migration and the ever widening ripples of local economies

("Oaxaca exports immigrants", a stencil from an exhibition at the contemporary art museum in 2006)


As always issues around migration swirl around my everyday here when I leave Oaxaca city (and to a lesser extent within the city, for largely class reasons). In part that’s because it’s in my consciousness and it’s a large part of what first brought me here to Oaxaca, but even more so, it’s because it’s an empirically huge issue here (which goes back to why I first choose Oaxaca). For all of the defensiveness I often found myself reacting with when people in New York would question my fieldsites (cushy and/ or home), I can now really say that there are real benefits for my research in being from LA. In almost every conversation I’ve had with people in different communities or in collectivos people ask me where I’m from and when I say California, LA, they tell me that they were there for X years, and that their cousin, sister, brother etc. lives in Santa Monica, Riverside, etc. All of this is to say that migration (especially to Southern California) is a very present and real thing in this region (and I also have heard stories about a person who’s just gone and getting the news that they got their safely), largely related to the economy—although L has some really interesting thinking about what beyond economic reasons is driving out-migration. The combination of NAFTA which destroyed Oaxaca’s subsistence agricultural possibilities and global warming (almost every person I’ve talked to in either the Ocotlan or Tlacolula valleys has talked about how hot and dry it has become—that they are no longer able to grow all that they used to) has made it nearly impossible for most communities to feel like their future does not involve some sort of migration options (whether it’s to Mexico City or to do agricultural work in Baja as a less well-paid alternative to the US). So, with all of this, there is also (among both people who are paying attention to global economic news and people who are hearing reports from “el oltro lado”) a lot of thinking about the impact of the slowing US economy and housing market on communities here—e.g. in the NYtimes today there was a piece about the huge decrease in remittances over the last two years.

There is also a lot of (at least NGO) talk about creating sustainable development opportunities here and a community in the Mixteca just won a big development award for a reforestation/ community development project. One of the things that has really taken off as Oaxaca has carved out a reputation as an international tourist destination is the artesania market which has allowed specific villages to specialize in a particular kind of craft, which they may either sell through middlemen in the city and/or develop local cooperative markets. And right now tourism/artesania (and mineral extraction sort of, which is at the root of a lot of protest) is really the only industry that Oaxaca has to offer (unless you count mescal, which hasn’t taken off as a huge export). But one thing that this specialization and development of artesania profiles has done as well is track tourist money into specific sites. When I was first here in the summer of 2005 I went to a calenda in San Ana de Valle (just up from the hospital in Tlacolula where I’m doing research) and few tourists had heard of it—a friend joked that it was the maquiladora for Teotitlan (the famous rug weaving village which is hugely hooked into the global economy). Now, along the caratera there are huge signs for San Ana as a weaving destination as well, but people still say if you want rugs go to Teotitlan and you would want to go to San Ana for their community museum.

So, I’ve been thinking about all of this stuff in relation to conversations I had in Xaaga and with people from San Martin Tilcajete (a village famous for alebrijes, which I just found out where only started in the 1980s as part of developing marketable artesania). Xaaga is a very impoverished village where a lot of houses are still made from mud bricks instead of clay or cinderblock and many of the compounds were incompletely fenced with cacti rather than chain-link or blocks. Only the road leading into town was paved and as the afternoon went on, the wind swept up clouds of dust. One woman I spoke with (a partera!) told me “living here is very difficult, there is no water, but it used to be different.” When I asked her if there were many migrants to the US from Xaaga she said no, there’s no money to do it (I’ve heard that it’s at least $5,000 to get a coyote to take you across). Other people told me that yes there’s migration because otherwise there’s no money, but I would guess that given the lack of remittance driven infrastructure, it is a more recent phenomenon unlike other villages with long histories of migration. This would also mean that these immigrants would be the most vulnerable within the current US economy. The nutritionist told me that this village does beautiful weavings (rugs, tablecloths), but I would guess because they aren’t a named one, they don’t have a solid place within the tourist/artesania marketplace.

In contrast I sat with a couple at the birthday party I went to on Sunday (have I mentioned Mexicans’ fondness for gelatin based deserts?!?!) from Tilcajete who have carved (haha) out an international reputation for their alebrijes—which are unbelievably intricate. They have traveled a lot in the US (invited to the NMAI, the Indian Museum in Santa Fe—they had a whole other interesting discussion about how indigenous Oaxacas are and aren’t considered within Native North American craft communities), but are still living in their small village where they grew up two houses away from each other. Even though it has established itself as a solid craft village (it’s where you go for alebrijes) San Martin has had a lot of out migration to Chicago and Santa Cruz (that’s where most are going now). Jacobo and Maria told me though that it’s bad, for the community and for migrants—“people think that all their problems will be solved, but they don’t talk about the real problems there. Guys sit in the workshop and talk about getting $10/hour and how much they can make in a 40 hour week, but they don’t talk about how much it costs to live there.” So more and more, people either leave or want to leave to support their families—but Jacobo and Maria said that all too often men leave when their children are young (to be able to pay for not only food etc. but the required school uniforms and materials) and for the first year or so they send money back—but then they get a new family in the states and they forget to send money back. Many women have gone with their kids since they can’t live here without remittances only to find their husbands with new families on the other side.” Or, people forget that running the town requires community work, the cargo system, and think that they can just send money back and that will elevate their status without having to put the time in. Also, for the first time, San Martin has two cases of AIDS (which everyone blames on men who migrated and came back) and people are worried that pregnant women will soon also have it (Jacobo and Maria found this out when the community doctor disclosed to the community in order to emphasize sexual hygiene (?).

So, there’s all this stuff about migration and the US swirling around (interestingly, this is the first trip where no one has directly mentioned racism as a downside to life in the US) and the economy here (which can also be blamed on the corruption of the local governments)—and what’s partially interesting is the way that the position of different communities here within local economic stratifications and their historical relationships to migration also shift the way that this stuff is framed. Part of this project is me trying to figure out an analytic frame for thinking about the relation of rural indigenious communities to the State and then in transmigration—which gets ever more complicated when the first term is not a homogenous referant.