You would never know the village was there unless you already knew it was there. Driving fast on federal highway #176 you would assume there was an endless flatness of luxuriant green, wild, and uncultivated land all around, an in-between countryside between the towns worth naming along the way. However, if you knew where to look and where to turn, you would see the one-lane, paved road that led to San Pedro Chacabal, comisaría, 1 765 inhabitants (INEGI, 2010). Without access to public transport, most residents had no other choice but to walk the eight kilometres that separated them from the next village, Ucí, in case they needed something as basic as a grocery store. However, if you followed the highway by car, the city of Motul – 23, 240 inhabitants (ibid.) – was only ten minutes away. A regional centre, Motul is the provider of services for the people that do not or cannot travel to Mérida, Yucatán’s capital thirty-one kilometres further on. For the residents of comisarías such as San Pedro Chacabal, Motul is an island of Yucatecan urbanity – a city which serves as a transportation node; hosts secondary and higher education centres; provides access to regional and nationwide retail chains, pharmacies and banks; and, offers “modern” food alternatives such as pizza and hamburgers. Most importantly, Motul is a centre of activity because it supplies jobs. The city is proud to be the home of Montgomery Industries2 – the biggest employer in the municipality (1, 800 workers on the payroll)3 and the leading maquiladora factory in Yucatán.

This article follows the life story of Lety, an ex-maquiladora worker from the village of El Refugio in Yucatán, the south of Mexico, from the 1980s until the present in a “global intimate” account. Against the background of two cycles of capital accumulation (i.e., henequen fiber production and a maquiladora chapter), the cross-scalar and historical examination I offer here relies on discourse analysis of governmental reports and state development plans as well as ethnographic research. Operationalizing a feminist-Lefebvrean toolkit, I reflect on how the concepts of abstract space, everyday life, and differential space are challenged or complemented by the global intimate. Through this, the paper explores how the fabric of capitalist urbanization unfolded in the everyday: how it was created, re-created, and challenged. Three main things are highlighted in this analysis: (1) how the space of capitalism was produced at the intersection of materiality, discourse, and lived experience; (2) the contradictions that arise between abstract space and everyday life; and (3) the potentialities of what I refer to as intimate spaces of difference. I conclude with a discussion of how the space of capitalism was challenged by Lety through these intimate spaces of difference, reflecting on the importance of building more theoretical bridges between critical urban theory and feminist scholarship.

At the intersection of commodity chains and urban research, this paper engages with Bair and Werner’s “disarticulations perspective” through a conversation with Lefebvre’s “production of space.” I argue that this mix can provide a stronger theoretical lens to explore social differentiation, accumulation by dispossession, and uneven development and with this, shed more light on how the uneven geographies of global capitalism are created and reproduced. I develop my argument fixed analytically in Motul, in the southeastern Mexican state of Yucatán, as I explore the changes that the city experienced in the midst of a maquiladora boom-to-bust cycle. Maquiladoras—a type of Export Processing Zone that were meant to replace the state’s dying agro-based economy—arrived to the region in the 1980s and grew exponentially between the 1990s-2000s. With a historical approach, I draw on discourse analysis and ethnography-inspired fieldwork to unpack how the production of maquiladora space—in the form of the New Frontier—came about at the intersection between discourse, materiality, and effects on everyday life. The creation of the New Frontier unfolded within the logic of a global maquiladora architecture but was carried out by local actors through a double movement of homogenization and differentiation.

The land of the Magical Maya is a mythical region in the south of Mexico where there are enigmatic creatures such as cosmic Indios, vultures, ghosts, white elephants, pineapples, swallows, and flamingos; and wondrous places like cenotes, pyramids, blue moons, old frontiers, new frontiers, and paradise-Zones. In the 1980s, henequen, the agro-based industry that had sustained Yucatán since the 19th century, was close to collapsing. With a sense of urgency, the state government looked for alternatives to diversify the economy in an attempt to prevent the effects of mass unemployment. Almost by chance, but with the help of state intervention, the maquiladora industry filled the gap left by the old system and boomed between 1990 and 2001, followed by a bust, and then a decline. Drawing on fieldwork, and with an analysis that starts with abstractions and zooms in to the level of the everyday, this thesis tells a tale at different scales. This is the story of how people in the city of Motul experienced the rise and decline of Montgomery Industries, the most important maquiladora in the state. There are glimpses into how people’s lives changed and how their city transformed; how the state built infrastructural veins to support the maquiladora industry; and how the government attempted to sell the idea of Yucatán as an exotic, maquiladora paradise where Magical Mayas await. This is also a bigger tale about the relationship between colonial legacies, urbanization, and global capitalism. Through instances of magic, capitalism exists in tension between its tendency to homogenize and its propensity to thrive in differentiation. Capitalism in Yucatán is articulated via the Imperial South through processes of racialization and colonization. Urbanization unfolds in tension between invisibility and visibility. This work contributes to the third wave of Lefebvrian thought, offers insights to the continuous debate of the urban question, advances the project of postcolonial urban studies, and adds to the body of maquiladora studies.