Driving the State - by Dolores M Byrnes

About the Book

In her absorbing ethnography of the everyday practice of public policy, Dolores M. Byrnes focuses on Mi Comunidad, a job-creation program founded in 1996 by Vicente Fox when he was governor of Guanajuato. This program was intended to reduce migration...

Book Synopsis

In her absorbing ethnography of the everyday practice of public policy, Dolores M. Byrnes focuses on Mi Comunidad, a job-creation program founded in 1996 by Vicente Fox when he was governor of Guanajuato. This program was intended to reduce migration and became an important source of empowerment for small businesses in rural Mexico. A significant aspect of the program is the way it encourages former residents who have successfully migrated to the United States to invest in the maquilas back home. Byrnes's close look at policy implementation reveals changing relationships between families and the state.

Working as a volunteer in Mi Comunidad, Byrnes attempted to understand how the program worked. As she traveled from site to site with the two female state employees who implemented the program's policies, she saw that program practices reproduced middle-class values rather than female solidarity. In spite of this, she argues for the potential of female professional power, with implications for democracy and social justice. Perhaps most interesting of all, Byrnes portrays the formation of nonborder maquilas in rich detail and shows how government employees at the local level personally engage in "driving the state."

Review Quotes

A welcome contribution to our discipline: a local level and personal analysis of everyday practices of state employees in the implementation of public policy. The book focuses on Mi Comunidad, a state program Vicente Fox, now president of Mexico, founded in 1996 when he was governor of Guanajuato.... Byrnes's examination must be applauded in that it moves beyond current scholarship on several important points. Most studies on maquila industry center on international border maquilas, especially along the Mexico-United States border. By honing in on Mi Comunidad in Guanajuato in Central Mexico, Driving the State alerts the readers that maquilas exist outside of the border context, and, more importantly, offers new, broader, and different insights for scholarship analyzing maquilas and, indeed, also for border and migration studies. Simultaneously, this study of a state within the Republic of Mexico foregrounds Mexico's federalism, focusing on the relative power of one state rather than a limited centralist perspective that still characterizes much of the analysis on Mexican politics and citizens.

The work of Byrnes remains a valuable anthropological resource, which both documents policy orientations in a neo-liberal period and exemplifies the interplay between writing ethnography and invoking the vocabulary of metaphors. It also suggests some fruitful potential for cross-disciplinary research between the anthropology of development and political science.

About the Author

Dolores M. Byrnes is a Lecturer at Colgate University.