1
Introduction

[W]e fall into the trap of treating space as space "in itself," as space as such. We come to think in terms of spatiality, and so to fetishize space in a way reminiscent of the old fetishism of commodities, where the trap lay in exchange, and the error was to consider "things" in isolation, as "things in themselves."

Lefebvre ( 1991 , p. 90)

A View from Motul, Yucatán

Motul is the center of the world, the tuch (navel) of the universe, or so say its residents. Known as the birthplace of the socialist governor Felipe Carrillo Puerto, famous for its breakfast dish huevos motuleños, and alluring to tourists because of the Sambulá cenote (sinkhole) - Motul is located in the southern Mexican state of Yucatán (see Figure 1.1).1 The city has 23,240 inhabitants (INEGI 2010), and it is well connected to other corners of the region. A four-lane highway links the municipality to the capital and economic engine of the state, Mérida, and to other logistically significant places in the peninsula, such as Progreso, the third most important seaport in the Gulf of Mexico (CentroEure 2014; SEFOE 2011). Motul has been a regional center since the nineteenth century, when it was known as the "pearl of the coast" (Buenfil y Méndez 2011; Dzul Sánchez 2015), and continues to be prominent even today. The city provides "urban" services (i.e. education, transport, healthcare, retail, and finance) to 35 comisarías (villages) and neighboring municipalities in a radius of up to 20?km (COESPY 2013).2 The pearl of the coast is also notable for the existence of Montgomery Industries, the biggest employer in the city and the largest maquiladora factory in Yucatán.3 Montgomery manufactures jeans and other denim products for clients in the United States, Italy, and Japan, and it has been operating under the special duty-free tax regime of the Mexican maquiladora program since it was inaugurated in 1995. A survivor of calamities such as hurricanes (e.g. Isidore in 2002) and economic downturns (e.g. 9/11 and the 2008 financial crash), the factory is a remnant of the state's maquiladora boom-to-bust chapter, the period between 1990 and 2001. This short interval saw Yucatán become one of the fastest growing regional economies among member countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development; it also signaled the definite ending of henequen, a type of agave that, as a sought-after commodity, had sustained Yucatán's economy for more than a century (OECD 2007). In Motul, Montgomery is regarded as a company that has left a mark in the fabric of the city and that continues to be vital for the economy. Local residents, motuleños, have the perception that everyone either has worked there or knows someone who has. The company is considered by some inhabitants as the driving force that "detonated" the local economy in the last few decades and helped Motul transform from a rural to an urban society - a watershed in the history of the city. Others, such as maquiladora workers and ex-workers, are less enthusiastic when talking about economic growth but recognize that Montgomery brought job opportunities close to home. Regardless of what they perceive makes the factory important, motuleños agree on one thing: "Motul was one before and after Montgomery," as phrased by the city's mayor (Interview from 30 November 2015).

Figure 1.1 Map of the state of Yucatán with regional centers and some settlements.

Source: Victoria M. Jiménez Esquivel. Reproduced with permission.

The maquiladora is considered as the trigger, if not the main factor, of the transformations that Motul has seen in the last 30 years. For instance, connectivity to Mérida improved; new neighborhoods were constructed; modes of transportation were transformed; modern food such as pizza became available; and nationwide supermarket, pharmacy, retail, and bank chains arrived. Maquiladoras have left a mark at the state level as well. The expansion of the industry prompted, for example, huge investments in infrastructure (e.g. roads network and airports). The factories also led to an increase in formal employment, transformations in commuting habits, and changes in migration patterns. Having been important players in the recent economic history of Yucatán, motuleños are proud of the development of their city, but truth be told, theirs is far from an extraordinary story in the context of globalization.4 However, if we were to borrow a pair of postcolonizing glasses and were to look at Motul - perhaps not as the navel of the universe but as a center - what could the city teach us about global capitalism and urbanization? What could we learn about how the global in global capitalism actually unfolds at the level of the everyday? What could be said about the influence of the region's historical context and colonial legacies? The aim of this study is to explore precisely these questions through the case of Montgomery Industries in Motul but taking in the wider context and history of the maquiladora boom-to-bust chapter in Yucatán. Before we begin, let me shed light on the significance of this approach.

Old Frontier/New Frontier

Maquiladora (or maquila for short) is a unique term to describe a factory throughout Latin America and the Caribbean that imports materials or equipment duty free in order to assemble or manufacture products for their subsequent export. However, the services offered by this type of Export Processing Zone (EPZ) are far from remarkable (Engman 2011; McCallum 2011; The World Bank 2008).5 Described by Werner (2016) as the "global factory" that fills the "seemingly endless store shelves" in the global North, what I refer to as the Zone - following the work of Bach (2011) and Easterling (2012) - is a common instrument of global capitalism that exists to provide a space for capital to operate under special tax regimes, concessions, subsidies, or regulations. The Zone can exist in one of many permutations in addition to EPZs, for example, as a Special Economic Zone, Free (Trade) Zone, Exclusive Economic Zone, or Economic Development Zone. The use of different names not only is a matter of preference but may imply differences in size and variations in regulations, concessions, and subsidies offered by the host country.6 Despite the distinctions, Zones share a dominating characteristic and purpose. These are enclaves that ensure the fluid circulation of capital and goods and sustain global supply chains (International Labour Organization 2014; The World Bank 2008) through localized strategies of "reterritorialization" (Bach 2011) carried out by governments to create "zones of exception" that, according to Roy (2011a), "both fragment and extend the space of the nation state." The history of the Zone is centuries old. For scholars like Bach (2011) or Easterling (2012), the precursors of the modern Zone are the free ports of antiquity and the entrepôts of the colonial period of European expansionism. Early Zones - like Mayaguez, Puerto Rico (1951); Shannon, Ireland (1959); or Kaohsiung, Taiwan (1965) - are prime examples of the first experiments in combining features of industrial estates and free trade zones to promote export-oriented economic growth (cf. The World Bank 1992, 2008).

Mexican maquiladoras were created by the government in 1965 as assembly plants that could only be located on a 20-km strip along the border with the United States (Iglesias Prieto 1997; Plankey Videla 2008). The intervention was a response to rising unemployment levels in the northern border caused by the end of the Bracero initiative - an agricultural guest-worker scheme for Mexican laborers willing to travel to the United States that ran between 1942 and 1964 (Núñez and Klamminger 2010). As such, maquiladoras were part of the Border Industrialization Program, which, in addition to promoting trade, aimed at increasing living standards (Alvarez-Smith 2008). In 1972, the Mexican government transformed the maquiladora experiment into a nationwide scheme, legally allowing maquiladoras to be set up anywhere in the country (Sklair 1989; Zarate-Hoyos and Albornoz Medina 1999). Despite the ease in restrictions, by 1985, only 10% of all maquiladoras in the country could be found in non-border locations (Alvarez-Smith 2008). Mexico's accession to the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1994 and the devaluation of the peso the same year changed all this (Bair and Gereffi 2001). Economic reforms taken by the state in the 1980s - switching the Import Substitution Industrialization (ISI) policies of previous decades for the Structural Adjustments or neoliberal reforms suggested by actors such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund - had paid off, making Mexico attractive for foreign investment by the 1990s (Dussel Peters...