Not Ours Alone

Explores how members of Guanajuato's Santa Fe Cooperative, Mexico's cooperatively owned silver mine, give meaning to their labor in an era of globalization and neoliberalism. This work analyzes the cooperative's practices and the importance of patrimonio in their understanding of work, kinship, and morality.

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Elizabeth Ferry explores how members of the Santa Fe Cooperative, a silver mine in Mexico, give meaning to their labor in an era of rampant globalization. She analyzes the cooperative's practices and the importance of patrimonio (patrimony) in their understanding of work, tradition, and community. More specifically, she argues that patrimonio, a belief that certain resources are inalienable possessions of a local collective passed down to subsequent generations, has shaped and sustained the cooperative's sense of identity.