How have scarcity and abundance shaped the borderlands? The region's poverty--manifested  in the millions of residents who follow subsistence regimens--forces scholars to consider how consumer culture, now considered the dominant form of culture worldwide, works even within economies of scarcity. The boom in assembly plants, cities, and contraband --each central to mature consumer cultures--emerges out of an abundance of natural resources, investment capital, entrepreneurial energy, and tractable labor. This conference aims to bring the borderlands, the American southwest, and the Mexican North to the attention of scholars in history, anthropology, sociology, and geography who study consumer capitalism and culture.  By the same token, it also seeks to show how the imperatives of consumption have shaped the borderlands.  In doing so, it will complicate our understandings of both scarcity and abundance.

The presentations ranged widely, from analysis of the consumerist strains underlying the nineteenth-century ideology of ‘manifest destiny,’ to exploration of markets for leisure-time activities and real estate in the United States-Mexico borderlands, to consideration of Mexican migrants as consumers. Most of the presenters straddled the border by addressing such topics as herbal-supplement company OmniLife's transnational sales' strategies, two Mexican brothers' motion picture exhibition circuits a hundred years ago, how Juarenses talk about consumption of imported trash and second-hand goods, the smuggling of narcotics, and the place of a gendered consumer politics in the ongoing struggle to put an end to the murder of Mexican women on the border.