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The eighteenth- and nineteenth-century fur trade in the United States and Canada that sent hundreds of thousands of furs to Europe and China relied on “Cheap Labor” and the abundance of “Cheap Raw Materials,” that is to say, living beings such as sea otter, land otter, beaver, and seals. Native American labor, procured by and paid through trade goods in a kind of “putting out” piece-rate system, was cheap partially because their lives were maintained/reproduced through traditional agricultural or hunting and gathering economies. The commodification of fur-bearing animals led to their sharp decline and in some cases near extinction. Cheap labor and cheap living beings interacted dynamically in unison to enable capital accumulation under mercantile capitalism. At the very end of the nineteenth century, fur farming as a petty capitalist enterprise became common in Canada and the United States, and more recently has expanded greatly in China.

Although there have been many articles and books on street vendors, ambulant and fixed, around the world, and many works written about them in Mexico, little has been done on the ubiquitous ambulant beach vendors in tourist centers.

This paper offers an analysis of the backgrounds, levels of contentment, and aspirations of 25 women beach vendors interviewed in Acapulco in 2010.

A third of the women beach vendors had fathers who were peasants, and others had grandparents who were. Thus the article shows light on the fate of some of the offspring of a dispossessed peasantry. Far more than half of the women vendors were very content with their self-employment vending wares on the beach, a few because they could set their own hours, and a few because they had no boss. Other’s contentment was linked to the fact that they could help support their children. Part of this help meant keeping them in school. This was true whether the women were married, widowed, or abandoned. Not all were content, however, and this underscores the importance of their income to their households. Most of the women, though not all, had aspirations for more education and better work, whether in the formal or the informal economy.

The women can be seen as marginalized because of their current poverty, and many because of past poverty leading to a lack of educational opportunities when they were young. They value education for their children.

To summarize the shocks and stresses that peasants in Mexico have been subjected to since the 1940s and to examine the responses of sons of peasants working as semi-informal beach vendors in Cabo San Lucas as to what they define as the worst problems of the peasantry in their hometowns.

This chapter offers an analysis of the responses of 32 sons of peasants interviewed on Medano Beach in Cabo San Lucas in October of 2012 partially as concerns whether they would like to be peasants themselves and as to what they define as the worst problems of the peasantry in their hometowns.

Twenty-five of the thirty-two vendors interviewed would be happy to be peasants. According to all of the vendors, the overwhelming problems facing the peasantry were primarily droughts or floods (related to climate change) and lack of government aid (related to neoliberalization).

The peasantry in Mexico is being and has been marginalized both by a number of stresses and shocks, currently identified by some of those at risk as factors related to climate change and neoliberalization.

In the case of migration to new destinations where the immigration stream from a particular locale is of little historical depth, it can be asked what people make up ego's adaptation network. It is argued here that networks of reciprocal exchange fortified by the creation of compadrazgo relationships (ritual kinship ties) provide the new immigrant with economic and affective benefits.

Although the theory of cumulative causation posits a “saturation point” at which all members of a rural community who are potential transnational migrants will have migrated, in the case of dynamic out-migration centers, this saturation point may never be reached. This is because growth centers – the growth often having been propelled by wages and remittances of prior migrants – attract in-migrants from poorer, less dynamic, surrounding ranchos that eventually become incorporated in transnational migration networks of the more dynamic rancho. It is also due to intermarriage as well as friendship and ritual kinship ties between members of the core rancho and surrounding ranchos.

This chapter aims to contribute to the study of social protests around the world and particularly in Latin America during the 1960s and 1970s, with a focus on an Argentinean case. Throughout these years, Argentina like many other Latin American societies witnessed the growth and development of intense social and political struggles in concert with the armed insurgency. Did workers or other popular social sectors support guerrilla organizations in Argentina? What was the interconnection between working-class and armed insurgent struggle? This chapter examines these liaisons by studying the case of an industrial city that has been identified to be a paradigm of labor radicalization and political violence in Argentina—Villa Constitución. Through the reanalysis of documents and sources as well as interviews, we discuss established interpretations on armed and labor struggles that reveal a broader heterogeneity in the forms of social support to revolutionary violence. Solidarity among workers and armed militants appears in (1) the actions of militant workers at their workplaces, and (2) the armed actions organized by militants in support of worker’s fights.” These two groups reinforced each other's activism. But, by no means can we directly deduct from this that rank and file workers immediately identified their strikes with ideologically revolutionary objectives.