Markets, movements, and meanings: Subsistence resources and political protest in Mexico and Bolivia

Over the course of the last thirty years, market oriented economic reforms have swept much of the globe. In some communities they have been met with relative quiescence while in others, they have generated sustained resistance. This dissertation seeks to explore the origins and dynamics of this resistance through a careful examination of two cases in which social movements emerged to voice and channel opposition to market reforms. Protests over the privatization of water in Cochabamba, Bolivia in 2000 and the liberalization of Mexican corn markets in 2007, combined with shadow case comparisons of quiescence, offer a lens through which to analyze and understand the conditions under which perceived, market-driven threats to material livelihood are likely to prompt resistance. The cases are particularly good subjects for analysis because the countries and reforms in question are, in many respects, very different. The movements that emerged, however, were similar—both grew in response to a rapid increase in the price of a "subsistence" good, and both included broad support that crossed traditional cleavages and included previously unorganized citizens. Yet in spite of these similarities, the movements developed differently. The Mexican movement rapidly collapsed and remains marginal while the Bolivian movement continued to grow, ultimately shutting down the region, and later the country, for days at a time.;A number of specific questions motivate the dissertation. What accounts for the strong opposition to the privatization of water in Cochabamba when earlier Bolivian privatizations and reforms had passed with little unrest? Why do responses to two different grievances in two different contexts look so similar with respect to the diversity of the participants and the frames employed? How do we explain the cross-class, cross-ethnic, cross-urban-rural, and highly diverse nature of both movements? How might we begin to explain variation in the movements' trajectories? In addressing questions of both similarities in movement emergence and composition, and differences in movement development, this dissertation seeks to add to and refine scholarship on political resistance. In doing so, the dissertation specifically explores connections among market reforms, local practices and understandings, and social movements.;The dissertation argues that to understand not only the similarities in the movements' origins and internal dynamics, but also the differences in their trajectories, it is necessary to amend traditional social movement approaches and put the grievance—the moral and material claims that citizens make—at the center of our analysis. Specifically, scholars must pay systematic attention to the meaning of the grievance, in these cases, to water and corn themselves. By categorizing grievances through specific attention to how they are materially and ideationally constituted, scholars can explore how similar grievances work in similar ways across space and time. The events studied here make the case for the analytical utility of a "subsistence" category of grievances. Through comparative case and interpretive analysis I show how, in certain contexts and due to shared understandings of each as subsistence goods, corn and water take on similar community-related meanings and, as a result, help to generate resistance through similar causal mechanisms. Often evoking imagined communities of nation, region or ethnic group, or the face-to-face interactions that revolve around a subsistence good's routine production and consumption, I argue that subsistence grievances serve as particularly powerful loci for resistance around which salient local divisions can coalesce, resulting in broad-based, diverse opposition movements; it was not just the material qualities of water or corn, but how those material qualities took on meaning in the Cochabamban and Mexican contexts that contributed to causing widespread resistance. Through paying careful attention to the subsistence meanings of the grievances in each case, we gain leverage in explaining both mobilization and government response. By reconciling material and ideational claims in a novel way, and bringing together literature on social mobilization, moral economy and nationalism, the dissertation bridges disciplinary gaps and advances our knowledge of patterns of collective action. The arguments advanced here apply not only to the cases that form the core of the dissertation, but also to broader theorizing on political mobilization in the face of marketization.