Cultural Geography

repeatedly heard blaming CARICOM and the

regional movement for its failure to address their

national economic, political and social problems,

problems for which they have no effective

resolution at the national scale.

Embedded within this discourse of economic

competitiveness and global participation, how-

ever, is also a discourse of anti-imperialism and

a struggle for independence. For small dependent

states, regionalism has been a means to protect

and extend economic and political independence

in an increasingly neoliberal global economy. In

the 1980s, in the context of mounting debts,

growing internationalization of production, and

US military intervention, independence in the

region was increasingly defined in terms of

strengthening links with global powers other

than Europe. The signing of the Caribbean Basin

Initiative (CBI) with the US in 1982 promised a

preferential package of trade, investment and aid

that tied the region much more closely to the

American political economy. Introduced in 1983,

the CARICOM logo celebrates independence, at

the same time announcing the arrival on the

global stage of the Caribbean as a region made

newly independent and unconstrained by the

forces of British colonialism. In the context of

growing fears about being left out of an increas-

ingly competitive and integrated global econ-

omy, regionalism continues to be invoked as the

solution to the region’s marginalization and as a

source of independence in an increasingly inter-

dependent global economy (Conway, 1998;

Elbow, 1997).

Parallel to concerns about economic self-

reliance is also a desire to right historic wrongs,

which in an exercise of domination have divided

the peoples of the region. Writing about the

history of regionalism in the Caribbean, Manuel

Zapata Olivella suggests:

the Americas and the Caribbean have been arbitrarily

divided up in accordance with the whims of Popes,

empires, geographers and politicians ... seen as sepa-

rate economic units, split up in accordance with the

interests of those who were unaware of the existence of

ecological ties between our ancient regions, ethnic

groups and civilizations. (1999: 165)

Here Olivella challenges the perception that

nations in the Caribbean are the natural geograp-

hic containers of Caribbean culture, politics and

economics. With other proponents of integration,

he considers regionalism to be a strategy of post-

colonial resistance, a strategic scale-jump, neces-

sary for the fulfillment of a historical destiny

denied to Caribbean peoples by the violent inter-

ruption of colonialism. CARICOM retrieves this

shared cultural history to convey a common

ground upon which regionalism can be promoted

as the right and fitting conclusion to centuries

of displacement, domination and separation. The

double play on chains, as both links between

islands and graphic reminders of enslavement

and bondage, plainly marks the significance of

the anti-colonial struggle underlying Caribbean

regionalism. Jumping up to the scale of the

region can therefore be interpreted as an attempt

to find a spatial resolution to the twin forces of

colonial domination and global competition.

Again, however, it is an ambivalent process that

revives memories of economic exclusion and

discourses of subordination at the same time as

promising a neoliberal future based on global

economic participation. On the one hand the

appeal to this collective history is an appropria-

tion and depoliticization of a radical historical

memory. On the other hand, however, the articu-

lation of the anti-colonial discourse into ideolo-

gies of neoliberal economic growth revives the

memory and inserts it into the contemporary

period where struggles against marginalization

and domination are constantly made and remade.

While the logo of Caribbean unity culturally

constructs a sense of a unified economic region,

it contains within it traces of alternative and

often conflicting readings of regional space and

belonging. Unraveling the cultural, political

and economic processes producing scales draws

attention to these alternative scriptings, and high-

lights potential fissures or moments of political

resistance within the play on unity. The empha-

sis on a history of colonialism in the Caribbean

keeps alive a collective spirit of resistance that

many non-governmental organizations are now

utilizing to hold CARICOM accountable for its

neoliberal development policies. As scale-

jumping attempts to transform the spaces in

which economies are organized, it simultane-

ously transforms the spaces of everyday life and

creates new opportunities for the articulation of

collective demands at a scale other than the

nation-state. In the next section, we examine in

detail how non-state, non-corporate actors are

also able to jump scales. Like many groups

within the Caribbean, Mexican migrants are

themselves reworking the transborder space of

the US–Mexico border on their own terms.

FINDING AGENCY IN

SCALE-JUMPING:

CROSSING LA FRONTERA

The caption on the cultural artifact in Figure 26.3

may be translated as follows:

492 GEOPOLITICAL CULTURES

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