Introduction to “Globalization and Its Discontents: Exposing the Underside”

Introduction to "Globalization and Its Discontents: Exposing the Underside" Evelyn Hu-Dehart (bio) When I wrote this essay some twenty years ago, I was moved by a series of massive demonstrations in the Americas against the globalization being championed by the government and elites of the United States and Europe, the so-called First or Developed World. As a scholar of modern Latin America and the Caribbean, with special attention to Mexico, the US- Mexico borderlands, and to migration al norte from Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean, I was also teaching about the enactment of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in January 1994 to remove trade barriers and regulations among Canada, the United States, and Mexico, which immediately led to the declaration of resistance by the Mayan Indians of Chiapas in southern Mexico. With poignant hindsight and prescient foresight, they gestured to the great peasant leader of the Mexican Revolution in 1911 by naming themselves "Zapatistas." It quickly dawned on me that this late capitalist globalization against the backdrop of neoliberalism was built to a large extent on the labor of Third World women, Asian and Latin American, whether in their home countries in the Global South or as immigrants (free or undocumented) to the Global North. This realization compelled me to expose the underside of this globalization by pointing out concrete examples of exploitation and abuses, as well as break down the structural logic of the transnational system of globalization which had served to exacerbate social and economic inequality within the core, and between core and periphery, North and South. The intersectionality of race, class, gender and nationality, racism and white supremacy, colonialism and decolonization, state violence and interpersonal violence, were implicit in my analysis, but today, I would make them much more explicit as theoretical frameworks and interventions. I did not intend my essay to contribute to a discussion on the "Asian American Abolition Feminisms" theme of this special volume, because I was not aware of the concept and term, or maybe it was not yet invented. But [End Page 145] I am honored to find that it resonated with the general and special editors of Frontiers, who find it timely and relevant to the theme. Most of all, I am pleased to be selected to accompany the essays and creative expressions of many young Asian American and feminist scholars and activists, who, I imagine, would tend to look at the system from more grassroots, bottom-up, and person-focused perspectives, and whose insights are derived from multiple sources and experiences, many I was ignorant of or could not have imagined, or had not been named twenty years ago. I know I have much to learn from them. [End Page 146] Globalization and Its Discontents: Exposing the Underside In recent years, we have been treated to a sense of déjá vu of the sixties. Great numbers of mostly young people, men and women, mostly white, middle-class college students, have descended on major American cities such as Seattle and Washington, D.C., as well as their own campuses to protest a new and virulent form of injustice.1 Only this time, instead of protesting against war or racism, they raised their voices against something called "globalization." Specifically, they named the related evils to be exposed and reformed, if not destroyed, as the World Trade Organization (WTO), which seeks to remove all barriers to world trade, such as regulations and tariffs erected by nation-states; the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI), which prohibits signatory nations from impeding the flow of money and production facilities across their borders; the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank, both created by the advanced economies to help poor countries "modernize" with loans and development projects; and sweatshops, the unregulated assembly plants. All of these are linked to globalization.2 The concern boiling over into outright objection to globalization has been brewing for some time. But if we have to pinpoint a specific event, we can be-gin with the Zapatista uprising in Mexico in January 1994.3 On that fateful day, the Indian peasants of Chiapas, Mexico's southernmost province, rose up in rebellion, timing the protest to coincide...

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