An exploration in the veiling of power: the politics of development in rural West Mexico

This article explores the politics of a dairy development project in West Mexico. The project was a response to foreign competition that resulted from the opening of the Mexican economy and sought to organize small-scale dairy farmers to produce higher-quality milk with lower production costs. Local and outside elites who initiated this project embraced a Weberian notion of institutional rationality that cast all development problems as technical--a move that veiled dominant modes of politics and power. Analysis centers on three domains of discourse and practice--milk quality, traditional culture, and communication--that together reveal the contradictions between project goals and local structures of power, patronage, and control that reproduced existing class cleavages and forms of domination.