Geographien tiefer integration: Das beispiel des agrarhandels zwischen Mexiko und den USA

Abstract

Being implicated in an ambivalent play of both border crossing and drawing, global commodity chains are an ideal organizational field to analyze the fundamental paradox of deep integration policies. Approaching the contingency of borders from a perspective informed by the performativity approach to markets, this paper starts from the assumption that this paradox is particularly salient in the context of commodity chains which connect the global south with the global north. Taking the example of the tomato commodity chain in the context of NAFTA, we follow the links and heterogeneous associations that stretch from the US-Mexican border to the fields, supermarket shelves and standardization agencies to migrant labor, quality control apparatuses and so forth.