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The Mexican economy has moved to an outward growth model that has resulted in a spatial restructuring of manufacturing activities. This transformation has allowed the incorporation of the regional economy, in which the local and the global interact to promote the expansion and well-being of the localities. The general objective of this paper is to describe the performance of manufacturing in Mexico through its regional composition based on total factor productivity (TFP) in the period 1993-2018. The applied methodology is the Solow Residual model with a Cobb-Douglas production function with constant marginal returns to analyze the sources of growth. The results show regional asymmetries in TFP growth, on the one hand, the northern border and central-north regions register significant growth and, on the other, the central and southern regions have lagged due to inefficient performance that has resulted in a limited productivity performance of Mexican manufactures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cultural and institutional centralism has characterized the development of rural and liminal regions of Mexico, entailing a prolonged and generalized neglect towards historiographic narration of the Northern region. The reconstruction of its social dimension has been picked up through the work of local historians; among a few, Ricardo Elizondo Elizondo (1950-2013) stands out thanks to his literary work, in which his historiographic research is conveyed through microhistory-related fiction. Thus, this research paper suggests an approximation to the Mexican Northwest microhistory between the end of the revolutionary conflicts and the rise of neoliberal politics, following the trace marked by Elizondo's coral novel Narcedalia piedrotas (1993) and reconstructing the relation existing between historical context and literary narrative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discourse theory is useful for understanding the creation of borders, whether material or imaginary. This paper addresses three situations on Mexico's southern border between 2000 and 2015 in which elements of discourse theory may be applied. The outcomes were the following: 1) correlations may be made between the elements of the discourse moving from the northern to the southern border, but not in the opposite direction; 2) the process of securitising the discourse about migrants is continuous, and new securitising elements are regularly added; 3) an "elastic borders" phenomenon exists, where borders extend or retract, thereby creating new border regions; and 4) discourses around the southern border are constructed with more pejorative elements than the northern, despite the fact that crime rates are higher in the north. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes processes of interaction, tension, conflict and economic interests in one of the major border areas between Mexico and Guatemala. Informal transborder trade involves several actors who have been building these processes pursuant to agency initiatives. From a conceptual perspective, supported by the dialectical relationship between the notions of a border the behavior of transborder actors, it is concluded that in the study area, an informal border-trade integration process has developed and its actors transcend the border, rendering that border permissive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]