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Cover -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Contents -- Series Editors' Preface -- List of Abbreviations -- List of Figures and Table -- Acknowledgements -- Chapter 1 Introduction -- A View from Motul, Yucatán -- Old Frontier/New Frontier -- Tales of Boom-to-Bust: Green Gold and Blue Jeans -- Producing Mayaland -- Instances of Magic -- Mobilizing Lefebvre's Triad -- Capturing the Production of Space -- Chapter Outline -- Notes -- Chapter 2 Postcolonizing Lefebvre? -- Navigating Eurocentrism -- The Rawness of Capitalism -- Global but not universal -- A colonial matrix of power -- A Postcolonial Spatial Approach -- Everyday Life -- A Planetary Urban Fabric -- Notes -- Chapter 3 Maquiladora Paradise -- The "Backward South" -- The Assets -- The geographically privileged and abundant tropics -- The dutiful worker -- A road paved for business -- No hurdles on the road -- "Yucatán offers good living"18 -- New World Exoticism -- Maquiladora paradises -- The taming and commodification of exotic nature -- Traces of Abstract Space -- Notes -- Chapter 4 The Magical Maya -- Dutiful Mayan Workers -- Myths of maquila bodies -- Mayan Essence -- Ancient glory, modern decay -- Transfiguration: from ambivalent Indio to oscillating mestizo -- Cosmic Race: The Demise of the Indio Through Abstract Space? -- Notes -- Chapter 5 The Zone -- The Factory -- Montgomery industries -- The Montgomery "maquiladores" -- A matter of destiny: the hands that have always bled -- Sheltering Capitalism -- Tricks in space and time: traveling the world with the made in Mexico brand -- Footloose: when the logic of exception is the norm -- Answering the need for homogenous difference -- Coloniality of Power and Abstractions at Work -- Notes -- Chapter 6 The Maquila Leftovers -- Invisible Remnants -- Industrial ghosts -- White elephants -- Blue moon -- A Lesser Evil -- Cyclical Relics.

This article follows the life story of Lety, an ex-maquiladora worker from the village of El Refugio in Yucatán, the south of Mexico, from the 1980s until the present in a "global intimate" account. Against the background of two cycles of capital accumulation (i.e., henequen fiber production and a maquiladora chapter), the cross-scalar and historical examination I offer here relies on discourse analysis of governmental reports and state development plans as well as ethnographic research. Operationalizing a feminist-Lefebvrean toolkit, I reflect on how the concepts of abstract space, everyday life, and differential space are challenged or complemented by the global intimate. Through this, the paper explores how the fabric of capitalist urbanization unfolded in the everyday: how it was created, re-created, and challenged. Three main things are highlighted in this analysis: (1) how the space of capitalism was produced at the intersection of materiality, discourse, and lived experience; (2) the contradictions that arise between abstract space and everyday life; and (3) the potentialities of what I refer to as intimate spaces of difference. I conclude with a discussion of how the space of capitalism was challenged by Lety through these intimate spaces of difference, reflecting on the importance of building more theoretical bridges between critical urban theory and feminist scholarship.

The land of the Magical Maya is a mythical region in the south of Mexico where there are enigmatic creatures such as cosmic Indios, vultures, ghosts, white elephants, pineapples, swallows, and flamingos; and wondrous places like cenotes, pyramids, blue moons, old frontiers, new frontiers, and paradise-Zones. In the 1980s, henequen, the agro-based industry that had sustained Yucatán since the 19th century, was close to collapsing. With a sense of urgency, the state government looked for alternatives to diversify the economy in an attempt to prevent the effects of mass unemployment. Almost by chance, but with the help of state intervention, the maquiladora industry filled the gap left by the old system and boomed between 1990 and 2001, followed by a bust, and then a decline. Drawing on fieldwork, and with an analysis that starts with abstractions and zooms in to the level of the everyday, this thesis tells a tale at different scales. This is the story of how people in the city of Motul experienced the rise and decline of Montgomery Industries, the most important maquiladora in the state. There are glimpses into how people's lives changed and how their city transformed; how the state built infrastructural veins to support the maquiladora industry; and how the government attempted to sell the idea of Yucatán as an exotic, maquiladora paradise where Magical Mayas await. This is also a bigger tale about the relationship between colonial legacies, urbanization, and global capitalism. Through instances of magic, capitalism exists in tension between its tendency to homogenize and its propensity to thrive in differentiation. Capitalism in Yucatán is articulated via the Imperial South through processes of racialization and colonization. Urbanization unfolds in tension between invisibility and visibility. This work contributes to the third wave of Lefebvrian thought, offers insights to the continuous debate of the urban question, advances the project of postcolonial urban studies, and adds to the body of maquiladora studies.