REGISTER: Contact Professor Long Bui via email at longb@uci.edu

About the talk:
Mexico is currently among the largest car producers in the world. This talk elucidates the convergence of socio-economic and political processes that created the conditions to gear Mexico towards the car economy. In particular it highlights how these transformations brought together workforces situated in uneven labor regimes to work shoulder-to-shoulder on the assembly lines: autoworkers (an industrial workforce employed directly by the car company), and logistics workers (a workforce that emerged with the flexibilization of labor and just-in-time production). By ethnographically focusing on the social relations between these differently situated workforces, this talk explores the ways in which the car economy generated new forms of inequalities on the assembly lines while also situating Mexico’s transnational car production within a particular moment of industrial capitalism. 

About the speaker:
Alejandra González Jiménez is a sociocultural anthropologist and an independent researcher. She is currently working on her first book manuscript tentatively titled Exclusionary Belongings: Transnational Car Production in Post-NAFTA Mexico. An in-depth ethnographic study of Mexico’s car economy, Exclusionary Belongings traces entanglements between the state, corporations, trade agreements, and everyday life. González Jiménez’s research has been supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, the Social Sciences Research Council of Canada, and the American Philosophical Society. Her current project focuses on autoworkers and logistics workers to examine social relationships between workforces located in uneven labor regimes.