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Progress does not come easily to the maquiladoras. These foreign-owned assembly plants have moved southward from the border into Sonora and Chihuahua, giving rise to the concept of "desert capitalism." However, the plants have not necessarily brought about the improvements in the lives of workers that had been so hopefully expected. Sociologist Kathryn Kopinak here examines the maquiladora industry in Nogales, Sonora, and explores various questions concerning how it is changing with NAFTA and other attempts at regional integration. Focusing on the auto-parts industry, Kopinak observes that few maquiladoras have taken steps toward more sophisticated technology and innovative labor practices anticipated by the "second wave" hypothesis of modernization. She argues instead that the apparent advances have not benefitted the overwhelming majority of Mexican employees by increasing their wages or involving them in the workplace. Women workers in particular are segmented at the bottom of the job ladder. Kopinak provides information on facilities in both Nogales and the town of Imuris to offer a balanced perspective on border and inland maquiladoras. Desert Capitalism draws on interviews with workers about their daily lives in both their home and adopted communities and on interviews with Mexican and U.S. plant managers. Community surveys, newspaper advertisements, and government records are other important sources of data. It also reviews and synthesizes literature published only in Spanish and utilizes creative quantitative statistical techniques. The book thus marks a significant study of people's lives that seeks to contribute to the understanding of ongoing continental economic reorganization, and it holds important lessons for scholars of economics, anthropology, political science, history, sociology, women's studies, and regional planning.

Winner of the third biennial Center for Documentary Studies/Honickman First Book Prize
Robert Frank, Prize Judge

In Driftless, Danny Wilcox Frazier’s dramatic black-and-white photographs portray a changing Midwest of vanishing towns and transformed landscapes. As rural economies fail, people, resources, and services are migrating to the coasts and cities, as though the heart of America were being emptied. Frazier’s arresting photographs take us into Iowa’s abandoned places and illuminate the lives of those people who stay behind and continue to live there: young people at leisure, fishermen on the Mississippi, veterans on Memorial Day, Amish women playing cards, as well as more recent arrivals: Lubavitcher Hasidic Jews at prayer, Latinos at work in the fields. Frazier’s camera finds these newcomers while it also captures activities that seemingly have gone on forever: harvesting and hunting, celebrating and socializing, praying and surviving.

This collection of photographs is a portrait of contemporary rural Iowa, but it is also more that that. It shows what is happening in many rural and out-of-the-way communities all over the United States, where people find ways to get by in the wake of closing factories and the demise of family farms. Taken by a true insider who has lived in Iowa his entire life, Frazier’s photographs are rich in emotion and give expression to the hopes and desires of the people who remain, whose needs and wants are complicated by the economic realities remaking rural America. Poetic and dark but illuminated with flashes of insight, Frazier’s stunning images evoke the brilliance of Robert Frank’s The Americans.

To view an image gallery, click here.