Neoliberalism and Labor Displacement in Panama: Contested Public Space and the Disenfranchisement of Street Vendors examines the simultaneous increase of informal sector employment and decreased access to space for Panamanian street vendors, whose creative ventures in public spaces concretize the face of informality in most of the Global South. Through the lived experiences and voices of street traders surveyed over twelve years of field research, this book portrays the long-lasting saga and resistance actions of informalized vendors dislocated from their traditional selling points in Panama City’s downtown. Amado argues that neoliberal policies, including privatization, labor deregulation, and market-led urban renewal, inflict a double squeeze on working-class Panamanians by reducing opportunities for stable formal sector employment and restricting access increasingly gentrified areas of Panama City historically used for street vending. This book also sheds light on the commoditization and contested nature of public space, discursively contended by competing views of its functions and who has the right to it.

Neoliberalism and Commodity Production in Mexico details the impact of neoliberal practice on the production and exchange of basic resources in working-class communities in Mexico. Using anthropological investigations and a market-driven approach, contributors explain how uneven policies have undermined constitutional protections and working-class interests since the Mexican Revolution of 1910. Detailed ethnographic fieldwork shows how foreign investment, privatization, deregulation, and elimination of welfare benefits have devastated national industries and natural resources and threatened agriculture, driving the campesinos and working class deeper into poverty. Focusing on specific commodity chains and the changes to production and marketing under neoliberalism, the contributors highlight the detrimental impacts of policies by telling the stories of those most affected by these changes. They detail the complex interplay of local and global forces, from the politically mediated systems of demand found at the local level to the increasingly powerful municipal and state governments and the global trade and banking institutions. Sharing a common theoretical perspective and method throughout the chapters, Neoliberalism and Commodity Production in Mexico is a multi-sited ethnography that makes a significant contribution to studies of neoliberal ideology in practice.

Neel Ahuja tracks the figure of the climate refugee in public media and policy over the past decade, arguing that journalists, security experts, politicians, and nongovernmental organizations have often oversimplified climate change and obfuscated the processes that drive mass migration. To understand the systemic reasons for displacement, Ahuja argues, it is necessary to reframe climate disaster as interlinked with the history of capitalism and the global politics of race, wherein racist presumptions about agrarian underdevelopment and Indigenous knowledge mask how financial, development, migration, and climate adaptation policies reproduce growing inequalities. Drawing on the work of Cedric Robinson and theories of racial capitalism, Ahuja considers how the oil industry transformed the economic and geopolitical processes that lead to displacement. From South Asia to the Persian Gulf, Europe, and North America, Ahuja studies how Asian trade, finance, and labor connections have changed the nature of race, borders, warfare, and capitalism since the 1970s. Ultimately, Ahuja argues that only by reckoning with how climate change emerges out of longer histories of race, colonialism, and capitalism can we begin to build a sustainable and just future for those most affected by environmental change.

Esperanza Speaks examines a century-long process of socioeconomic change in rural Panama through the experiences of one woman, Esperanza Ruiz, and four generations of her family. The intimate narrative shows how ordinary people, through their choices and actions, are affected by and, in turn, can affect how history unfolds. Readers see Esperanza’s family as both victims and protagonists in their own histories. Born into rural poverty with limited options, they still find small openings to try to improve their lives. Sometimes successful, sometimes not, they survive by drawing on their only abundant resource: each other. Based on twenty field visits over the course of fifty years, Esperanza Speaks is the result of a dedicated anthropologist’s long-term engagement with the individuals of a single community, and a beautiful example of ethnographic storytelling.

Set against the backdrop of contemporary US economic history, Puerto Rico Is in the Heart examines the emigration, labor, and political experiences of documentary photographer, human rights activist, and Puerto Rican community leader Frank Espada and considers the cultural impact of neoliberal programs directed at Puerto Rico and Puerto Ricans.

Left-leaning political parties play an important role as representatives of the poor and disempowered. They once did so by promising protections from the forces of capital and the market's tendencies to produce inequality. But in the 1990s they gave up on protection, asking voters to adapt to a market-driven world. Meanwhile, new, extreme parties began to promise economic protections of their own--albeit in an angry, anti-immigrant tone. To better understand today's strange new political world, Stephanie L. Mudge's Leftism Reinvented analyzes the history of the Swedish and German Social Democrats, the British Labour Party, and the American Democratic Party. Breaking with an assumption that parties simply respond to forces beyond their control, Mudge argues that left parties' changing promises expressed the worldviews of different kinds of experts. To understand how left parties speak, we have to understand the people who speak for them. Leftism Reinvented shows how Keynesian economists came to speak for left parties by the early 1960s. These economists saw their task in terms of discretionary, politically-sensitive economic management. But in the 1980s a new kind of economist, who viewed the advancement of markets as left parties' main task, came to the fore. Meanwhile, as voters' loyalties to left parties waned, professional strategists were called upon to "spin" party messages. Ultimately, left parties undermined themselves, leaving a representative vacuum in their wake. Leftism Reinvented raises new questions about the roles and responsibilities of left parties--and their experts--in politics today.--

Engaging the past, the present, and the future, The Workings of Diaspora: Jamaican Maroons and the Claims to Sovereignty shows how the lived experience of Jamaican Maroons is linked to the African Diaspora. In so doing, this interdisciplinary undertaking interrogates the definition of Diaspora but mainly emphasizes the term’s use. Mario Nisbett demonstrates that an examination of Jamaican Maroon communities, particularly their socio-political development, can further highlight the significance of the African Diaspora as an analytical tool. He shows how Jamaican Maroons inform resistance to abjection, a denial of full humanity, through claiming their African origin and developing solidarity and consciousness in order to affirm black humanity. This book establishes that present-day Jamaican Maroons remain relevant and engage the African Diaspora to improve black standing and bolster assertions of sovereignty.