an ethnography of travel. Opening with Michel de Certeau—“Every story is a travel story”—Dolores M. Byrnes focuses her work on physical movement—migration and her own travels during fieldwork—and, more centrally, on movement and change within the state. For Byrnes, “travel” also implies writing against rigid dichotomies, including macro–micro, individual–collective, public–private, and theory–practice, and these are among the many themes she explicates throughout her well-written book.
Byrnes follows representatives of Mi Comunidad (My Community)—a government program in the Mexican state of Guanajuato created by then-governor, and later president, Vicente Fox Quesada—as they implement a state initiative directed at families impacted by migration to the United States. Mi Comunidad invests private and state funds to create jobs in textile maquilas. Although the original mission of the program was to reduce migration through economic development, Mi Comunidad has instead become “primarily a source of training and income for the women left behind” (p. 2), underscoring the often-overlooked gendered character of transnational capital. This is also an ethnography of “people engaged in the process of being the state,” (p. ix) in which Byrnes provides “a glimpse into … the disorderly, charming, self-contradictory, personal, mobile, and gendered nature of ‘the state’ ” (p. 2). In the first section of the book, Byrnes focuses on interactions among key actors associated with the program, including state officials, managers of participating maquilas, and representatives from businesses such as Wal-Mart that contract with the clothing manufacturers. In part 2, Byrnes discusses the government office that houses the Mi Comunidad program and reviews literatures related to migration and the textile maquila industry. Here, she also presents state and public discourses around transnational movement and maintains that—especially through family imagery—“the state government intervened in the local community and in the family lives of its participants as if it were another family member” (p. 101). The state’s reach into family life is certain, yet, because Byrnes did not conduct fieldwork among Mexican families, her argument on this point remains primarily metaphorical. The theoretical focus and contributions of Driving the State develop as it progresses. In part 2, Byrnes’s insights about gender begin to emerge and in part 3, Byrnes presents rich data about gendered state discourses. In the chapter titled “Las Muchachas” (“the girls,” as they are referred to by program staff and managers), Byrnes posits the “intertwined nature of family, government, home, and work” (p. 113) and demonstrates how the program’s ideologies and practices often discipline and dismiss las muchachas. In the final chapter, Byrnes critiques theories of the state, namely, “macro-level, highly quantified, game-theory-based modeling” (p. 178), and argues for the potential contributions of ethnography to political theory. Throughout the book, Byrnes provides a nuanced account of the actions of state agents and, to a lesser degree, maquila owners and managers, but relatively little about the individuals and families this program targets. Byrnes acknowledges that this was not the primary focus of her project, but the study would have been considerably strengthened by fieldwork focused on the state–family nexus she so keenly identifies. For example, ethnographic study of the maquila employees and their families would have developed Byrnes’s argument that the “needle of the state pierces the fabric of a family” (p. 181) and would have demonstrated more clearly how “the state can be gendered and gendering” (p. 7). A closer look at the everyday lives of female workers and their families, and at how transnational migrants interact with state agents and programs, would have complemented and enriched Byrnes’s sophisticated analysis of the inner workings of the state. In Driving the State, Byrnes engages multiple literatures within anthropology and other disciplines, including work about Mexican politics, the state, the maquila industry, and gender. By incorporating feedback she offered to the program’s directors, Byrnes also bridges the theory–practice divide with success. One of Byrnes’s primary contributions is uncovering the contradictory character of Mi Comunidad, showing how a program intended to foster economic development and independence in Mexico has resulted in the explicit insertion of Mexican nationals—especially females—into the global economy. The case Byrnes presents in Driving the State—in which men migrate to work in the service sector in the United States while women stay in Mexico and are employed in textile maquilas—emphasizes that, in the context of migration, no one escapes the workings of state power and transnational capital. “Travel,” as Byrnes demonstrates in her work, constitutes the experience of those who migrate, but also, those who do not, underscoring how, in transnational and translocal communities, every story is indeed a travel story. [appendices, notes, bibliography, index.]
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