Hegemonic Geographies of the Mexican Neoliberal State

Abstract

I use Gramsci's notion of hegemony to analyze how Mexican governments have reproduced the neoliberal state over the past twenty-five years. Hegemony is a spatially-contingent process of consensus and coercion that explains how dominant economic and political policies take shape. In the case of Mexico, I examine the rise of new political elites (technocrats), their attempts at reshaping the corporatist consensus through social pacts, and their use of a regional economic model as national archetype for economic development. More specifically, this analysis employs labor politics to illustrate how the government uses consensus and coercion to maintain the state as the privileged space for shaping the hegemonic geographies of economic development in Mexico.