The Neoliberal Project and Governmentality in Rural Mexico: Emergent Farmer Organization in the Michoacán Highlands

This article explores the neoliberal project in the context of Mexico's new agrarian reform and the disjuncture between neoliberal ideals and on-the-ground reality. This is examined through the case of small-scale dairy farmers in northwestern Michoacán as they struggle to understand their relationship with a medium-scale dairy processor who is urging them to organize in the name of quality. This activity is consistent with the position of the neoliberal state that advocates farmer organization and new production techniques as the solution to problems of quality, efficiency, productivity, and competitiveness—concepts articulated in new ways in Mexico by transnational corporations and the agrarian policies of the state. Framed by the Foucauldian concept of governmentality, this article examines the complex, hierarchical web of state agents and their practices through which these new neoliberal concepts and practices produce and transform markets, people, and everyday relations at the local level in intended and unintended ways. Within this web, emergent contradictions between state agents, farmers, and processors reveal the failure of the neoliberal agenda as it is being implemented in the Mexican context.