Immediate Struggles. People, Power, and Place in Rural Spain

This historical and ethnographic study of the political economy of the Vega Baja region of Spain, one of the European Union´s "Regional Economies," takes up the difficult question of how to understand the growing alienation ordinary working people feel in the face of globalization. Combining rich oral histories with a sophisticated and nuanced structural understanding of changing political economies, the authors examine the growing divide between government and its citizens in a region that has in the last four decades been transformed from a primarily agricultural economy to a primarily industrial one.