In northern Mexico, the extraction of beach pebbles serves as the primary source of income for many Indigenous workers who constitute an invisible workforce employed in the informal economy. The importation of natural resources from Mexico to address water scarcity and arid landscapes at the time of climate change in the United States has fostered new forms of labour precarity in the local communities where this resource is extracted. Christian Zlolniski analyses the relationship between environmental exploitation and labour precarity in the ‘green economy.’ Geographical isolation, unregulated workspaces, and natural environments intersect to exacerbate labour precarity in this extractive industry. As the beach rocks move along this commodity chain, there is a gradual alienation of nature, wherein the labour and environmental impacts of these extractive activities are obscured. The result is a transfiguration process that delineates a transnational geography of violence against nature as well as the bodies of the workers employed in this sector.


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Speaker

Christian Zlolniski is professor of anthropology at the University of Texas at Arlington (UTA). He obtained his PhD in anthropology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His research interests focus on economic globalisation, work, and transnational migration, with a regional focus on the U.S.-Mexico border. He is the author of Made in Baja: The Lives of Farmworkers and Growers behind Mexico’s Transnational Agricultural Boom (University of California Press 2019), which examines the economic, social, and ecological effects of export agriculture on Baja California. He is also the author of Janitors, Street Vendors and Activists: The Lives of Mexican Immigrants in Silicon Valley (UC Press 2006). He is a research fellow at the Centre for Mexican American Studies at UTA, where he served as director from 2014 to 2022. Since 2020, he has been chief editor of the journal Mexican Studies/ Estudios Mexicanos published by University of California Press.