Class, Gender and Migration

Return Flows between Mexico and the United States in Times of Crisis

María Eugenia D'Aubeterre Buznego, Alison Elizabeth Lee, María Leticia Rivermar Pérez, María Eugenia D’Aubeterre Buznego

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781138318946
• eBook ISBN: 9780429844973
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Immigration Law
• Index: Law

Using a gender-sensitive political economy approach, this book analyzes the emergence of new migration patterns between Central Mexico and the East Coast of the United States in the last decades of the twentieth century, and return migration during and after the global economic crisis of 2007.

Based on ethnographic research carried out over a decade, details of the lives of women and men from two rural communities reveal how neoliberal economic restructuring led to the deterioration of livelihoods starting in the 1980s. Similar restructuring processes in the United States opened up opportunities for Mexican workers to labor in US industries that relied heavily on undocumented workers to sustain their profits and grow. When the Great Recession hit, in the context of increasingly restrictive immigration policies, some immigrants were more likely to return to Mexico than others. This longitudinal study demonstrates how the interconnections among class and gender are key to understanding who stayed and who returned to Mexico during and after the global economic crisis. Through these case studies, the authors comment more widely on how neoliberalism has affected the livelihoods and aspirations of the working classes.

This book will be of key interest to scholars, students and practitioners in migration studies, gender studies/politics, and more broadly to international relations, anthropology, development studies, and human geography.

1

Understanding accelerated and return migration in Central Mexico

Migration, class and gender

DOI: 10.4324/9780429454196-1

Right now, there is no difference. With the crisis, we are living the same situation, because there is no work here, in Mexico. It is the same there, no work. There is another disadvantage, in a sentimental sense, in an emotional sense, because when you are there, you are thinking, how is my family? Have the children eaten? Is my wife O.K.?

(Marco Antonio, Pahuatlán)

I want to start a business. I have it in mind. But, like I told you, these are moments of crisis. The only thing left to think about is how to make it through the day.

(Ernesto, Zapotitlán Salinas, Puebla¹)

Beginning in 2008, the United States fell into its worst financial crisis since the 1930s. The rapid rise in Mexican migration to the US over the previous decades appeared poised to reverse. Some speculated that the Great Recession would force millions of Mexicans back to their country of origin, a remarkable change for one of the largest economic migration flows in the world. Growing anti-immigrant hostility during and after the crisis along with the soaring numbers of deportations of Mexicans and the exile of their US-born children to Mexico added hundreds of thousands to return flows. By the early 2010s, census data indicated that migration between the two countries had reached net zero and perhaps below: flows leaving Mexico for the US were equal or smaller to those returning to Mexico (Gonzalez-Barrera, 2015; Passel, Cohn, & Gonzalez-Barrera, 2012).

Although the “massive” exodus of Mexicans fleeing the recession never materialized, migratory patterns changed significantly. Some argued that a permanent decline in the need for immigrant labor resulting from the economic crises stemmed flows to the US (Levine, 2015; Villarreal, 2014). The increasing risks to crossing the militarized border may have also deterred some migrants from attempting to cross into the United States (Lee, 2018). Further, households felt the economic impacts of the recession. After a decade of robust growth, remittances fell significantly, recovering to their pre-recession levels in 2016, years after the official end of the crisis (BBVA Bancomer & CONAPO, 2018, p. 126).

This book examines the causes, dynamics and impacts of changing migration flows on Mexico and the United States. However, instead of focusing on migration and return as objects of study in and of themselves, our ethnographically and historically grounded research compels us to view them as symptoms of deeper structural changes on both sides of the US-Mexican border. We step back from the singular shock of the Great Recession and cast our gaze over the last several decades of the twentieth century to analyze several waves of economic and social restructuring that transformed livelihood conditions in Mexico and led to the expulsion of labor from rural localities. Similar processes in the United States remade accumulation regimes on the East Coast now sustained by new waves of immigrant labor from Mexico and Central America.

Through close examination and contextualization of the lives of rural women and men from Central Mexico, we situate the return flow of migrants in a broader historical process of the supply of Mexican labor to US labor markets sustaining the accumulation of capital in different regions for more than 100 years. We explore the process of class formation among rural migrants who insert into labor markets in the US East Coast, exploring the construction of subjectivities shaped by class, gender and US immigration status. From this perspective, migration and return appear as defining features of a new global proletariat.

Our research focuses on return migration in Pahuatlán de Valle and Zapotitlán Salinas in the Mexican state of Puebla located, respectively, in the Northern Sierra and in the southeastern region of the state (see map, Figure 2.1). Based on our long-term ethnographic and survey research in the two towns, we examine the emergence and acceleration of migration followed by the contention of northward flows and increasing returns. We share Bourgois and Schonberg’s vision (2009, p. 318) of the importance of focusing on long-term processes through ethnography with the intent to understand “… the way structural forces operate at the individual everyday level.” Gavin Smith argues that our task as ethnographers involves interpreting people’s self-understanding “in a particular historical setting, so that characterizing those settings in quite rigorous terms becomes an important component of our work” (1999, p. 9). Using a framework he calls “historical realism,” Smith challenges ethnographers to “find means of investing interpretative methods with ways of comprehending power and the situatedness of cultural perception.” This perspective also “calls for the need to embed social practices and relationships in the historical shaping of institutions …” (1999, p. 11). Inspired by these perspectives, in our fieldwork we follow families’ trajectories and transitions, including the families of returned migrants, those that never migrated to the US as well as those who remained in the US.

The book addresses the following three objectives:

1. Analyze the disarticulation of the conditions of reproduction of rural populations in Central Mexico and the insertion of recent undocumented migration flows that manifested a heterogeneous demographic profile in terms of gender and age.

2. Document how gender and class articulate to shape emergent migration flows from Puebla to the United States that began in the late 1980s and accelerated in the 1990s in the context of neoliberal deregulation and the articulation of the economies of both countries through free trade agreements and the supply of cheap labor.

3. Identify how gender and class articulate in conflicts and negotiations related to migrants’ returns and reinsertion in Mexico in the context of prolonged stay in the US and limited circulation between the two countries due to the US economic and financial crisis, border militarization and heightened interior enforcement.

Accelerated migration as a symptom of restructuring of both the Mexican and US economies

Although Mexican migration to the United States began in the late nineteenth century, migration flows originating in the Central Mexican state of Puebla date only to the mid-twentieth century (Rivera Sánchez, 2004; Smith, 2006). In Pahuatlán, for example, a few dozen men participated in the Bracero Program (1942–1964), a guest worker program supplying the United States with male agricultural laborers during and after World War II. However, there was no continuity between these men’s experiences and the massive, undocumented flow of the last 30 years, which is the focus of this book. In Zapotitlán, international migration emerged in the 1980s. Once the flows from these two towns began in the 1980s, they expanded rapidly, incorporating wide swaths of the local population in a short period. Following Binford (2003) we refer to this pattern as accelerated migration, whereby a significant proportion of the adult population (about 30 percent) acquired international migration experience within two decades, from the 1980s to the early 2000s. A symptom of the economic restructuring of both the Mexican and US economies (Binford, 2004), accelerated migration characterized the migration flows of perhaps hundreds of towns in Central Mexico. In contrast, in Western Mexico, the traditional sending area of migrants to the United States since the nineteenth century, the growth of migration flows occurred at a much slower pace (Massey, Goldring, & Durand, 1994).²

Restructuring and massive, accelerated flows contributed to the unprecedented growth of Mexican migration to the US in the last third of the twentieth century (Massey, Durand, & Malone, 2002; Zúñiga & Hernández-León, 2005). From 1990 to 2000, the migrant flow increased ten times in comparison with previous decades (Arroyo-Alejandre, Berumen-Sandoval, & Rodríguez-Álvarez, 2010; BBVA Bancomer & CONAPO, 2014). The number of children born in the US from Mexican-origin families equaled the number of new immigrants from Mexico: 4.7 million. From 2000 to 2010, the number of children born in the US from Mexican-origin parents reached 7.2 million, surpassing the 4.2 million new immigrants (Pew Hispanic Center, 2011). This changing socio-demographic profile of migrants was the result of the overlap of three patterns of mobility: the continuing migration of unaccompanied men, the growing number of families moving together and, finally, unaccompanied, single women who migrated to the United States and started families there.

The vast majority of Pahuatecos/as and Zapotitecos/as incorporated into these massive flows to the United States at the end of the twentieth century. They, along with millions of other Mexican migrants, arrived to the United States after the passage of the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) of 1986, an amnesty that legalized 2.3 million Mexicans who had worked and resided continuously in the country since 1982.³ Without legal status, this workforce labored and lived in the shadows (Chavez, 1992); their condition of deportability (De Genova, 2002) cheapened their labor-power. Their “illegality,” disposability and vulnerability shaped their labor market insertion and their minimal conditions of social reproduction.

Accelerated migration was sustained by the relatively porous border that prevailed until the mid-2000s, although thousands of people lost their lives in the extreme conditions of the border region (Cornelius, 2001). Up until the mid-2000s, migrants apprehended by the border patrol were deported back to the border area in Mexico and re-attempted clandestine crossings until they successfully crossed and reached their destination in the US interior (Espenshade, 1994). In this process, which Heyman termed “the voluntary-departure complex,” the US appeared to be making an impressive number of arrests, protecting the country from illegal “aliens” while continuing to import Mexican labor on a large scale (Heyman, 1995). The porosity also allowed for circular migration at intervals of several years among undocumented adults and children.

After accelerated migration: conceptualizing return

After the mid-2000s, accelerated migration came to an end, a consequence of the financial crisis, and, to a lesser extent, the growing criminalization of immigration. As return migration to Mexico increased, scholars—ourselves included—grappled with conceptualizing return. Neoclassical or social network theories developed to explain the growth of migration flows in a context of migrant circularity could not be applied in reverse. They were no longer useful in the political economic context that presented itself in the first decades of the twenty-first century (Sandoval & Zúñiga, 2016). Our historical-structural framework to migration and return migration takes as a starting point the idea that short-cycle migration in Puebla develops within the context of the configuration of an economic block—the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA)—that required the development of a labor force that corresponded to new forms of accumulation in the hemisphere. The changes in accumulation regimes, detailed in Chapter 2, created mobility patterns between Mexico and the United States that selected for particular individuals in Mexico. In the context of the economic crisis and slow recovery, return migration was also selective. In order to understand selectivity, the conditions of social reproduction on both sides of the border form a central part of our analysis.

Social reproduction refers to the “social capacities” of sustaining biological processes of life and meaningful social connections that are essential to households and broader communities (Fraser, 2016). Most often performed by women, social reproductive labor unfolds in the domestic and family sphere—often as unpaid labor—and also in the state, market and community (Bhattacharya, 2017; Glenn, 2004; Kofman & Raghuram, 2015). Capital accumulation requires social reproduction; however, “capitalism’s orientation to unlimited accumulation tends to destabilize the very processes of social reproduction on which it relies” (Fraser, 2016, p. 100). As we will see, the tensions and conflicts that traverse migrants’ lives are manifestations of the destabilization of social reproduction.

This historical-structural-social reproductive approach to the short migration cycle that developed in Puebla departs from the dominant theoretical perspectives on migration and return. To review these theories in depth is beyond the scope of this chapter. We refer readers to overviews written by others (Cassarino, 2004; Sandoval & Zúñiga, 2016). A central idea in our reflection is that return migration is configured by the cycle of reproduction of capital and the restrictive immigration policies adopted by receiving states when foreign workers become temporarily superfluous in the context of economic contraction in destination countries or when capital abandons “old” sites installing itself in “new” sites looking to increase profits. With Wolf (1982), we claim that, in its process of re-creation, capital differentiates classes from one another. Within this continuous movement of the genesis of new sources of the production of surplus and of renewed recession, not only are property owners differentiated and made to compete for slots among the “winners” and “losers,” the labor force also passes from full employment to underemployment to unemployed. By studying the cycles of migration-return we observe the formation and reconfiguration of these working classes and gender relations.

Our analysis considers the specific circumstances of migration flows, destinations and processes of accumulation in distinct regions. It distinguishes different modalities of displacement and focuses on the household demographic cycle, considering its composition and the migratory status of its members, among other intervening factors in what we could call “the selectivity of staying-returning.” Structural aspects linked to production are just as important to take into account as those aspects related to the reproduction of life conditions of workers and their families.

This theoretical positioning moves us away from neoclassical perspectives that champion ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents Page
• List of figures Page
• List of tables Page
• Acknowledgments Page
• 1 Understanding accelerated and return migration in Central Mexico: migration, class and gender
• 2 Rural Central Mexico and the East Coast of the United States: articulating surplus labor and restructured economies
• 3 Disarticulation of agriculture, transition to a service economy in the Sierra Norte of Puebla and accelerated migration to the Nuevo New South
• 4 “I was motivated to do everything”: undocumented “entrepreneurs of the self” in New York
• 5 Deceleration of migration and the selectivity of return migration in the Northern Sierra of Puebla
• 6 “In Zapotitlán, we won’t have to pay for so many things”: the Great Recession, return migration and social reproduction
• 7 Economic crisis and the social reproduction of Mexican transnational working classes
• Index