ARTICLES Analiese M. Richard University of the Pacific Mediating Dilemmas: Local NGOs and Rural Development in Neoliberal Mexico Analysis of the role of NGOs as mediators of change may yield important theoretical insights into the processes by which neoliberalizing projects become embedded in and consequently transformed by specific settings. In recent decades, NGOs have played an important role in mediating intertwined and often contradictory processes of political and economic liberalization in countries around the globe. However, changes to the political context in which NGOs work have altered the nature of the interventions these groups make. This article examines how members of a Mexican NGO community centered in the provincial city of Tulancingo, Hidalgo, rework cultural idioms of mediation to position themselves as legitimate intermediaries linking rural cooperatives, state officials, international donors, and global activist networks. Their strategies for confronting their own entrapment in processes of structural reform illuminate the constraints faced by Southern activists in negotiating possibilities for social change after the Washington Consensus. They also underline the importance of renewed attention to the role of intermediaries in enabling and enacting structural change. [Nongovernmental organizations (NGOs); neoliberalism; intermediary; Mexico; development] And thus it is necessary to begin again, and again, in the middle of things. [Anna Tsing 2005: 2] Nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) have become key mediators of political, economic, and social change in the post-Washington Consensus era. While devel- opment experts have lauded NGOs as efficient conduits for aid, and pointed to the NGO “boom” as an indicator of democratizing civil societies, anthropologists have focused on the myriad ways NGOs help to remake forms of social organization and government. Analysis of the role of NGOs as mediators of change may yield impor- tant theoretical insights into the processes by which neoliberalizing projects become embedded in and consequently transformed by specific settings. Earlier anthropolog- ical theories of mediation assumed a nation-state frame, seeking to explain how local communities were incorporated into postcolonial nation-building projects via the work of cultural intermediaries. Although neoliberal ideologies have advocated the elimination of intermediaries in order to “free” individuals to interact in the market- place, in practice neoliberalizing projects have relied upon the cultural knowledge and practices of a variety of actors to construct and consolidate new modes of regulation in specific settings (Harvey 2005; Brenner and Theodore 2002; Tsing 2005). In Latin America and elsewhere, NGOs have increasingly been called upon to fill in for the PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review, Vol. 32, Number 2, pps. 166–194. ISSN 1081-6976, electronic ISSN 1555-2934. C  2009 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/j.1555-2934.2009.01040.x.