Mexicans on the Move

Migration and Return in Rural Mexico

F. Rothstein

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781137559937
• eBook ISBN: 9781137559944
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book describes and analyzes migration of individuals from San Cosme Mazatecochco in central Mexico to a new United States community in New Jersey. Based on four decades of anthropological research in Mazatecochco and among migrants in New Jersey Rothstein traces the causes and consequences of migration and who returned home, why, and how return migrants reintegrated back into their homeland.

1

Introduction: Understanding Mexican Migration

Abstract: This chapter describes when, where, why, and how Mexicans came to be living in the United States and how the pattern of Mexican migration has changed, especially since the 1980s. It then discusses various broad theories of migration and return migration and how globalization, the increased flow of capital, commodities, ideas, and images within and between nations have contributed to an increased flow of people. It also emphasizes the importance of supplementing a broad theoretical view with an “emic” or inside view. A major strength of an anthropological approach is the deep immersion of the anthropologist in the communities he or she studies. This allows us to listen to what people say and view their lives and communities in terms of their categories and understandings.

Rothstein, Frances Abrahamer. Mexicans on the Move: Migration and Return in Rural Mexico. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. DOI: 10.1057/9781137559944.0004.

I first went to San Cosme Mazatecochco, a rural community in central Mexico, in June 1971, to do my dissertation research on political factions. Although the community was characterized by factionalism and I did write my thesis on political factionalism, I also found something I had not anticipated. On the surface, the community appeared to be a rural one of small-scale subsistence cultivators as was true of rural Mexico in general. Most of the houses were built of adobe, the streets were not paved, and everywhere there were cornfields. Although the community was an agricultural community, by 1970, over a quarter of the economically active population were men working in textile factories in Mexico City (sixty miles away) or Puebla, a city about fifteen miles away (INEGI 1971). Over the next fifteen years, my research focused on the impact of factory work on the community.

Then, in the 1980s, when globalization began, many of the textile factories closed and the factory workers lost their jobs. By 1990, many families had begun producing garments in small family workshops. During the mid-1990s, however, as the Mexican economy experienced a crisis, those workshops began to face problems. By the early 2000s many were forced to close.

In the early 1990s the husband of a woman from Mazatecochco whom I had known since she was a child called me in New York and said he was living in Flushing, New York. He was from the neighboring community of Papalotla and had recently arrived in New York City with his brother and several friends who were also from Papalotla. He returned to Mexico a few years later. Then, when I was in Mexico in 2001, I heard about other people, also from Papalotla, who had migrated to the United States, but the small-scale garment business in Mazatecochco had improved and I did not hear of anyone from Mazatecochco who had migrated. When I returned a few years later in 2005, however, I learned that many San Cosmeros/as had since moved to the United States, especially to New Jersey. I gave my phone number to a friend whose granddaughter was in the United States, and shortly after I returned to New York, the granddaughter called. She was living in “Riverview,”¹ a medium-sized city in central New Jersey. When I visited her, I learned that there were hundreds of people from Mazatecochco who were also living in Riverview.

San Cosmeros/as are what are referred to as “new migrants” from new sending areas living in new receiving communities. Until recently, most Mexican migrants were men. Today’s migrants, including those from Mazatecochco, are almost as likely to be women as men. Furthermore, in the past when few women migrated, if they did, they were what analysts called “associational migrants” who followed men—husbands, lovers, or fathers (Kanaiaupuni 2000). Today, many Mexican migrants are women and they have come not to follow husbands, lovers, or fathers. They have come for the same reasons as the men—for jobs. In the past also, most Mexicans who came to the United States came from “historic” or “traditional” sending areas in western Mexico. Few people from central Mexico had migrated to the United States. To understand how and why the pattern of Mexican migration broadened to include women as well as men from central Mexico going to new receiving areas such as New Jersey it is necessary to look briefly at the history of Mexican migration.

Growth and changing patterns of Mexican migration to the United States

Mexicans are not new to the United States. As many Latinos in the United States point out, “We did not cross the border, the border crossed us” (Gutierrez n.d.). Mexicans lived in areas including California, Nevada, Texas, Utah and parts of New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado and Wyoming, which became part the United States as a result of the war between Mexico and the United States in the mid-19th century. Migration from Mexico did not take place to any significant extent until the second decade of the 20th century when it grew during the Mexican Revolution. The Bracero Agreement between Mexico and the United States from 1942 to 1964, brought temporary agricultural workers to the United States. But even by 1970 only 1.5 percent of the US population was Mexican (Hanson and McIntosh 2009). It was not until the 1980s that the annual number of Mexican migrants reached over a hundred thousand a year (Martin 2005). The Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 led to the legalization of many who had arrived in the 1980s. But, it also brought new restrictions which made it illegal for employers to hire undocumented workers and strengthened the US Border Patrol, making it more difficult to cross the border.² Despite these difficulties, however, in the 1990s and during the first few years of the 21st century, migration from Mexico continued to be high. Then, in what a Pew Hispanic Center report on Mexican migration called a “notable reversal of the historic pattern,” more Mexicans left the United States between 2005 and 2010 than arrived (Passel, Cohn, and Gonzalez-Barrera 2012). Although many San Cosmeros/as have stayed in the United States, many have returned home. Since then, fewer Mexicans have come to the United States (Passel et al. 2014; Passel and Cohn 2015).

Most Mexicans live in “traditional” destinations in the United States, such as Los Angeles, Houston, Chicago, Tucson, and San Antonio. Increasingly, however, since the 1990s, Mexicans are living in new regions, including New Jersey. Riverview, the city where many of the people from Mazatecochco now live, has experienced one of the largest increases in the arrival of Mexicans in New Jersey. Initially, a few people from Mazatecochco arrived in Riverview about twenty years ago after having lived in Chicago or New York. Today most new arrivals come directly to Riverview.

Not only are Mazatecochco’s migrants representative of new patterns of migration because they come from a new sending community and go primarily to new destinations, New Jersey and Connecticut, but today many are women and they have come for jobs. To understand migration, settlement, and return for San Cosmeros/as and for Mexicans more generally, we must look at various theories of migration.

Theories of migration and return: macro-level and middle-level theories

Much of the theoretical literature on migration has consisted of what migration specialists refer to as “push-pull” approaches. These functionalist approaches include push factors such as population growth, limited economic opportunity, and political repression in the sending countries and pull factors including the demand for labor, economic opportunity, and political freedom in the receiving areas. Although economic opportunities and political factors are no doubt important in migration as indicated earlier for Mexican migrants,

... it is never entirely clear how the various factors combine together to cause population movement. We are left with a list of factors, all of which can clearly contribute to migration, but which lack a framework to bring them together in an explanatory system. (Skeldon 1990:125–126)

Similarly, a number of recent discussions place contemporary migration in the context of changes in the labor markets in both sending and receiving countries (Sassen 2003; Delgado Wise 2004). As Kyle argues, however, we need to conceptualize an overarching system that is greater than just the sending and destination countries (2000:48).

The concept of globalization provides such a framework. Discussions of globalization show not only an increase in international labor flows but also an increase and intensification of global flows of capital, commodities, images, ideas and people moving not only to migrate but as tourists, students, and businesspeople. Some studies have specifically examined the relationship between the flows of capital and migration (Sassen-Koob 1988; Sassen 2003; R. Cohen 2007), images and migration (Appadurai 1996; Ma 2001; Smith 1998; Stephen 2007), ideas and migration (Flores 2009), and commodities and migration (Miller 1997; Grimes 1998; Mills 1999; Lee 2008). Few researchers have looked at the complex and cumulative ways in which the intensification of all these global flows can impact the growth and diversification of migration. In addition, a major concern of contemporary theorists is not only that the flows of capital, commodities, people, images and ideas are greater but what flows are most crucial.

The approach used here, following David Harvey (1990), begins with the struggle between capital and labor and the current form of capital accumulation, what Harvey and others call flexible accumulation. This pattern of accumulation is characterized by a flexible commitment of capital to particular places and workers. This flexible commitment is evident in the frequent movement of productive capital, the frequent threat of movement to new places and new workers, and the frequent movement of finance capital to new markets. Consequently, my analysis sees the flow of capital as crucial. But, along with the flow of capital, we must also acknowledge the struggles of labor. Much of the recent movement of capital has been in response to the struggle of labor. We will see how Mazatecochco’s workers, like workers elsewhere, have struggled in many ways. Their struggles have ranged from migrating to nearby cities to work in factories as their land became inadequate and using their union ties to bring many improvements to their home community. They also used their factory wages to buy land that has protected them from some of the adverse effects of wage work including low or loss of wages. More recently they have struggled by migrating to the United States as jobs in Mexico declined and wages deteriorated. More recently, during the recent US recession, many returned home where the economy has been improving. The economy has been improving not only in Mexico but also in Mazatecochco. At home, social and cultural patterns, including family and kin sharing and caring networks, are significant sources of support which help San Cosmeros/as deal with economic difficulties.

It is important to stress that San Cosmeros/as, like people everywhere, struggle in diverse ways. To understand some of the alternative and/or supplemental forms of struggle, it is necessary to go beyond just the economic conditions that influence migration. Here, following Harvey and Castles, among others, I look at social and cultural factors that facilitate migration to the United States and encourage their return to Mexico. As Harvey, citing Simmel (1978), suggests:

It is also at such times of fragmentation and economic insecurity that the desire for stable values leads to a heightened emphasis upon the authority of basic institutions—the family, religion, the state ... Such connections are, at least plausible, and they ought, therefore, to be given more careful scrutiny (1989:171–172)

Similarly, Castles points out:

The social transformation processes crucial to the reordering of labor relations are mediated thru local historical and cultural patterns, which allow people to develop specific types of adaptation and resistance. These can take the form of religious or nationalist movements, but also of individual- or family-level strategies as well as collective action against exploitation. (2011:319)

Macro-economic conditions, especially global flows of capital, set the stage for contemporary migration by influencing the demand for labor.³ How people respond, however, to changing labor conditions, as both Harvey and Castles stress, involves other institutions, including the state and the family. The state, including the sending nation-state and the receiving nation-state, plays crucial roles in migration because of its role in regulating the flows of both capital and people, especially international migrants. The family can also play important roles in encouraging and facilitating or discouraging migration.

Research on migration, including discussions of Mexican migration to the United States, has suggested that family plays a role in migration in two important ways. First, families are seen to be important in decision making about who migrates and when. Second, family networks are seen as facilitating migration by providing help as a person migrates. As suggested by the new economics of labor migration approach, families or households often make the decisions about family members’ migration. There has been a great deal of emphasis on the family as the unit that decides whether a person should migrate. There is little research, however, on such decision making that shows that migration decisions are actually made by the household or which family members are involved and how. As de Haas and Fokkema have suggested, “the inherent flaw of household-centered migration theories is that they tend to ‘reify’ the household, that is, to construct it as an entity with clear plans, strategies, and aims,.. based on equality of power and commonality of interests” (2010:543). As de Haas and Fokkema go on to point out, migration decisions are often made by individuals or members of the household with more power who are likely to be senior male household members. Indirect evidence from the kinds of communities from which Mexican migrants often come suggests that decision making about migration is likely to vary with the composition of the household and the pattern of authority in the community. Until recently, Mexican migration was largely from agricultural communities. Families in these communities were usually patrilocal extended families (i.e., households in which one or more married sons and their families lived with the husband’s parents). Often, the parents, especially the senior male, made many of the decisions for the household. In one of the few studies that asked about the decision to migrate among a small sample (twenty-four returnees), the decision to migrate had been made by parents for one-third of the r...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  Introduction: Understanding Mexican Migration
• 2  San Cosme Mazatecochco, 1940s1990s: The Impact of Globalization and Neoliberalism
• 3  Life in New Jersey: Continuities and Change
• 4  When Migrants Return: Who Returns, Why, and How They Reintegrate
• 5  Final Thoughts: Globalization and Migration
• References
• Index