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Introduction: the (semi-)informal economy and tourism in Mexico -- Wasted lives? Aspirations of the vendors -- Levels of contentment among the beach vendors -- The family legacy of the beach vendors -- Globalization and the increase of beach vendors -- De facto residential apartheid -- Indigenous vendors -- Women vendors

Based on the life histories of 166 beach vendors in three Mexican tourist centers-men and women whose income-generating activities form part of the informal or semi-informal economy-Economic Life of Mexican Beach Vendors explores their educational and employment aspirations and their family connections to vending. It also addresses how the vendors have been affected by the current economic recession, their residential segregation in neighborhoods far from the tourist zones, and the special cases of indigenous and of women vendors.

Herstories : women and work -- Gender and Mexican migration -- Concepts in the study of migration -- Women's migration to Colonia Popular -- Consuelo's story -- Doña Consuelo at work -- Anamaría's story -- Anamaría's and Roberto's networks -- Irma's story -- Irma and Raúl's network -- The urban woman and male transnational immigration

"The ladrillera" -- Approaches to the "informal sector" and to the brickmakers of Mexicali -- Petty commodity producers in the informal sector : the peasant adaptation of the brickmakers in Colonia Popular, Mexicali -- "The old brickmaker, 1993" -- "Invisible" women and children workers on the Mexicali brickyards -- "Mexicali brickmaker's wife" -- Gender considerations among the brickmakers -- "Brickmaker's daughter, brickmaker's wife" -- The heterogeneity of subsidies to the capitalist system : the case of the garbage pickers -- Are the brickmakers counterhegemonic? -- "Don Rafael's desire

In the center of the corporate agricultural regime is the pesticide-industrial complex which is part of the current hegemonic order in the reproduction of capitalism. There are quasi-counterhegemonic movements, however, in the form of Integrated Pest Management and a fully counterhegemonic trend in the form of agroecology. Not only does agroecology as a science and practice eschew the use of pesticides in favor of biological controls developed by Latin American peasants over hundreds of years, but it has become a national and transnational movement led by La Vía Campesina (The Peasant Way) and agroecology has also become institutionalized on both of those levels. I consider cases from Latin America, with an emphasis on Mexico. JEL Classification: Q1, Q16, Q18, Q19

Climate change and neoliberal policies in Mexico have been fomenting migration by campesinos and their sons. This migration is primarily internal, to cities and tourist centers, where migrants engage in informal and semi-informal income-generating activities. Interviews with 32 beach vendors, sons of campesinos, in Cabo San Lucas reflect these two drivers of migration: while most reported that they would like to farm, they identified drought and lack of government aid as major difficulties for farmers in their hometowns.El cambio climático y las políticas neoliberales en México han fomentado la migración de campesinos y sus hijos. Esta migración mayoritariamente interna se dirige a ciudades y centros turísticos, donde los migrantes participan en actividades informales y semiformales para generar ingresos. Entrevistas con 32 vendedores de playa en Cabo San Lucas, todos ellos hijos de campesinos, reflejan el efecto de los mencionados impulsores migración: aunque la mayoría de los entrevistados informó que le gustaría cultivar sus tierras, la sequía y la falta de apoyo gubernamental se mencionaron como dos grandes obstáculos a la agricultura en sus lugares de origen.

It is argued that informalization (used primarily to understand economic dynamics in the Global South) and precarization (used primarily in the analysis of the labor market in the Global North) are in the process of becoming identical phenomena and are both related to the expansion of the reserve army of labor. Insights from Marx are useful in understand both processes, especially his concepts of the value of labor, of formal subsumption vs. real subsumption, and of absolute vs. relative surplus value. The vast expansion and globalization of the labor force has fostered the trend toward a reversion to formal subsumption and facilitated the recommodification of labor.

Under capitalism, the homeless are an oppressed and an exploited class. They are exploited sometimes as part of what Marx identifies as the lower reaches of the surplus labor force, but most usually through their commodification. They are subject to Althusser's repressive and ideological state apparatuses. The long-term and recurrent homeless are commodified by being a source of both money-making employment and power among the police, the legal system, and psychiatrists and social workers. JEL Classifications: B51, J68, O18

In the wake of neoliberal reforms that devastated the country, Mexico and the World Bank converged on providing at least two social programs in the guise of "humanitarian" capitalism. Progresa, also known as Oportunidades and more recently Prospera, involves a workfare-based cash transfer program aimed at enhancing the human capital of future generations. The program has been criticized for its exploitation of the work of mothers. Seguro Popular involves extending basic health care to those employed in the informal economy. Both, with all their weaknesses and exploitative aspects, serve the function of providing skills and enhanced health status to the subproletariat in the hope that a competitive formal economy will expand and employ them; they are also intended to mute social protest.A raíz de las reformas neoliberales que devastaron el país, México y el Banco Mundial acordaron la creación de por lo menos dos programas sociales disfrazados como capitalismo "humanitario." Progresa, también conocido como Oportunidades y más recientemente Prospera, es un programa de asistencia de transferencia de efectivo dirigido a mejorar el capital humano de futuras generaciones, y ha sido criticado por explotar el trabajo materno. El Seguro Popular extiende servicios de atención de salud básica a los empleados en la economía informal. Ambos, con todas sus debilidades y características explotadoras, tienen por objeto mejorar las habilidades y estado de salud del sub-proletariado, con la esperanza de que se amplíe una economía competitiva formal que los emplee. También buscan silenciar las protestas sociales.