Grounding Global Justice: Race, Class, and Grassroots Globalism in the United States and Mexico

By Eric D. Larson

The rise of Trumpism and the Covid-19 pandemic have galvanized debates about globalization. Eric D. Larson presents a timely look at the last time the concept spurred unruly agitation: the late twentieth century. Offering a transnational history of the emergence of the global justice movement in the United States and Mexico, he considers how popular organizations laid the foundations for this “movement of movements.” Farmers, urban workers, and Indigenous peoples grounded their efforts to confront free-market reforms in frontline struggles for economic and racial justice. As they strove to change the direction of the world economy, they often navigated undercurrents of racism, nationalism, and neoliberal multiculturalism, both within and beyond their networks. Larson traces the histories of three popular organizations, examining the Mexican roots of the idea of food sovereignty; racism and whiteness at the momentous Battle of Seattle protests outside the 1999 World Trade Organization meetings; and the rise of dramatic street demonstrations around the globe. Juxtaposing these stories, he reinterprets some of the crucial moments, messages, and movements of the era.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: Sep 19, 2023
• ISBN: 9780520388581

Eric D. Larson

Eric D. Larson is Associate Professor in Crime and Justice Studies at University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. He is the editor of Jobs with Justice: 25 Years, 25 Voices.  

Book preview

Grounding Global Justice

Grounding Global Justice

RACE, CLASS, AND GRASSROOTS GLOBALISM IN THE UNITED STATES AND MEXICO

Eric D. Larson

UC Logo

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

University of California Press

Oakland, California

© 2023 by Eric D. Larson

A version of chapter 3 appeared as Ode to the American Century: Ambivalent Americanism and the Founding of the Jobs with Justice Coalition, Labor: Studies in Working-Class History 12, no. 3 (September 1, 2015): 53–74, https://doi.org/10.1215/15476715-2920364.

A version of chapter 4 appeared as Tradition and Transition: Neoliberal Multiculturalism and the Containment of Indigenous Insurgency in Southern Mexico in the 1990s, Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies 13, no. 1 (January 2, 2018): 22–46, https://doi.org/10.1080/17442222.2018.1416895.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Larson, Eric David, 1977– author.

Title: Grounding global justice : race, class, and grassroots globalism in the United States and Mexico / Eric D. Larson.

Description: Oakland, California : University of California Press, [2023] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2023002318 | ISBN 9780520388567 (hardback) | ISBN 9780520388574 (paperback) | ISBN 9780520388581 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Anti-globalization movement—United States. | Anti-globalization movement—Mexico. | Social classes. | Race.

Classification: LCC JZ1318 .L366 2023 | DDC 303.48/40972—dc23/eng/20230302

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023002318

Manufactured in the United States of America

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Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

List of Abbreviations

Introduction

PART I (IN)VISIBILIZING EMPIRE: AMBIVALENT NATIONALISM AND THE ORIGINS OF GLOBAL JUSTICE

1. Food Sovereignty: The Origins of an Idea

2. Ambivalent Nationalism: Food Sovereignty in Mexico’s Age of NAFTA

3. The Specter of US Decline: Ambivalent Americanism and the Jobs with Justice Coalition in the 1980s

PART II RACISM AND GLOBAL JUSTICE IN A MULTICULTURAL AGE

4. Against Coca-Colonization: Neoliberal Multiculturalism and Indigenous Insurgency in Southern Mexico

5. Obscuring Empire: Color-Blind Anticorporatism and the 1999 World Trade Organization Protests in Seattle

6. Invisibilizing Immigration: Color-Blind Anticorporatism and the 1999 World Trade Organization Protests in Seattle

PART III TWO PROTESTS: GROUNDING GLOBAL JUSTICE IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

7. Localizing Global Justice: Class, Nation, and the Jobs with Justice Coalition after Seattle

8. The WTO Is Back: UNORCA, the Vía Campesina, and the Struggle over Agriculture in Cancún

9. The Radical Road to Cancún: Anarchism and Autonomy for the Popular Indigenous Council of Oaxaca—Ricardo Flores Magón

Epilogue

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Illustrations

MAPS

1. United States: cities and global justice events featured in this book

2. Mexico: cities and global justice events featured in this book

FIGURES

1. Jobs with Justice march in Montgomery, Alabama (circa late 1980s/early 1990s)

2. CIPO-RFM member at the organization’s first street protest in November 1997 in Oaxaca City, Oaxaca

3. Jobs with Justice activists and staff members during the week of protests against the International Monetary Fund and World Bank in Washington, D.C.

4. Mexican farmers affiliated with Vía Campesina at the 2003 protests outside the World Trade Organization meetings in Cancún, Mexico

5. Protester carrying a CIPO-RFM banner at the 2003 protests outside the World Trade Organization meetings in Cancún, Mexico

Acknowledgments

Writing a book can be a solitary experience. Academic institutions increasingly make research and writing competitive and acquisitive endeavors. This context makes me especially grateful for all the help, generosity, and companionship I’ve enjoyed over the years from students, peers, and scholars.

While I was an undergraduate at the University of Minnesota in 1998, a graduate assistant in the Spanish department first introduced me to the disproportionate power of the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Trade Organization. While I was attending graduate school at the University of Colorado, my advisers helped shape the thinking that went into this book, especially in terms of nationalism and labor. Camille Guérin-Gonzales worked with me from the beginning, granting me unique opportunities for intellectual development. Julie Greene introduced me to the field of labor history and shepherded me through my early years as a graduate student. I thank her for her patience and rigor. Eric Rekeda introduced me (and others, I think) to the social importance and political potential of punk rock and hardcore music. I also met Evelyn Hu-DeHart at the University of Colorado, and for the first of many times she supported me when she really didn’t have to. She agreed to sit on my master’s thesis committee, though we were in different departments and we had never properly met. Later, when I was at Brown University, Evelyn stepped in again, various times, including, ultimately, as my dissertation director. This book wouldn’t have happened without her support.

I am grateful for other support I received at Brown. Anthony Bogues offered inspiring seminars and went out of his way to support my project, offering me the kind of direct suggestions and criticisms I needed. I thank him for that. Paul Buhle agreed to work with me and helped me think through the history of the US left. Patrick Heller helped me generate a framework to understand international trade and investment. María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo helped guide me through important theoretical considerations. Phil Rosen allowed me to define and pursue my intellectual interests in my comprehensive exams.

Ani Mukherji, Margaret Stevens, and Sarah Wald were friends in American studies whose scholarship and ethical commitments helped keep me focused. I also thank Natalia Matta, Michael Seigel, and Teresa Villa-Ignacio for their interest in me and my work. Yvette Koch, as the first person I met at Brown, helped me find my place in graduate school. Rhacel Parreñas and José Itzigsohn offered support and commentary at different junctures. I thank Hilda Lloréns and Claire Andrade-Watkins for the conversations and insights, and Bob Lee for supporting the Solidarity School project. Richard Snyder supported my efforts long after I left Brown, as did the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies more generally. At Harvard, I thank Jeanne Follansbee for offering me an opportunity to work in the History and Literature program, and to my colleagues and students there for a lively and wide-ranging intellectual experience. Thanks in particular to Alba Aragón.

At the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, I would like to thank my departmental colleagues for generating a bold intellectual environment. I thank Viviane Saleh-Hanna in particular for her mentorship and support. Thanks to Tammi Arford for making my pathway into the university easier as we entered together. I also thank the late José Soler and Ricardo Rosa for their friendship. Carlos Benevides has helped support efforts to create study abroad programming in Oaxaca. Thanks to the Provost’s Office and CAS Dean’s office for their support in the final years of the research for this book.

Scholars and activists outside of my academic workplaces also provided me with key channels to develop this work. Kathryn Brownell offered me the chance to present parts of chapters 5 and 6 at Purdue University. Maria Hwang has been a constant source of support and friendship and has read material on short notice. Kim Nolan-García provided helpful and critical comments as well. In Oaxaca, Jorge Hernández-Díaz and Martha Rees opened spaces for me to present my research. I appreciated Lynn Stephen’s willingness to connect and allow me to work with Otros Saberes.

Others who deserve mention are Benjamín Maldonado Alvarado, Avi Chomsky, Roberto Ramírez, Michael Woo, Christina Heatherton, Joe Lowndes, Kate Goldman, Rebecca Leverett, Ligia Tavera Fenollosa, Juan José Bocanegra, Joe Uehlein, Rand Wilson, Alicia Rusoja, Manisha Desai, Luis Hernández Navarro, Jonathan Fox, Ricardo Ortega, Aunt Donna, and Uncle Cliff. Greetings and thanks to friends in Oaxaca, and in particular Sali, Beto, Hena, Tlahui, Luis, and Celia. I am forever grateful to Cindy Domingo and the late Garry Owens for opening their home to me. I would like to thank Tommaso Gravante and Alice Poma for opening the doors to the LACAB for me. Steve Striffler has created a range of opportunities for me over the years, and I thank him and David Roediger for their support and careful reading of my manuscript. Thank you to Niels Hooper and Naja Pulliam Collins for their constant support, to Elisabeth Magnus for the astute and thorough copyediting, and to Jessica Moll, who helped with other components of the project.

I would like to offer a heartfelt thank-you to the activists and organizers who allowed me to speak and work with them over the last fifteen years. Those from the Popular Indigenous Council of Oaxaca—Ricardo Flores Magón (CIPO-RFM), the National Union of Autonomous Regional Peasant Organizations (UNORCA), Jobs with Justice, and the Legacy of Equality, Leadership, and Organizing (LELO) deserve special mention. Thank you. I am forever grateful for my friendship with Alfonso Perez.

Working on this book took me away from River and Rui Rui too often. I can only hope to make it up to them some day. I dedicate this to Elena, who met me on deadline day and gave me a chance—even when I couldn’t text back.

Abbreviations

Map 1. United States map: cities and global justice events featured in this book.

Map 2. Mexico map: cities and global justice events featured in this book.

Introduction

My great-uncle Cliff was unlike me in so many ways. I, the progressive college student with upper-middle-class credentials. He, the conservative wheat farmer, struggling in the face of drought and economic decline. I, the veteran of the student activism of the 1990s. He, the veteran of World War II. I, a young journalist, working at my university’s daily newspaper. He, a member of the rural white working class, a demographic group that generated considerable hand-wringing from the big-city journalists who mentored me, particularly in later years, as Donald Trump rose to power. Trump’s America First vision struck a chord with Cliff and his neighbors along County Road 1806, in rural western North Dakota.

Cliff told lots of stories. He respected the past. He was a sensitive person, whose gentle care for his cattle garnered him the respect of other family members. He was also unpredictable. I never knew quite what to expect, including when our family gathered for the annual Christmas visit to his farm in 1999.

I certainly didn’t think we would end up talking about the protests outside the World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle. Yes, the November 30 demonstrations were still in the news, and yes, reports of their magnitude shook the world. ¹ Images of masked protesters, tear gas, and enormous puppets of endangered sea turtles circulated internationally, and the protests had temporarily shut down the meetings of the massive institution.

But national news wasn’t plentiful around Zap, the nearby small town with two bars, one church, and fewer stoplights. Before the age of cell phones and satellite TV, the rural farmers in the area got their news through AM radio or staticky Channel 5, the NBC affiliate in Bismarck. While the protests may have caught the public’s eye, the World Trade Organization itself probably didn’t. The WTO emanated an air of uncontroversial technocracy, at least for people in the Global North. If the evening news started talking about it, you probably turned the channel.

Imagine my surprise, then, to see those same images of masks and tear gas on my great-uncle’s couch, on the cover of one of his farming newsletters. Cliff not only approved of the protests but supported the direct-action methods the protesters used to blockade the ministerial. The WTO was bad for small farmers like him. He didn’t know all the details why, and neither did I. But we both knew we didn’t like what was going on.

If WTO ever became a household word in the US or in Mexico, it was for a few years in the 1990s and early 2000s. Trade and globalization became prominent topics of public debate. ² Public demonstrations outside the meetings of the WTO and international financial institutions were nothing new, but Seattle initiated a new cycle of summit protests. Some marveled at how Seattle helped bring together the unlikely alliances of Teamsters and Turtles, unionists and environmentalists, and human rights advocates and anarchists. It even brought together my great-uncle and me.

Most people reacted positively to the abstract idea of opening nations to trade, and to the exchange of ideas and products. The WTO proponents called it free trade, and who didn’t like freedom? But activists argued that the deceptive new rules were written for the multinationals. This trade wasn’t free—it was private and managed. It wasn’t even about countries; it was about corporations. WTO rules removed protections for social goods like health care and water. They prevented organizing or collective bargaining. These policies would ratchet up debt and dependency for the Global South.

I didn’t know I would ever write a book on how people—including people like my great-uncle—came to oppose the WTO. I also didn’t know that I would be completing it as issues of trade and globalization returned to prominence in profound, and destabilizing, ways.

The rise of Covid-19 in 2020 galvanized a new wave of appeals to confront dangerous and unknowable forms of globalization, as I discuss in this book’s epilogue. But anxieties about national independence in the face of a hostile world had already spiked with the election of Donald Trump as US president in 2016. Trump’s campaign of America First was built around scapegoating China and slandering immigrants, and even on attacking longtime trading partners. Around the same time, the United Kingdom abruptly left the European Union, huffing about protecting traditional ways of life in the face of immigration and imports. Twenty years after the Battle of Seattle, the WTO is once again an object of attack, but more for the former president than for left-wing protesters.

To be clear, I don’t tell the story of this fleeting moment of agreement between my great-uncle and me simply to celebrate the political connections that Seattle made possible. This book, in fact, seeks to explore the tensions and limits of that moment and of these social movements, particularly around questions of race. Cliff, like Donald Trump today, saw trade through the lens of US greatness—and the threat the nation faced from foreign competition. Other perspectives, especially from the Global South, saw trade through the lens of a history of contending with US empire. Free trade was another example of US aggression. One central aim of this book is to think about how these issues of unequal and disproportionate US power are made visible (or not) when people talk about globalization.

What, then, can the movements that debated, discussed, and defied globalization in the 1980s and 1990s tell us about today? That’s the central question of this book. It traces the history of the global justice movement through three organizations. The first is a national peasant organization in Mexico, the National Union of Autonomous Regional Peasant Organizations (Unión Nacional de Organizaciones Regionales Campesinas Autónomas, UNORCA). The second is a US-based national labor alliance named Jobs with Justice. The third is a radical Indigenous organization from southern Mexico, the Popular Indigenous Council of Oaxaca—Ricardo Flores Magón (Consejo Indígena Popular de Oaxaca—Ricardo Flores Magón, CIPO-RFM). ³

In doing so, this volume juxtaposes a range of stories. It highlights the Mexican origins of the idea of food sovereignty. It asks us to think through the Seattle protests in the context of whiteness and immigration. It explores the politics of anarchism and autonomy in Mexico. Its interpretation of the April 2000 protests against the International Monetary Fund and World Bank is based on interviews, news clippings, and organizational documents, and is seen partly through the eyes of a protester who was there—me. That said, while I wrote the book, I didn’t write it alone. It was only possible because of the intellectual labor of scholars and activists before me.

RACISM, EMPIRE, AND GLOBAL JUSTICE

Globalization was a big deal in the 1990s. People began using the term more and more in the late 1980s, but its use really skyrocketed between 1993 and 2000. It didn’t have a single definition, and in the early 1990s left-leaning intellectuals published books that helped define the problem of globalization for a new generation of activists. These early accounts stressed that it was a new problem—and that was what made it so urgent. According to one account, the problems of globalization stemmed from shifting manufacturing work to the Global South. ⁴ In another, they stemmed from recent technological advances in fields like satellites and lasers. ⁵ In another, they arose from recent policy decisions by international financial institutions. These works shared the idea, though to varying degrees, that solutions must also be global. Activists, one writer argued, must create their own kind of globalization from below to oppose this new, corporate-led globalization from above. ⁶

The global justice movement’s globe-spanning use of the internet, its international gatherings, and its targeting of supranational financial institutions (like the WTO) inspired many observers. For Marxists, the global reach of this new political enthusiasm signaled the coming of a truly international proletarian movement. For anarchists, it meant the prospect of interconnected local communities delinked from the troublesome nation-state. For liberals, it meant the chance for a new global civil society unbound by irrational nationalisms and populisms, particularly of the working classes. Some argued that globalization and global flows were overpowering the sovereignties of individual nation-states. Liberals and even some conservatives argued that these all-encompassing forces had shorn people of the certainties of home, community, or the guarantees of the welfare state. Liberals especially saw popular reactions to globalization as likely to veer toward dangerous extremism, whether white nationalism, violent leftism, or Islamic fundamentalism. The will to find liberal, secular alternatives informed a wave of studies that emphasized how global justice movements could be birthing new forms of postnational democracy. ⁷

But the language of the global was also vexed and contradictory, opening up new possibilities but sometimes foreclosing others. In the months leading up to the 1999 Battle of Seattle, the most prominent direct-action organization of the protests sent information packets to activists around the country. The packets attested that because world trade and inequality was a global issue not tied to any single-issue identity, activists could finally move beyond the identity politics that had plagued radical social movements. ⁸ The packet never went on to define identity politics, but in the wake of the protests, activists of color like Elizabeth Betita Martínez published essays arguing that strategies and assumptions based in white experiences were creating exclusion and oppression in the movement, ultimately weakening its impact and harming communities of color. ⁹

The essays generated important conversations within the emerging global justice movements. In addition, some of the recent movement scholarship has examined the questions of racism, representation, and empire that Martínez and others raised. ¹⁰ Yet other scholarship has treated racism as a secondary consideration. For some analysts, since the movement’s brand of transnational organizing was multinational or anti-imperial, it didn’t matter as much if it was multiracial or not. ¹¹ While Jeremy Brecher and colleagues’ widely cited work makes general statements about the need for social movements to struggle against racism and inequality within their organizations as well as outside, it also suggests the whiteness of Seattle was not of particular importance, partly since African Americans had their own global justice expressions in other venues. Citing the Martínez essay but misreading its spirit, Brecher et al. suggest that it would be patronizing to assume that the African American community should simply show up at events like the Battle of Seattle and participate on terms set by other groups. ¹² Some works emphasize the diversity of the global justice movement but leave out the Global South. ¹³ One positions the movement in a lineage of urban-based internationalism, yet that lineage is composed of distinctly white efforts, among them a movement that explicitly excluded Blacks. ¹⁴ Some scholars suggests that considerations of race are secondary, or even divisive and troublesome, to movements that seek to become transnational. ¹⁵ One analysis of the impact of global anticorporate movements warned that waging battles against corporate environmental racism was bound to create particularistic racial identity politics. Talking about racism would threaten the new global connectivities. ¹⁶

While the perspectives above are only one thread in a larger literature, the majority of the English-language scholarship on global justice movements continues to feature predominantly white movements from the US and Europe. ¹⁷ As political theorist Anthony Bogues noted in 2003, political engagement with questions of globalization at the time had mostly failed to consider Black histories of struggle against global inequalities. Those struggles helped create things like the program for a New International Economic Order (NIEO), a set of proposals for concrete reforms to narrow the gap between the Global South and the North in the 1970s. ¹⁸ Global South activists and officials, often drawing on the work of (Latin American) dependency theorists and others, noted how the South was trapped in an unfair trading relationship with the North. It was selling away at low prices their nonrenewable natural resources and raw materials—like lumber and corn—to buy refined products from the North at high prices. These activists proposed measures to stabilize the prices of raw materials and agricultural commodities. They advocated for transfers of needed technology to reduce the South’s dependency on the North. As Adom Getachew has shown, intellectuals and revolutionaries in Africa and the Caribbean in the twentieth century defined empire not simply as the alien rule of a particular colony but also as an international racial hierarchy. They understood decolonization as being not only about creating their own sovereign states but also about worldmaking, about undoing inequality on a global level. ¹⁹

To be clear, this book is not about governments and intellectuals, it’s not about the NIEO, and it’s not only about the Global South. But the dissonance traced here—between pronouncements of global social movements at the 1999 WTO protests and the simultaneous fretting about identity politics—has guided my interpretations of what the book is about: the ways that popular organizations helped build the global justice movements, and how the politics of race, class, and empire shaped them. Drawing inspiration from work in transnational American studies and cultural histories of empire and resistance, I explore multiple origin stories in different countries—in this case the US and Mexico. ²⁰

GRASSROOTS GLOBALISM

You probably wouldn’t think that a national peasant and farmer organization in Mexico, a US-based union alliance, and a radical Indigenous organization in Mexico’s far south would have much in common. Yet comparing the three—UNORCA, the Jobs with Justice coalition, and CIPO-RFM, respectively—has shown me that they all developed a set of practices that grounded their opposition to seemingly distant, global economic forces in local, front-lines struggles. ²¹ The existing literature on global justice tends to focus on middle-class NGOs and intellectuals, on the one hand, or radical direct-action protesters, on the other. It focuses on the flexible and deterritorialized networks these groups created or the international gatherings and spaces that they helped build. ²² In focusing on working-class and poor people’s responses to neoliberal economic restructuring, this book seeks to think about organizations that inhabited particular places and represented specific constituencies but also interacted with these broader networks. ²³

The book argues that, despite the massive differences between these three organizations, they each developed a form of what I call grassroots globalism. Rather than an ahistorical theoretical concept, grassroots globalism is a distinct kind of politics that these organizations developed between the 1980s and the early 2000s. It emerged in the late twentieth century to respond to conditions distinct to that moment. While the term grassroots connotes a kind of romantic authenticity, I don’t intend to suggest that this approach to global justice is more radical or pure than other kinds. It’s a multifaceted, contradictory, and overlooked political orientation. This book seeks to capture the dynamism, tensions, and cultures of the broader movement by focusing on both the lived experience and the lively ideological debates and cultures of constituency-based groups as they built struggles to change globalization.

As a work of history, the book proceeds chronologically. ²⁴ The early chapters focus on how the organizations came to understand globalization, and the latter chapters focus on how these groups participated in the wave of international protests after 1999. Two chapters in the middle momentarily step back from the organizations to analyze the iconic 1999 Battle of Seattle. The book hopes to offer breadth and comparative scope but simultaneously attend to historical detail and cultural nuance. My hope is that this detail and nuance allow the book to shed new light on the dynamics of race, class, and nation operating in and around these movements. ²⁵

Grassroots globalism consisted of three main characteristics. First, grassroots globalism was about grounding global justice politics in poor and working-class communities directly affected by neoliberal structural changes like the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). During the policy campaigns of the 1980s and early 1990s, just as amid the efflorescence of global justice organizing in the later 1990s, organizations from directly affected communities criticized how NGOs, political officials, and other activists tended to exclude their voices. Organizations with a grassroots globalist vision tried to center these marginalized perspectives. They set forth a classed vision of the impacts of neoliberal structural reforms, often through highly gendered and racialized notions of class. Sometimes those class ideologies disrupted racial and gender hierarchies, and sometimes they reinforced them. Grassroots globalism was about territorializing a movement sometimes considered deterritorialized. It was about localizing the movement for global justice to examine the local impacts on working-class communities. ²⁶

Second, the working-class organizations here were mainly dedicated to organizing sectors defined by their structural place in a political-economic system. The literature on global justice movements, however, tends to highlight groups brought together by ideological affinities, like anarchism. The organizations at the center of this history organized directly affected people to build power and secure material gains. Amplifying or creating particular ideological currents was important but often secondary. Like other global justice activists, they maintained radical, even utopian visions of global justice. Grounding global justice, though, meant engaging with the local, regional, and national institutions that governed or controlled communities on the front lines of globalization’s impacts. Much of their work was dedicated to engaging with governmental institutions and seeking out piecemeal changes within existing structures. The fact that much of their work entailed dealing with local people and regional politics shouldn’t cast them as insufficiently global. Instead, it highlights a distinct brand of global justice, a working-class brand of politics contesting larger forces of neoliberal power on the front lines of their implementation. ²⁷

The third characteristic is organizational, and it set them apart from both NGOs and global justice networks or affinity groups. Years before the networked organizational models of the later global justice movement, grassroots globalists created early, hybrid forms of network organizations out of their formal, membership-based organizations. They did so to offer a democratic and plural alternative to the bureaucratic organizations that had ordered working-class politics for most of the century in both countries. Their early models of networks reflected the strategic value they placed in forming expansive and innovative coalitions and alliances, including but not limited to transnational alliances.

ORGANIZATION OF THIS BOOK

The chapters of Part I, (In)visibilizing Empire: Ambivalent Nationalism and the Origins of Global Justice, look at the early moments of grassroots globalism in the 1980s and show how Mexican activists visibilized empire as they confronted the trade and investment liberalization in Latin America’s Lost Decade. In contrast, early activist efforts in the US often invisibilized empire. Drawing from studies of empire and nationalism, these chapters note the subtle ways in which ideas of protecting national identity and national sovereignty textured progressive grassroots globalism at particular moments. ²⁸ Chapter 1 shows how UNORCA mobilized a version of food sovereignty more than a decade earlier than the 1996 second world meeting of the international peasant confederation Vía Campesina. ²⁹ Chapter 2 shows how UNORCA organizers expressed an ambivalent Mexican nationalism as they steered the organization into the Vía Campesina peasant confederation. As UNORCA grew, women members challenged its male leadership in seeking to balance power relationships. Chapter 3 documents the ways white progressives who founded the Jobs with Justice coalition in the US articulated their own kind of ambivalent nationalism as they attempted to organize US workers in a context of deep-seated and racialized suspicion about foreign imports.

Part II, titled Racism and Global Justice in a Multicultural Age, examines the way organizers in the US and Mexico dealt with not only the politics of sovereignty but also racialized notions of who belonged in the nation in the first place. Chapter 4 shows how some Global North intellectuals characterized globalization as a coca-colonization of cultural differences. Yet Indigenous radicals tied to the Popular Indigenous Council of Oaxaca—Ricardo Flores Magón were confronted not so much with homogenization as with the Mexican state’s brand of neoliberal multiculturalism, which sought control not by eliminating difference but by creating, defining, and patrolling it.

Chapters 5 and 6 momentarily step away to analyze the pivotal WTO protests in Seattle. The events influenced our three organizations to adopt the tactic of mass protest, even if they mostly watched Seattle from afar. That none of them played significant roles in Seattle, in fact, speaks to the central point of the chapters: distinct forms of exclusion accompanied the new alliances and broad-reaching impact of the protests. Chapter 5, taking up activist-intellectual Elizabeth Betita Martínez’s essay Where Was the Color in Seattle?, argues that the whiteness of the 1999 Seattle World Trade Organization protests was partly due to the framing of the problem of globalization by white progressives in the 1990s—a framing defined by what I call color-blind anticorporatism. ³⁰ Chapter 6, building on chapter 5, shows how color-blind anticorporatist perspectives helped isolate the issue of immigration from the larger debate about international trade in Seattle.

Part III, Two Protests: Grounding Global Justice in the Twenty-First Century, considers the development of grassroots globalism in mass demonstrations outside economic summits after 1999. ³¹ Chapter 6 considers how Jobs with Justice localized the movement for global justice in protests outside the International Monetary Fund and World Bank just months after the Battle of Seattle. In doing so they contested the AFL-CIO’s version of color-blind anticorporatism in its xenophobic targeting of Chinese trade practices. Chapter 7 examines how UNORCA, with the Vía Campesina, took on an important leadership role in the 2003 WTO protests in Cancún. It mobilized thousands of its members, many of them Indigenous Mayan farmers from nearby states, to protest the WTO’s attempts to liberalize agriculture and privatize Global South forms of community-based knowledge and biodiversity. Chapter 8 discusses the grassroots globalism of CIPO-RFM as it prepared for the 2003 Cancún WTO protests and focuses on how their Magonista brand of autonomy and anarchism differed from the anarchism in the wider global justice movement.

PART I

(In)visibilizing Empire

AMBIVALENT NATIONALISM AND THE ORIGINS OF GLOBAL JUSTICE

1

Food Sovereignty

THE ORIGINS OF AN IDEA

Food Sovereignty! Few demands that circulated in the global justice movements of the 1990s and 2000s generated as much impact as the demand for a people’s right to control its food. And no organizations have pushed the claim as far and fast as the Vía Campesina (Peasant Way),