Immediate Struggles

This superb historical and ethnographic study of the political economy of the Vega Baja region of Spain, one of the European Union's "e;Regional Economies,"e; takes up the difficult question of how to understand the growing alienation ordinary working people feel in the face of globalization. Combining rich oral histories with a sophisticated and nuanced structural understanding of changing political economies, the authors examine the growing divide between government and its citizens in a region that has in the last four decades been transformed from a primarily agricultural economy to a primarily industrial one. Offering a new form of ethnography appropriate for the study of suprastate polities and a globalized economy, Immediate Struggles contributes to our understanding of one region as well as the way we think about changing class relations, modes of production, and cultural practices in a newly emerging Europe. The authors also consider how phenomena such as the "e;informal economy"e; and "e;black market"e; are not marginal to the normal operation of state and economic institutions but are intertwined with both.