Agency, Mobility, and Constraint in Neoliberal Fiction of Female Labor

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. See Harvey 160–65.

2. Fuentes guardedly supported NAFTA, while voicing concerns about US cultural imperialism and its long history of xenophobia toward Mexico across The Crystal Frontier and his nonfiction writings on the subject (Van Delden 127–28).

3. In Marxist philosophy a comprador bourgeoisie is a local ownership class in a historically underdeveloped country that economically benefits from directing its country’s economy to the benefit of powerful foreign or multinational economic entities.

4. The real-world Reich has gone on in the years since the Clinton administration and Fuentes’s death to become a vociferous critic of neoliberal economic policy across numerous books, op-eds, and social media contributions.

5. Or “maquiladoras” –the numerous foreign-owned or financed factories along the Mexican side of the border taking advantage of low labor costs to produce tariff-free export goods, mostly destined for the US or Canada.

6. Take, for instance, the propagandistic late Cold War US fixation on long queues for bread or bananas in the former Soviet Union (contrasted with the abundance of the US shopping mall) and the exuberant mass media attention paid to the opening of the first McDonald’s restaurant in the USSR in 1990.

7. Throughout the story, the narrator makes use of a number of linguistic elisions, leaving off articles and the verb is/are/were in particular. This helps convey a sense of how harried and over-worked is the basic tenor of his life—in which he has no real prospect of ever getting ahead socio-economically.