9404609 Cook This project involves a cultural anthropologist from the University of Connecticut studying the social relations, and use of capital in manufacturing enterprises in the small-scale artisan brick industry of the Mexico-Texas border. Using techniques of in-depth interviews with owners, managers and brick workers, the project will try to understand how the low- technology Mexican industry survives and co-exists alongside the heavily capitalized and more high technology US industry. The project will test alternative theoretical explanations for the coexistence of these firms, analyzing theories drawn from literature glossed as modernization, subsumption, flexible accumulation, endo-accumulation, and technical/applied. Different theoretical approaches predict different outcomes for the interaction of the artisan-type brick works with industrial-type works. This research is important because the existence of NAFTA will expand cross-border economic relations. Our understanding will be advanced by studying how the two economic styles relate to each other, not from a simple perspective that the more heavily capitalized North American side will dominate the exchange, but from the perspective of seeing what has developed in one industry over time as a case study.
