Abstract
Colonias are nonincorporated communities located on the rims of larger urban centers throughout the U.S.-Mexico border. They are significant for understanding the inequities associated with elements of globalization such as free trade, industrialization, urbanization, and migration, for it is in specific places where the global becomes local. The analysis of cities adds to the “analysis of economic globalization,” which allows us to “reconceptualize processes of economic globalization as concrete economic complexes situated in specific places” (Sassen, 1998: xix). In Globalization and Its Discontents (1998), Saskia Sassen refers to places bound to each other by the dynamics of economic globalization as a “new geography of centrality.” Specifically, analyzing colonias offers scholars an opportunity to make the periphery the center of analysis in examining global phenomena, such as transnational migration and population settlement processes of immigrant enclaves within regions of the world that are critical to the transformation of capital, labor, and human interactions.
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© 2010 Kathleen Staudt, César M. Fuentes, and Julia E. Monárrez Fragoso
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Núñez, G.G., Klamminger, G.M. (2010). Centering the Margins: The Transformation of Community in Colonias on the U.S.-Mexico Border. In: Staudt, K., Fuentes, C.M., Fragoso, J.E.M. (eds) Cities and Citizenship at the U.S.-Mexico Border. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230112919_7
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