The Cooperative Solution? Community Strategies for Adaptation and Resistance to Globalization in Mexico

Abstract

This ethnographic study analyzes how three Mexican communities are responding to the challenges of globalization, the worldwide integration of economic, political, cultural, religious, and social systems, by creating economic, political, and social cooperatives as a means to improve their specific living situations. These cooperatives emerge as anti-systemic movements, whose purpose is to resist and change the current global system. However, these communities also adapt to certain aspects of globalization as a means to maintain and sustain their cooperatives by drawing on the interconnectedness of systems of communication. I argue that these cooperatives are emerging as effective alternatives to the modern world system in these communities, by giving their members access to the benefits of the system that they had previously been denied.