¿This book focuses on the migration strategies of Chinese women who travel to Mexico City in search of opportunities and survival. Specifically, it explores the experiences and contributions of women who have placed themselves within the local and conflictive networks of Mexico City¿s downtown street markets (particularly in Tepito), where they work as suppliers and petty vendors of inexpensive products made in China (specifically in Yiwu). Street markets are the vital nodes of Mexican ¿popular¿ economy (economía popular), but the people that work and live among them have a long history of marginalization in relation to formal economic networks in Mexico City. Despite the difficult conditions of these spaces, in the last three decades they have become a new source of economic opportunities and labor market access for Chinese migrants, particularly for women. Through their commerce, these migrants have introduced new commodities and new trade dynamics into these markets, which are thereby transformed into alternative spaces of globalization.

Ximena Alba Villalever earned her PhD in Anthropology from the Institute for Latin American Studies of the Free University of Berlin, Germany. Her research interests revolve around gender, migration, inequality and globalization. She has researched Chinese migration to Mexico for more than a decade. More recently, she has turned her sight to processes of forced migration and organized violence in Mexico. She is currently working as a Postdoctoral Fellow in a project founded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft in the Institute for Latin American Studies of the Free University of Berlin.

Part One: Chinese women in Mexican popular markets, starting with small scale processes of globalization.- 1 The networking components of street markets and 'popular' economy.- 1.1 Locating Tepito and its ramifications, deconstructing the 'centre'.- 1.2 Tepiteñes and spaces of opportunities, intersectional spectrums.- 1.3 Blended spaces: migration and commerce in Tepito.- 2 Made in Yiwu, to Tepito.- 2.1 Of bullet trains and hair garments, experiencing Yiwu.- 2.2 Blended spaces: migration, commerce and gender in Yiwu.- Conclusions.- Part Two: Herstories of migration, building spaces of opportunities.- 3 Building subjectivities in systematic inequality.- 3.1 The feminization of Chinese migration patterns, causes and effects.- 3.2 Growing up in a Chinese jia. What is the place of women?.- 3.3 Defying social constructions of gender. Migration, marriage and work.- 4 Mexico, land of opportunities? Migration as a search for survival and social mobility.- 4.1 The paradoxes of development. Education, employment and origin, indicators of inequality.- 4.2 Building networks between Mexico and China, strategies of migration and work.- 4.3 Constructing spaces of opportunities: transversal articulations between commerce and migration.- Conclusions.-Part Three: Drafting alternative spaces of globalization.- 5 From transnational urban formations to global cities.- 5.1 What are alternative spaces of globalization?.- 5.2 Constructing cities through belonging: bringing gender in.- 5.3 Vulnerabilities and resistances in the city, building networks of trust between guanxi and comadrazgo.- 6 The place of women as actors of transnational formations.- 6.1 Transnational motherhoods.- 6.2 Building transnational family businesses.- 6.3 Building bridges from space to place: ambivalent constructions of otherness, migration and discrimination.- 6.4 Building alternatives to survival and growth.- Conclusions.