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In the Fields of Free Trade
Gender and Plurinational En/Countering
ofNeoliberal Agricultural Policies
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Ann Kingsolver
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In the summer of 1993, when the North American Free Trade Agree
ment (NAFTA) was being negotiated and Mexico's communal ejido lands
had just been pdvatized through constitutional changes pushed hy the
Salinas administration, I Diana stood in a row of cucumbers, looking down
the hill at the trickle of dver the drought had left running through her
community in rural Morelos. Her two youngest children were casting a net
in the river, trying to catch some fish. Her two eldest children were in
Canada doing contract work on a fann where they had gone for several sea
sons. She and her hushand, Leonardo, now held a deed for their ejido plot;
the national administration had promoted this aspect of pdvatization so
that land held previously by communities for agdcultuml use could be sold
to corporations (for example, for the construction offactories). Leonardo
said that all that had come of this was the ahility of the government to tax
those holding property deeds for ejido lands, so the household's taxes had
increased fiftyfold in the past four years. They, like many other families,
.<'
~..6:' ...... had not paid their taxes because they did not have enough money. The
loans they and their neighbors had taken out to buy seeds and other agri
cultural necessities had 20 percent interest rates, compounded monthly.
On the day that I talked with them,2 Diana and Leonardo were trying to
decide whether to harvest a crop of cucumbers or leave them in the field.
235
ANN KINGSOLVER
FIELDS OF FREE TRADE
They had to go a long way to sell the crop, and hiring a truck and workers subsidized farming in the United States taking an unfair share of their agri
to help pick the cucumbers would cost more than the cucumbers would cultural market.
bring in the market. Leaving them in the field made sense economically, Diana and Dot's analyses of individual and community economic mar
but like so many other things under a neoliberal policy regime, it did not ginalization through agricultural free trade policies resonated witl1 the
make sense socially. interpretations of globalization that women and men shared with me. in
That same summer, in eastern Kentucky in the United States, Dot was interviews on upcountry tea estates in Sri Lanka in 2004. Saraswati and her
also balancing the challenges of being a small-scale falmer, a mother, and mother had lived and worked on a tea estate that had been nationalized
a partner while making decisions on her tobacco and vegetable fannjointly and then reprivatized. In this gender-segregated workforce in 2004, women
with her husband, Tommy. Dot was working with a national organization, tea workers earned 120 Sri Lankan rupees (approximately US$1.15) per
"Farm Aid" (championed by singer Willie Nelson), and local agricultural day for plucking tea leaves to be processed and sold in bulk to corporations
organizations to lobby the US government against NAFTA. She said: such as Lipton on the international market. Saraswati, sitting with her
It's a national issue, but it's a local issue that we've taken to infant, friends, and family members in the "lines" (company housing on
heart. ... Farmers here-I don't want to say that they're not pay the estate), told me that I should share her analysis of globalization wi th
those who drank the tea that she and the other workers harvested: "If one
ing attention to what's happening because they are aware of it,
but it's that they're so caught up in survival, getting their crop in, person speaks, nobody is concerned about it. If everybody says [some
getting on to the next step, that they really don't have time to be thing], that is the real satisfaction-the communal voice. It makes a differ
active .... Local involvement was not what it should have been, ence. This kind of issue should be taken to the international level, and
considering [tobacco] is the primary income in this whole com people at the international level should be told that we are living in such a
situation. "3
munity, but I don't think the total community has a clue what it
could do to the economy here .... Our organization [Community In this chapter, I draw on long-term, multisited ethnographic research
I have been conducting for 20 years on local intelpretations of globaliza
Farm Alliance] started at the grassroots leveL .. We help each
tion and plurinational organizing to (a) consider the strategic use of dis
other from county to county. We, as farmers, in our organization
tinctions-for example, North-South, racialization, ethnicity, gender, class,
basically are against everything that NAFTA stands for at this
point. caste, and age-in neoliberal capitalist logic and practice that isolates com
munities of agricultural workers and promotes their further marginaliza
Dot went on to tell me that she, Tommy, and other farmers were fonn tion from decision making and the economic gains related to "free" market
ing a collective to work out problems-similar to those experienced by policies; and (b) discuss some analyses and strategies of those working to
Diana and Leonardo--with marketing vegetables so that they could coor counter that isolation and strategic alterity.
dinate who would grow cucumbers and who would grow tomatoes and how I am a Euro-American cultural anthropologist from rural Kentucky.
they would get them to market. She had told someone at the land-grant The methods I have used in studying interpretations of globalization have
university to stop doing research for ConAgra and start doing research to included semistructured interviewing and discourse, archival, and spatial
help small farmers. In Morelos. Diana and Leonardo had also been work analyses. Participatory research has shaped my approach to ethnography.
ing with their community. They had helped build a dam and a bridge to Some of my interviewing on NAFTA, for example, has been done collah
address collectively their problems with access to water. Their local organi oratively with other activist researchers, from Mexico, and all of us
zation was increasingly working together as the state became more a source including those interviewed-have used the infonnation from tllOse con
of tax bills than 9flarming assistance. versations in our writing.
Dot worried about NAFTA becaus~ she predicted that competitive Because, in this volume, we focus on those most economically margin
tobacco produced' in Argentina would inter the North American market alized by policies related to all the processes and actions tl1at get glossed as
through Mexico. Farmers like Diana, protesting at World Trade Organi "globalization," we shoulO be mindful ofJune Nash's (1997b:12) point that
zation (WTO) meetings 10 years later in Cancun, Mexico, worried about ethnographic listening needs to be most attuned to those who have tl1e
23 6 237
ANN KINGSOLVER
:FIELDS OF .FREE TRADE
keenest analytical insights regarding global capitalism: those who have South Korea, Turkey, Argentina, and the United States) to create a single
experienced and resisted internal and transnational colonial domination. product, a filtered cigarette, representing the labor of people in multiple
Diana, and women like Saraswati who live even closer to the economic countries. Studies of this process can be compared to other analyses of the
edge under neoliberal regimes,4 are frequently the authors of theories and "global factory." As Diana and Leonardo's children work on a farm in
organizational strategies that challenge the way workforces are imagined in Canada because their family needs to pay the taxes levied through neolib
debates and documents (like NAFTA) related to neoliberal free trade. eral policies in Morelos, Mexico,5 they may be drinking tea produced
Hence, a research question I see as central to the project of this volume was through the efforts of Saraswati and her coworkers on the tea estate in Sri
asked in the Second Encounter for Humanity Against Neoliberalism (held Lanka. I have written elsewhere (Kingsolver 1991, 2007) about the ways in
in Spain in 1997 as a follow-up to the First Encounter for Humanity Against which ideological constructions of agricultural labor as independent "fam
Neoliberalism, organized by the Zapatistas in Chiapas): "What are the lived farming"-as for Diana and Dot, though not Saraswati-obviate labor
experiences of the contemporary neoliberal economic strategies--the face organizing among those sharing the lowest-paid and highest-risk work in
less rule of markets, wars, cuts in social spending on essential services, pol multinational agricultural industries. It is Saraswati, in the opening exam
lution and devastation of our natural commons?" (De Angelis 1998: 138). ple, who calls most directly for global organizing from her perspective as a
One of our tasks as ethnographers is to document those "lived experi member of a transgenerational captive labor force. Free trade policies are
ences" of neoliberal restructuring associated with economic "globaliza encountered and countered directly by agricultural workers around the
tion." Another is to challenge the facelessness of those most central to the world, then, and their labor is often organized in gendered workforces.
imposition of those neoliberal capitalist policies. In the United States, The word farmer, itself, may be gendered as male to some readers. As
Mexico, and Sri Lanka, I interviewed men and women who were members many have wIltten, such gendered notions of agricultural workforces have
ofneoliberal governments and whose occupations situated them in various led to disastrous international economic-development policies based on
ways relative to the "free" market, including as authors of free market poli erroneous assumptions regarding gender-assigned tasks related to plant
cies. I also interviewed those most marginalized by neoliberal economic ing, harvesting, and marketing. Although I have not separated out gender
policies. Along the way, I encountered women and men of various class as a focus separate from its connection to racialization and other strategic
positions organizing against and beyond neoliberal free trade policies. I justifications for inequitable policies in my research on globalization, gen
consider the insights of Patricia Hill Collins (2000) and others vital in rec der has sometimes come up specifically in interviews. A retired plantation
ognizing the ways in which class, caste, gender, and racialization, for exam manager in Sri Lanka, for example, volunteered his view that Sri Lankan
ple, intersect and inform alliances and conflict~ of interest within national men should be ashamed that women do the hard work of bringing inter
contexts of the globalized North and South, and not simply between them. national capital to Sri Lanka through their low-wage work in the garment
In this chapter, I include narratives by those most economically marginal sector, in the transnational domestic labor circuit, and on tea estates (Sri
ized by capitalist globalization and by those working collaboratively across Lanka's three main sources of foreign exchange capital). "It's sad," he told
what might be seen to be different markers of identity or class interests, to me. "We live on the backs of our women." Women and men's experiences
design and implement specific alternatives to neoliberal free trade policies. of "free market" capitalism need to be discussed relation ally, not in isola
I discuss the organizing strategies articulated by Bertha Lujan, a labor tion (which is why the concern of this volume is gendered globalizations),
lawyer who has participated in transnational collaborative organizing and analyses of gendered marginalization may, of course, come from men,
against neoliberal free trade policies through the umbrella organization as in this manager's assessment, as well as from women.
Red Mexicana de Accion frente al Libre Comercio (RMALC, or Mexican In the rest of this chapter, I address the two purposes of my argument
Action Network.a~inst Free Trade). mentioned earlier. First, I examine how the neoliberal capitalist strategy of
V:
I focus in this ch~pter on the agridj'ltural sector, which is also a multi isolating workforces with at least some shared experiences of economic
national industry.' Dot and Tommy well: producing burley tobacco, which and cultural marginalization benefits most those central to the implemen
was sold in a warehouse to a buyer from a transnational tobacco corpora tation of free trade policies. The first section discusses what happened at
tion that blends tobacco leaves produced in many nations (including the WTO meetings in Cancun, Mexico, in relation to the links and wedges
23 8 239
ANN KINGSOLVER FIELDS OF FREE TRADE
between Dot and Diana as farmers in the globalized North and South, is positioned within a much larger project of action and analysis of free
respectively. The next section further problematizes the North-South dis trade policies affecting not only those working in the fields but also every
tinction by examining the words of Saraswati and other workers on the tea one connected through the neoliberal project.
estates, along with the words of the former president of Sri Lanka Chandrika Barndt (1999) has argued, in a discussion of women and NAFfA, that
Kumaratunga, and turns toward strategies of South-South organizing to a focus on the agricultural sector and women's roles as pickers, packagers,
contest historical North-South relations of infrastructural domination of and consumers gives us a way to understand viscerally the globalized con
financial and transport aspects of global production, distribution, and con nections among those of us situated in many different countries and con
sumption networks. The final section closely examines the strategies of texts. There can be very different ways of publicizing and addressing those
Bertha Lujan and others working to craft and implement alternatives to connections, and discussions of globalization (and transnational collab
neoliberal free trade policies in Latin America. I argue that lessons learned oration and organizing) need to address communications. Of the three
from gender-focused, transnational organizing efforts about power rela women I introduced in the opening part of this chapter, for example, Dot
tions, voice, agency, and the intersections of not only racialized, classed, had access to the Internet and eventually began marketing organic tobacco
nation-based, and gendered aspects of identity but also those of shared and to Europeans via that medium; Diana and Sara~wati did not have access to
distinct concerns have shaped broad-based, transnational "umbrella" orga the Internet. However, Diana learned about policy changes and resource
nizing strategies to contest neoliberal policies. availability through her agricultural collective-'.mmething Dot was just st:'lrt
This ethnographic project is informed by the analyses of Diana, ing to form. Saraswati said that her union, the Ceylon Workers' Congress
Saraswati, Dot, and Bertha as much as by those of the other theorists I cite (CWe), did not represent her interests because the leadership was upper
here. Barry Carr (1996:210), in his chapter "Crossing Borders: Labor caste and shared resources and information within closed family networks.
Internationalism in the Era of NAFfA,» comments that although neoliber She felt that the working conditions of women on the tea estates were not
alism has opened an unprecedented opportunity for grassroots activists to covered thoroughly or accurately enough in local, national, or interna
organize across borders and make public statements on transnational pol tional media.
icy, the trends in international organizing have been dominated by those Grassi (1990) has argued the need for South-South participatory and
in the North "helping" those in the South rather than recognizing exper interactive communications networks to challenge Northern domination
tise in the South. At the 5th International Interdisciplinary Congress of of global media. Internet sites have helped with transnational communica
Women in San Jose, Costa Rica, in 1993, I heard Digna Ribera, speaking as tion and activism, including challenges to national governments. (For
an indigena organizer from Costa Rica, say that she was rarely invited to example, the Ejercito Zapatista para Liberacion Nacional [EZLN] devel
such congresses and that indigena voices should be included more often oped both on-line and armed strategies to challenge the Mexican govern
in international discussions of inequality and the environment (rather ment on the implementation of NAFfA in 1994.) Organizations like the
than being, as she said, kept in parks) because of the knowledge they bring R"1ALC have websites that-among other pmposes-give other organiza
to what amounts to f!lIeryone's problems: poverty, inequality, and what's hap tions models for writing alternative policy statements when it is time to
pening to the world's resources. In her words, "We don't have water, we move beyond critiquing state policy to proposing specific alternatives. It
don't have rights to wood, but we have the right to pay taxes....We should bears noting, however, that accessibility to the Internet continues to vary
have more of an administrative role." In 2005, Costa Rican congresswoman according to class politics, infrastructural, and organizational considera
Epsy Campbell, the first black woman elected to Costa Rica's legislature, tions. The EZLN, for that reason, used multiple types of media and initi
was working froIl}, an administrative role in Costa Rica and in alliances ated a public polling process to democratize its shift from a military to a
across Latin ~ica to see that the voices of Latin Americans of Mrican
political organization in Mexico (Kingsolver 2001:176-179). Clark and
< heritage-who repHlsertt the lowest l~tels of income and political repre
Themudo discuss some of the specific inequities within Internet-based anti
sentation (Campbell, personal comnufhication, 2005)-are heard more in
globalization organizing that they have heard voiced:
national and international contexts (for example, at the current negotia
Unequal familiarity with new technology and access to resources
tions of the Central American Free Trade Agreement). This chapter, then,
leads to a North-South tension. Many Southern activists see
24 0 241
ANN KINGSOLVER FIELDS OF FREE TRADE
events such as Seattle and global social movements as very (RMALC), with which I did ethnographic research in 1995 and which I
Northern (or US) dominated (O'Brien et al. 2001), focusing pri have followed since.
marily on issues of Northern concern (for example, the protec Ha:Joon Chang (2002) points out that the United States and European
tion of the US environment, US jobs and US markets; US nations became developed nations, in part, because of tariffs and protec
citizens wanting to have clear consciences about child labour; tionism. It is ironic that these nations now lobby hardest for the liberaliza
and reducing pressures for illegal migration). They are angry tion of other economies into a global free-trading market. With the
that issues of concern to the South (such as the way in which implementation of trade liberalization policies, growth in developing coun
agriculture is dealt with in wro talks) are not addressed. And tries has declined (Chang 2002). The United States and the European
events that are largely Southern organized (such as the citizens Union (EU) do not fornl a neat bloc within the wro's discussions of agri
actions at the UN Conference on Trade aDd DeveIopment culture, nor do the G-22 nations, which represent collectively "two thirds of
UNCTAD-meetings in Thailand in 2000 and the first World the world's farmers and 60% of world agricultural output on five conti
Social Forum-WSF) attract very few Northerners. [Clark and nents" (Johnson et al. 2003:42). Generally, the breakdown of the Cancun
Themudo 2003:121-122] talks can be attributed to the unacceptable logic of nations (including the
United States) wanting to perpetuate their own protectionist policies and
North and South, as rubrics, cannot be too far reified because those
simultaneously pushing for the opening of markets for their agl1cultural
governing the nations of the North and South have often been educated
surpluses in G-22 and other nations. South Korean farmer Lee Kyoung-hae
together and the movement of people between the physical North and
committed suicide at the barricades separating the negotiators from the
South challenges the notion of distinct publics in many ways. But we can
protestors at the wro meetings in Cancun (Elliott and Denny 2003:21) to
think of nations as distinct policy spheres through which (at least some)
demonstrate that removing the wro from setting agricultural policy
people move. Transnational networks, or meshworks (Harcourt 2003), are
within nations was a life-and-death issue. His delegation wasjoined by thou
"created out of the interlocking of heterogeneous and diverse elements
sands of Mexican women and men who were feeling the dire effects of
brought together because of complementarity or common experiences"
NAFTA and other neoliberal free trade policies in their fields and homes. 6
(2003:78) like the women's movement. One of the challenges of these
What has happened to faImers like Diana and Leonardo in Mexico since
meshworks is to discern the meaning of policy spheres, how to engage
the passage ofNAFTA? The costs of agricultural production, along with food
them, and, when necessary, how to change them, especially because the
in the market, have gone up, but the prices received for crops have gone
neoliberal shift in many states has represented a shift away from democra
down. For those and other reasons, more than 100,000 farmers in Mexico
tic involvement in policy making. The following sections take up the nar
marched to the Zocalo in Mexico City to protest agricultural policy
rative thread of those encountering and countering neoliberal economic
(Hemispheric Social Alliance 2003:24). NAFfA is not the only transnational
policies associated with globalization.
neoliberal policy alfecting Mexican agriculture; Mexico also has trade agree
ments with the European Union and with nations in Central America. How
BRINGING THE FOCUS TO THE FIELDS: WHAT ever, decades of neoliberal policies in Mexico have not countered poverty, as
HAPPENED AT THE WTO MEETINGS IN CANCUN? had been promised. Agricultural trade liberalization in Mexico has increased
In analyses of the breakdown of wro talks in Cancun, Mexico, in both domestic poverty rates and food p11ces (Food First 2003a).7
September 2003, one current of discourse points to farmers of the North The increasing poverty in rural areas of Mexico is mirrored in the
benefiting from state subsidies at the expense of farmers of the South. United States, which calls into question the pitting of one set of small farm
Such a narratiY~:1hasks the experiences common to small-scale farmers in ers against another, as in the explanation that subsidies in the United States
the United States and Mexico, like D~t and Diana, despite their obvious benefit small farmers like Dot and Tommy but hurt small farmers in
differences in m.edi~n income. That/ommon experience has been one Mexico and other countries. US agricultural subsidies impoverish small
reason for organizing piurinationally against free trade policies in such scale farmers both in and outside the United States. Most of the agricul
alliances as the Red Mexicana de Accion frente al Libre Comercio tural subsidies are going to banks and corporations. The market share of
242 243
ANN KINGSOLVER
FIELDS OF FREE TRADE
grain has become much more concentrated in just a few corporations. We do not wish to be dictated to. We wish to be active partici
Cargill, ADM, and Zen Noh, for example, export 82 percent of US pants in the process of formulating policy. Therefore the World
produced com (Memarsadeghi and Patel 2003:3). Meanwhile, economic Trade Organisation and world trade agenda will have to be rene
conditions for most people in the United States have worsened. Since the gotiated. The principles and underlying positions on trade must
implementation of NAITA, approximately 700,000 jobs have been lost in definitely be the same for the developed and developing nations.
the United States (Food First 2003b), and they have not gone to Mexico, We do not comprehend how rich nations demand of us to
despite Ross Perot's predictions (Perot with Choate 1993). Following trade abandon to the whims of the global markets vulnerable sectors
liberalization in the US agricultural sector, Memarsadeghi and Patel of our society ... when they practice extensive protectionist poli
(2003) report that the number of family farmers has decreased, there has cies for these sectors in their countries.
been a whitening of the farm population, and malnutrition in the United We do not believe in the magic formulae that brandish brilliant
States has increased. Just as capitalist class interests are allied across statistics achieved by a privileged few while the majority of our
national boundaries, so, too, are the class interests of those most margin peoples languish in the ignominy of poverty.
alized culturally and economically by neoliberal restructuring. It is just that The developed and powerful nations will have to realise there
the capitalist class has better control of means of communication (literally are millions of humans waiting on the sidelines to share the
owning telephone companies and television stations now, after neoliberal fruits of development.
privatization) and is more closely networked (as in the example of neolib It is time for the rich and developed nations to give their tech
eral cabinet members in Mexico and the United States cooperating to pro nology, knowledge, and financial assistance not only with the
mote NAITA, having studied Milton Friedman's free market policies objective of securing contracts for their nationals, but also to
together in graduate school).
alleviate poverty.
What happened after representatives from Brazil, India, China, and
other nations refused to allow the representatives from the United States Her words resonated with those of many other national leaders challeng
and the EU to set what the former saw as a trade agenda with disastrous ing the wro, the IMF, the World Bank, and the handful of nations who
implications for farmers in the global South? Farmers like Diana and Dot, maintain elite control of those transnational institutions. In South and
and their coworkers, organized stronger "meshworks" across national con Central America, for example, several newly elected national leaders have
texts to understand the ways in which wro policies to lower trade barriers challenged the US-proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas (FfAA).8
have benefited large financial and agroindustrial corporations globally Because their own nations may be debtor nations these days, national lead
while seeming to pit small farmers against one another in a North-South ers of the global North cannot as easily hold debt over the heads of state in
price war. The lived effects of free trade are by no means even across the global South in their efforts to monopolize the trade agenda and ensure
commodity or geopolitical sectors; individuals have different organizing the inequitable distribution of the profits of «free" trade. Increasingly, even
strategies according to specific sectoral interests. This is taken up in the
as one-ta-one free trade agreements (for example, a proposed free trade
section on the RMALC and focused organizing efforts countering free
agreement between Sri Lanka and the United States) are negotiated as
trade policies.
alternatives to the wro process, there are active South-South trade agree
ments and trade areas intended to counter neoliberal infrastructural
inequities. Examples include the South Asian Association for Regional
SOUTH-SOUTH FREE TRADE: TWO WOMEN'S
Cooperation (SAARC) fornled in 1985 and the Association of Southeast
PERSPECTIVES FROM SRI LANKA
Asian Nations (ASEAN).
An articleiil!!TJte Island (an Engli~.h-Ianguage, daily Sri Lankan news
Ananya Mukhetjee Reed (1997) point~ out that regional cooperation
paper) on OctoberJ5, 2003, canied'pews of then president Chandrika
has been challenged by the need to compete as individual nations in the
Kumaratunga's spee~h at the World l:onomic Forum's East A~ia summit
global market, especially in textile production, but that collaboration has
in Singapore, after the breakdown of the wro talks in Cancun, Mexico.
been increasing. An interesting point of comparison, I think, between the
She said:
SAARC nations (India, Bhutan, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Pakistan, Bangladesh,
244
245
ANN KINGSOLVER
FIELDS OF FREE TRADE
and the Maldives) and the signatory nations to the North American Free I am arguing here that even as those participating in capitalist logic
Trade Agreement and the contemplated Free Trade Area of the Americas, is practice "strategic alterity," selectively "othering" specific groups at strate
that the SAARC decisions must be unanimous: no matter its size or income, gic moments by gender, ethnicity, caste, national identity, religion, racial
a nation cannot (in SAARC rhetoric, anyway) be bullied out of its sover ization, age, or other markers of identity in order to justify their low-wage
eignty, its territory, or its economic rights in trade discussions. The South or non-wage position in the labor force,1J there are at the same time strate
Asia Free Trade Area, or SAFTA (negotiated by SAARC member nations), gic alliances-across these noted differences-to address (sometimes lim
should be fully implemented by 2010. It will be useful to compare the inter ited) shared concerns. In the case of President Kumaratunga and Saraswati,
national dynamics and the well-being of SAARC residents with those within these are disarticulated. President Kumaratunga called for South-South
the jmisdiction of NAFTA, which will be fully implemented in 2009. organization on the state level from a podium, "streaming" immediately
Both President Kumaratunga and Saraswati have expressed a stated into global media, and Saraswati made her call for global organizing in an
goal to address-immediately and seriously-the poverty experienced by individual conversation connecting her to the readers of this chapter. They
millions of women and men, globally and in Sri Lanka. Saraswati and do not strategize together; in fact, Saraswati feels completely marginalized
President Kumaratunga cannot, however, be characterized as having from all political representation in the context of the Sri Lankan state,
shared interests simply because they both reside in the global South, any which she views as oppressive.
more than Diana and US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice can be said There have been many questions in transnational women's organizing
to have shared interests because they both live in the global North. about the possibility of, for example, challenging capitalist domination.
Saraswati, for example, speaks Tamil and practices Hinduism. President Some women participate in capitalist strategies even as they challenge them,
Kumaratunga speaks Sinhala and English and practices Buddhism. 9 These which might be said of President Kumaratunga's position in guiding eco
distinctions are relevant to the ways in which Saraswati was actively mar nomic decision making in the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka.
ginalized in the Sri Lankan national context before, during, and since Saraswati has little participation, or say, in the marketplace. Yet they both
President Kumaratunga's administration (which ended in 2005). Sinhala is have called, in different venues, for an end to economic disparities, which
the state language and Buddhism is the state religion. Saraswati is first mar are so often gendered. As Domitila Barrios de Chun!fMa pointed out to Betty
ginalized, then, as a member of a state-marginalized ethnic group. She and Friedan at the United Nations International Women's Year Tribunal in
other Tamils living on the tea estates are then doubly marginalized by Mexico City in 1975 (Barrios de Chungara with Viezzer 1978),just because
Tamils from the north and east of the island, who do not share their fam they were both women did not mean that they had a full set of overlapping
ily histories of coming from India to the central hill country of the former concerns. Diana and Bertha, in the next section, have many differences
British colony of Ceylon as indentured workers. like President Kumaratunga and Saraswati-and some similarities, including
The Malaiyaha, or upcountry Indian Tamil, population has tended to being Mexican residents interested in the lived effects of neoliberal policies
be concentrated for generations on the estates. In fact, hundreds of thou in agriculture and other sectors of the economy. The RMALC example in
sands of descendants of originally indentured plantation workers from the next section demonstrates women's leadership and cross·dass, cross
India were left stateless-without national identities or passports-for half sector organizing for empowernlent in the face of free trade policies.
a century after Indian and Sri Lankan independence from British colonial A consideration of the possibilities of such multivocal organizing can
rule. President Kumaratunga's government only very recently granted citi not, of course, ignore the challenges to such collaboration presented by
zenship to the remaining stateless Tamils. Saraswati's family, then, is part linguistic, class, ethnic, gender, racialized, and other powerful distinctions.
of the most marginalized Sri Lankan community (by cultural and national Differences within and between North and South women's movements, [or
citizenship, e~icity, caste, language, and income), and President example, have been discussed by Hawkesworth (2006:121-145). Alvarez
Kumaratungais position is privileged! culturally, as well as politicalIy.lO and others (2003) document divisions expressed among Latin American
These differences mediate powerfull/but do not completely negate, con and Caribbean feminist activists, and Macdonald (2003) specificallyana
vergence in the two women's strategies to address economic marginality lyzes exclusionary practices in transnational, anti-NAFTA social move
related to glObalization. ments.
:<14 6 :<147
ANN KINGSOLVER
FIELDS OF FREE TRADE
ORGANIZING STRATEGIES OF THE RED MEXICANA DE was proposed. These alternatives were more akin to the European Union's
ACCION FRENTE AL LlBRE COMERCIO (RMALC) attention to economic asymmetries among nations involved in transna
In April 1991, the first Trinational Trade Union meeting took place in tional trade agreements, to the lights of migrant~, and to compensation for
Chicago so that labor advocates could compare experiences and plan those displaced from changing labor market~ as a result of neoliberal
strategies across North America. Also that month, the RMALC was formed restructuring.
in Mexico. The RMALC is an umbrella organization that collectively facili The RMALC is an example of how national and plulinational cross
tates smaller, diverse organizations' crafting of a specific alternative to class and cross-interest collaborations can be usefuL Agrarian, women's,
NAFfA and other free trade policies. Around 100 organizations joined in and other worker organizations, for example, had close understandings of
the RMALC, including labor, environmental, women's, youth, rural, urban, how neoliberal policies were affecting the most economically marginalized
and human rights organizations. Diana's agricultural collective was con NAFTA public. Those understandings, coupled with the knowledge of the
nected to the RMALC, along with many other rural and urban organiza juridical domain gained by those with more plivileged access, like Bertha
tions across Mexico. In turn, representatives of the RMALC met with Lujan, resulted in a broad set of analyses formulated into specific policies
umbrella organizations from Canada and the United States, including the countering the NAFTA document. Here are some examples.
Action Canada Network, the Quebec Coalition on the Trilateral In 1993, the alternative to NAFTA written by RMALC representatives
Negotiations, and the Mobilization for Development, Trade, Labor and had, in the labor section, provisions that workers be included in deciding
Environment to organize transnational responses to proposed free trade policies that affected them; have rights to organize; have benefits that
policies. In October 1991 in Zacatecas, Mexico, representatives of these would be equal for workers in all signatory nations; and work in toxin-free
org-anizations held, together, the International Forum on Public Opinion environments. The proposal called for the equal protection of agricultural
and the NAFTA Negotiations: Citizen Alternatives. The RMALC has been and manufactuIing workers and the observance of protection for migrant
involved in organizing a number of conferences bringing various con workers as already laid out in such agreements as the United Nations
stituencies together-for example, workers for SONY from many different Agreement on the Protection of the Rights of Migrant Workers and Their
countries or labor union representatives from industries benefiting from Families, signed in 1990.
and losing out under neoliberal free trade policies. The environmental section of the RMALC's proposed alternative to
For Bertha Lujan, a labor la'wyer and representative of the Frente NAFTA called for sustainable development, saying that environmental
Autentico de Trabajadores (FAT), who became a leader in the RMALC degradation and economic inequality do not foster sustainability. One of its
(and later the comptroller of Mexico City when Cuauhtemoc Cardenas principles was the "sovereign right of each nation to protect its own
became mayor), one of the central roles of a flexible, issue-specific organi resources and the responsibility to avoid doing harm to the environment
zation like the RMALC was to find legal instruments already signed by the that affects other nations" (RMALC 1993:7). The proposal called for har
signatory nations negotiating free trade agreements and to try to hold monization without uniformity in the environmental regulations attached
those nations accountable to those existing policies. Examples of such a to free trade agreements, specifying that one nation not become a toxic
policy would be the United Nations Universal Declaration on Human waste dump for other signatory nations (that is, each nation would recycle
Rights and Organization of Ameli can States agreements on immigrant its own wastes). The specific legal framework, in the environmental section
workers' human rights. She felt that, case by case, lawyers and judges as in the others, was elaborated in this RMALC document, as were specific
needed to be made more accountable for their interpretations of changes proposals that groups of NGOs administer oversight of the proposed regu
made in national Jabor laws accommodating neoliberal models. Hertha lations.
Lujan argued f.<:!a very different kind of plulinational accountability than The RMALC proposal on human lights and free trade called for the
the control or'the IMF, the wro, an~he World Bank. She told me, in an ratification of the Organization of American States (OAS) and United
interview in 1995, mat the RMALC vtJs monitoring (in collaboration with Nations agreement'! on human rights and acceptance of the rulings of the
other umbrella organizations) conditions after NAFTA and was continuing Interamerican Human Rights Court, with a commission of NGOs to over
to propose specific alternatives to it, as the RMALC had done when NAFTA see the human rights of migrant workers.
24 8 249
ANN KINGSOLVER FIELDS OF FREE TRADE
As noted by Manisha Desai (2002:15), women's transnational solidarity edged officially a role for civil society in the negotiations. The RMALC web
networks have played important roles in working to counter the North to site includes links to gender-based organizations contesting free trade poli
South flow (or return, as we could see it through the lens of dependency cies. Those organizations, and their reports. mostly focus on the
theory) of ideas and resources: "At these {transnational organizing] sites, privatization of water supplies across Latin America, which is a community
the flow of ideas and activism is no longer unidirectional, from the North based issue of concern to women and men in many contexts. 12 In Bolivia,
to the South, but multidirectional. The ideas and activism are dispersed an organized public stood up to the privatization of the water supply, but
into varied local sites where they are picked up and refashioned as they res the continuing pressure through free trade instruments and organizations
onate in contextualized ways." The RMALC has been accounting for varia is tremendous and the counterpressure must be toO. 13 While neoliberal
tions in local contexts as its members work toward economic and social policies are ongoing in their proposals and implementations, the FTAA is
harmonization through specific policies. Although the organization began another point of convergence for umbrella organizations within which
in response to NAFTA proposals, it has continued to respond to free trade constituencies countering free trade policies have some overlapping goals,
policies such as the Central American Free Trade Agreement and Free induding bringing attention to-and addressing-free marketeers' agency
Trade Area of the Americas. Strategic collaborative concerns have been in compounding the economic marginalization of those construed as "oth
worked out in person in various conferences and through the RMALC ers" in neoliberal capitalist logic. Daysi Granados, for example, is a
website. Nicaraguan farmer who has stood up with others in her community against
Bertha Lujan wrote a chapter called "Citizen Advocacy Networks and the water privatization that corporations are trying to force on Nicaraguans
the NAFTA" for a book titled Cross-Border Dialo{!;ues (Brooks and Fox 2002). (even though there are national laws against water privatization). She and
She notes the positive dynamics associated with globalization, not only the her colleagues have found support and advice for their effort'! via the
negative ones, including "the growing interrelation between grassroots, cit Internet from activists who successfully countered water privatization
izen, and political organizations" (Lujan 2002:212) to "promote citizens' attempts in Bolivia (Granados, personal communication, 2005).
rights over capital" (2002:215). She document'! disagreement'! that arose
between labor groups within and between each nation in forging consen CONCLUSION
sus on an alternative to NAFTA and describes the differences in national Women like Diana, Dot, Saraswati, and Bertha have brought expertise
priorities among transnational NGO solidarity networks (with US groups learned about the challenges of organizing across many kinds of political
tending to prioritize environmental concerns, for example, and Mexican and identity borders to the current moment of crafting alternatives to
groups seeing workers' compensation and the human right'! of migrants as neoliberal global capitalist policies (in and beyond the agricultural sector).
top goals). She also notes that Canadian and Mexican NGO alliances criti The RMALC is an example of a solidarity network that brings women's,
cal of neoliberal free trade policies agreed with each other in opposing environmental, human rights, urban, rural, and labor interests to the table
NAFTA but disagreed over whether alternatives should be proposed. (The with transnational counterparts to negotiate-through very specific policy
Canadian groups did not join the RMALC in going forward with alterna proposals-a long-term bottom line of social and environmental well-being
tive free trade proposals.) In 1996, the Canadian Labour Congress hosted as an alternative, in global accounting, to neoliberal national administra
a conference with the trinational alliance organizations, called "Challen tions' attention to a tenuous, short-term economic bottom line. Those
ging Free Trade in the Americas: Elaborating Common Responses" (Lujan working in agricultural sectors, as in all economic sectors, are affected
2002:223). As Lujan (2002:225) observes, the trinational alliance of hun unevenly by neoliberal restructuring, but the RMALC and other organiza
dreds of NGOs has held together beyond its initial purpose of opposing tions are working to identify those issues and policies that can be supported
NAFTA to con."t:!flue with a critique of the proposed FTAA, even as each strategically across interest groups.
national alliarice focuses it'! goals in a+:Jressing policy at the national leveL Because plurinational alliances of NGOs have become significant
The RMALC ~ontinues to co~st free trade policies, and Foster venues for not only critique but also action in relation to national and
(2005:215) argues that because of the countering ofNAFTA by the R\1ALC international policies, events, and practices glossed as globalization, I
and allied movements, governments negotiating the FTAA have acknowl- believe that it is important to recognize and document the histories of
25 0
ANN KINGSOLVER FIELDS OF FREE TRADE
each of those organizations and to see what lessons they bring to joint orga IeIing the fifth meeting of the W"TO in Cancun, Mexico, in September
nizing efforts. Lessons learned about multivocality and intersectionality 2003. The Internet site of the RMALC (http://www.rmalc.org.mx) includes
through women's transnational organizing now inform those involved in a declaration of the Alianza Social Continental (Continental Social Alli
umbrella organizing seeking alternatives to free trade policies that focus ance) on the results of the WTO meetings, a descIiption of El Foro de los
on gender-based inequities in relation to other configurations of inequity. Pueblos as "an alternative space created by and for Civil Society," and other
The RMALC, for example, is not a women's organization, but women par documents related to ongoing plurinational efforts key to moving beyond
ticipate in positions of leadership and have crafted policies that resonate simply protesting to evaluating and proposing alternatives to neoliberal
with public welfare goals and strategies of the plurinational women's move state policies.
ment. Ximena Bedregal Saez (1992), in a history of the Mexican women's As Friedman (2003:314) notes, "the transnational women's rights move
movement, states that the holding of the International Women's Year ment substantially changed the framework for understanding global
Conference (beginning the UN Decade for Women) in Mexico City in issues." One of those legacies is the increasingly public struggle between a
1975 catalyzed widespread organizing efforts among Mexican women dur neoliberal, free-market agenda and a social bottom line, as seen in the out
ing that next decade, with a focus on linking gender and class concerns. I come of the 2004 national elections in India. Documenting the specific
suggest that this history, along with intersections with the labor movement, contributions of differing organizing histories, including gender-related
provided a discourse that has facilitated the very effective work of the ones, to plurinational activist alliances is important as these bodies chal
RMALC in articulating alternatives to neoliberal trade policies. 14 lenge neoliberal states and propose more inclusive alternative policies. The
Valentine Moghadam (1999) argues that globalization has increased call to organize globally made by Saraswati resonates with the actions of
women's participation in the low-wage labor force, as well as the interna Dot, Diana, Bertha, and many others, through strategic alliances in and
tional trade in ideas about feminism and neoliberalism, and that this is an beyond the agricultural sector.
interesting moment for seeing how these factors come together in the In conclusion, I am arguing here that one of the contributions of
union of women's interests across class lines. This was certainly evident in decades of women's transnational organizing to current, broader-based
a 1995 gathering ofwomen and men in Mexico City organized through the efforts to analyze and contest the marginalizing effects of free trade policies
FAT (Authentic Workers' Front) and the RMALC, in which the conditions is the insight that interests need not be completely convergent for strategic
for workers (many of them women) around the Pacific Rim were analyzed alliances to be effective. President ChandIika Kumaratunga, for example,
critically in the context of neoliberal policies. The convergence of plurina contests marginality within the W"TO yet participates in Saraswati's cultural
tional activists in Seattle during the 1999 WTO talks exposed many activists and economic marginalization. This seeming paradox is explained well by
in the United States for the first time to long-term discourses critical of Patricia Hill Collins' (2000) concept of the matrix of domination, through
neoliberal policies and established transnational, trans-class, and trans which domination, subjugation, and resistance are intertwined, negating,
interest organizing strategies. Staudt, Rai, and Parpart (2001) commented for example, totalizing assumptions of shared interest by gender. I agree
on that moment of convergent interests in "empowerment" and the need with Shirin Rai (2002) that a "politics of engagement" with globalization
for more sustained, cross-context policy efforts, going beyond protests. processes-a transformative politics recognizing the differences between
Activists in the Canadian National Action Committee (NAC) on the Status activists-is both possible and necessary. We have learned through discus
of Women have made the same obseIvation (Cohen et al. 2002). sions of multiply situated viewpoints, as well as the organizing efforts of
Such initiatives have been occurring. In August 2001, for example, in women like Digna Ribera and Bertha Lujan, that strategic actions do not
Mexico City, 270 representatives of social groups from 39 countries met to have to involve complete concordance.Just as global capitalist organization
form an allianc,Q!to counter neoliberal globalization and promote social and processes can rely on strategic alliances between capitalists who mayor
justice (Globa1"Exch;mge 2001); a ser¥s of forums, often paralleling meet may not know one another, strategic contestation of global capitalist prac
ings of nationalgowrnments and re~ed transnational entities such as the tices-and the inequities associated with them--can be enacted by dis
WTO and the International Monetary Fund, was planned at that time. parately positioned individuals.
Another initiative was EI Foro de los Pueblos (the People's' Forum) paral
253
25 2
ANN KINGSOLVER FIELDS OF FREE TRADE
About the Author 12. See BaUve 2005, Olivera with Lewis 2004, and Shiva 2002.
Ann Kingsolver, associate professor of anthropology at the University of South 13. Bechtel and a Dutch corporate partner have sued the Boli\1an government
Carolina, has been interviewing men and women about their \1ews on globalization for $25 million in lost profits after the efforts of many organized women and men in
since 1986 in the United States, Mexico, and, most recently, Sri Lanka. She wrote Bolivia were successful in stopping the privatization of public water supplies that was
NAFTA Stories: Fears and Hopes in Mexico and the United States (200]) and edited More attached to debt renegotiation by the IMF, the World Bank, and the Interamerican
Than Class: Studying PIYWCT in US Workplaces (]998). She is general editor of the Development Bank in 1988 (Women's Committee, Hemispheric Social Alliance
Anthropology oj Work Review. 2004:7-B).
14. The collaboration of the RMALC with other umbrella organizations transna
tionally builds on earlier transnational organizing efforts, begun long before NAFTA
Notes negotiations, for example, the transnational monitoring and publicizing of conditions
1. Article 27 of Mexico's constitution was amended to allow for the privatization in the maquiladoras, factories in export processing zones in Mexico, documented by
of ejido lands. the Border Committee of Women Workers (2004).
2. The full context of the interviews with Diana and Leonardo (pseudonyms)
may be found in Kingsolver 2001:96-99. The names Dot, Tommy, and Saraswati in this
chapter are also pseudonyms.
3. B. Sasikumar translated between Saraswati's Tamil and my English in this inter
view. My fieldwork on globalization in Sri Lanka was supported by a 2004 Fulbright
Lecture/Research Award.
4. John Gledhill (1995) observes that the economic problems in the ejido sector
in Mexico are not solely due to neoliberal policies, but those policies are the focus of
this chapter.
5. See Barron 1999 for a discussion of Mexican agricultural workers in a
Canadian context.
6. See Biswajit Dhar and Sudeshna Dey 2002 for an excellent discussion of the
WTO Agreement on Agriculture and the contestation bern,-een nations of the global
North and South over food security issues.
7. Marc Edelman (2004) discusses famine across Central America as a direct
result of trade liberalization in the agricultural sector. In Mexico, Olivia Acuna
Rodarte (2003:130) states that since the implementation of free trade policies, approx
imately 300,000 corn farmers have lost their livelihoods.
8. Itty Abraham's (2005) discussion of increasing counter-hegemonic organizing
between Latin American and Asian acti\1sts is relevant to this section.
9. See Jayawardena 2002 for a discussion of President Kumaratunga's elite family
position, in terms of social and economic capital, in Sri Lanka.
10..For more on the history, working conditions, and citizenship status of estate
Tamils in Sri Lanka, see Daniel 1996, Hollup 1994, and Sinnathamby 2004.
11. The ilui5J.ity of the category marked as "other" for purposes of inequitable dis
tribution of res-ourceshas been well docu~nted by Brodkin (1998:63), Harrison
(1995), and Omi an4lcWinant (1994), am~g others. See Kingsolver 2001,2007 for fur
ther discussion of "strategic alterity."
254
