My study proposes to examine how state, business, and citizen actors are influencing the recent cross-national collaborations that created an export textile zone called Nustart in Morelos, Mexico. I will do so by asking how these actors shaped the conditions and alliances through which Nustart became possible and how groups’ cross-national and national ties and access to information inform their ongoing concerns and demands regarding Nustart. My objective is to show how historically grounded, local social relations and cross-national, inter-local alliances shape national and international production strategies and policies. By showing how sociopolitical relations in Morelos, Mexico are shaping the federal government’s practices of political-economic consolidation, I will contribute to recent scholarship contesting ‘corporatist’ analyses of Mexican State formation. My research also extends these critiques by asking how Morelenses’ relations with actors outside of Mexico reconfigure their interests and bargaining power vis-à-vis federal government actors. Examining national economic initiatives as woven from local and cross-national group tactics of alliance-building, exclusion, and resistance will challenge popular conceptions of NAFTA as a set of ‘global’ production strategies and state policies that ‘cause’ local patterns of social organization.