The fayuca hormiga of used clothing and the fabric of the Mexico-U.S. border
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis investigates the border's economic underworld. It details the lives of ordinary people who live along state borders. With particular reference to the border between Mexico and the United States, this thesis explores how cross-border small-scale traders experience the nation and the state in their everyday economic activities at international borders. Along the Mexico-U.S. border, there is a lively trade of American second-hand clothing introduced clandestinely into Mexico where its import for resale is prohibited. Second-hand clothing is retailed in stores and warehouses along the American side of the border and brought into Mexico through an impressive system of smuggling from the United States called fayuca hormiga . This thesis is an ethnographic study of used clothing fayuqueros or "ant traders" in the Mexico/United States borderland whose livelihoods depend upon crossing state lines and exploiting differential economic opportunities on either side. This anthropological research investigates how small-scale cross-border traders involved in the illicit flow of second-hand clothing across the Mexico-United States border interact with the structures of state power. By documenting the history, trading culture, and contemporary refashioning of secondhand clothing in the Mexico-United States borderlands, this thesis sheds light on the various processes of appropriation, transformation and redefinition that second-hand clothes undergo by crossing borders. This thesis shows how the border plays a part in the economic processes through which the value of used clothing emerges and how the unruly flow of these material goods shapes the social "fabric" of the Mexico-U.S. borderlands.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".