Issue link: http://cp.revolio.com/i/30780
Want to know how “free trade” affects women in Mexico? Follow the corn. The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which went into effect in 1994, was supposed to raise living standards in the U.S., Canada and Mexico, add high-paying jobs to the U.S. economy, improve the environment and build up Mexico into a booming market for U.S. exports. Instead, it has strained the ability of communities to legislate Mujeres de Maiz I BY MARIA MELENDEZ GREW UP IN THE ERA OF SAVE-THE-BLANK CON- servation. As a teenage member of the Sierra Club, I was routinely sent mailings exhorting me to Save the Whales, Save Our Coastlines, Save the Rain Forest, against toxic industries, raised prices on medicine, deregulated essential services such as water and led jobs and industries to leave the U.S. Also, it has allowed U.S. agribusiness to dump low-priced corn onto the Mexican market—thus severely hurt- ing small farmers in Mexico. Poet/essayist Maria Melendez followed the corn to Oaxaca to see how “liberalized” trade has brought hardship upon the women of rural Mexico. From The Colors of Nature, edited by Alison H. Deming and Lauret Savoy (Milkweed Editions, 2011). Copyright © 2011 by Maria Melendez. Reprinted with permission from Milkweed Editions (www.milkweed.org). 50 | SPRING 2011 Save the Redwoods. By contrast, the task of opposing the North American Free Trade Agreement during the early ’90s, the years of its signing and ratification, must have seemed a sloganeer’s nightmare: Save us from a rich- getting-richer-and-poor-getting-poorer-world-of-greed- and-destruction was the “liberal” message that reached me, if only dimly, through the political noise being made against NAFTA here and there. But the whole thing just seemed confusing to me. I was suckered by the use of the word free. I was raised to think that free is, always and everywhere, equal to good. Even more confusing, I knew my early 20s self to be a staunch liberal, politically speaking, but proponents of NAFTA www.feminist.org