This dissertation focuses on the impacts of US-Mexican state-level restructuring – particularly the liberalization of corn – on the lives of Zapotec maize farmers in San Juan Guelavía, Oaxaca. While demonstrating how neoliberal policies such as NAFTA emerged through a long history of the structural abandonment of southern Mexico, this study shows that current state-level disinvestment in productivity, corruption, migration, and constant infusion of commercial products, along with environmental challenges such as drought, are rapidly changing the conditions of corn production and consumption throughout Mexico's rural South. I argue growing inequalities, particularly between individual family resources, including social resources such as access to education and migration networks to subsidize the rising costs and risks of production and diminishing returns, differentially shape the ability of Guelavíans to respond to the "crisis of corn harvests" and undermine the self-governance of communities traditionally based on ^{usos y costumbres}.

Unlike many studies of rural Mexican communities, I assert that much of this inequality has roots in the establishment of the ejidos, which, despite embodying the Mexican Revolutionary ideals of communal land management, introduced legal institutions and unequal access to good land within the community, leading to unending opportunities for strife. Now, patterns of faltering corn production and uneven access to social and economic capital to meet the challenges of production closely match these patterns of inequitable land distribution.

I show how as Guelavíans confront a deepening integration of the cash economy and increasing loss of self-sufficiency, they struggle to reconcile a conflict between two moral economies – one based on traditional reciprocity, Guelaguetza, and another based on the "puro dinero" of the global market – within a cultural system of meaning that is deeply ambivalent about the possible outcomes of their responses. Contrasting with studies that examine the role of traditional indigenous institutions in confronting or resisting globalization forces, this study instead shows how it is precisely such institutions that have become points of contention, and emphasizes how community members are attempting to create new opportunities and to define a new moral economy as they try to balance lives lived in "two worlds" located somewhere south of hope.