2014 L Velasco & D Paris Indigenous Migration in Mexico and Central America

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2014 41: 5Latin American PerspectivesLaura Velasco Ortiz and Dolores París Pombo

Identity TransformationsIndigenous Migration in Mexico and Central America: Interethnic Relations and

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LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES, Issue 196, Vol. 41 No. 3, May 2014, 5–25DOI: 10.1177/0094582X13519971© 2014 Latin American Perspectives

Introduction Indigenous Migration in Mexico and Central America

Interethnic Relations and Identity Transformationsby

Laura Velasco Ortiz and Dolores París PomboTranslated by Margot Olavarria

This issue is dedicated to Michael Kearney for his contribution to the study of indigenous migration in Latin America. His legacy is not just theoretical and empirical knowledge but also a line of critical thinking about the global and local forces that create the multiple exclusions of displaced and migrant indig-enous people confronting national states and global capital and the enormous capacity of those people to resist domination. The content of the issue is an example of the vitality of his influence on two generations of researchers in Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, and the United States. The articles delineate a complex field of reflection about the redefinition of ethnic identities, the new forms of resistance of indigenous workers in the international economy, and the reconstruction of indigenous consciousness in the ethnic configurations of more than one nation-state.

Latin American indigenous migration is a multiethnic phenomenon that is much older than mestizo migration and has a transnational character because of strong community ties. It varies in intensity and form by region, ethnicity, gender, and generation and in response to the receiving countries’ migration policies. Throughout the twentieth century indigenous migration in Latin America reconfigured the ethnic geography traced by modern states not only within countries but also beyond the geopolitical lines that divide the Latin American South from the U.S. and Canadian North. In the midst of international capitalism’s full development, environmental catastrophes, political violence, and narcotrafficking, contemporary indigenous migration contains traces of the ancient movement of colonization through pre- and postconquest ethnic terri-tories with new paths of industrialization and economic globalization.

The multiethnic and multiracial component of Latin American migration is a consequence of the vitality of the continent’s indigenous and Afro-American peoples. Bolivia (61.3 percent) and Guatemala (39.45 percent) are the countries with the greatest proportion of indigenous population, followed by Peru (15.9 percent), Panama (12.26 percent), Ecuador (7.02 percent), Honduras (6.54 per-cent), and Mexico (6.21 percent). The Afro-American population is more numer-ous than the indigenous population in Brazil (50.75 percent), Cuba (34.74 percent), Colombia (10.6 percent), and Panama (9.19 percent). These percentages point to

Laura Velasco Ortiz and Dolores París Pombo are sociologists and professor-researchers at El Colegio de la Frontera Norte. The collective thanks them for organizing this issue. Margot Olavarria is a political scientist and translator in New York City.

519971LAPXXX10.1177/0094582X13519971Latin American PerspectivesVelasco and París / Introductionresearch-article2014

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6 LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES

different interethnic and interracial contexts and reflect different criteria that may combine identification and the use of an indigenous language or (as in the case of Brazil) localization. In absolute terms, Mexico is the country with the most speakers of indigenous languages in Latin America with 6,044,547, followed by Bolivia, with 5,076,251, and Guatemala, with 4,433,218.1 Mexico occupies first place with 64 indigenous languages, after Bolivia with 33 and Guatemala with 24 (UNICEF and FUNOPROEIB Andes, 2009: 81). In a way, as Bartolomé (2008) points out, Latin America possesses a certain civilizational unity that distin-guishes it from the United States and Canada.

As a multiethnic and multiracial phenomenon, migration affects not only the countries of origin but also those of destination. It is a central component of the ethnic diversity of the countries of the North. In 2010, the Latin American pop-ulation in the United States was 16.3 percent (50,477,594), representing an increase of 3.8 percent since 2000 (Humes Jones, and Ramírez 2011:2). Latin American indigenous migration is reflected in the increase in size of the Indian Hispanic American population in the United States, which in 2000 was 407,073 (Huizar and Cerda, 2004: 284) and by 2010 had increased to 685,150 (Humes, Jones, and Ramírez, 2011: 13).2 In Mexico the census does not register undocu-mented indigenous foreigners, but it is calculated that in recent decades 140,000–150,000 indigenous Guatemalans have entered the country, many of whom moved on to the United States (Nolasco and Rubio, n.d.).

Adopting a transnational perspective, Michael Kearney and Carole Nagengast (1989) pointed to indigenous reconstitution in terms of ethnicity and class at the root of Mixtec migrations to rural California and coined the concepts “transnational communities” and “transnational ethnic conscious-ness.” The development of these concepts does not imply the neglect of the state; Kearney (1995; 2004; 2005) sought to understand indigenous migration in the framework of nation-states because of the effects of nationalist policies on indigenous populations. At the same time, however, he connected the impor-tance of the state apparatus and its geopolitical borders with the effect of the global economy in depleting rural life and displacing indigenous peoples as an international source of labor. From this point of view, internal and interna-tional indigenous migration is part of the functioning of global capitalism.

The current scenario of indigenous migration is characterized by the dete-rioration of the living conditions of the campesinos, workers, and low-income residents of the Latin American continent. According to the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (CEPAL, 2012), using data for 2007–2011, the indigenous population of Latin American countries has higher percentages of poverty than the general population. In particular, pov-erty is worse for indigenous people in Bolivia (59.87 percent compared with 42.4 percent), Guatemala (72.31 percent compared with 54.8 percent), and Peru (55.42 percent compared with 27.8 percent). Mexico is the country in which the income gap between indigenous and the nonindigenous is widest: in 2010, 75.7 percent of the indigenous population lived in poverty compared with 36.3 per-cent of the total population (CONEVAL, 2010). This pattern of poverty con-firms the structural subordination of indigenous people under the neoliberal policies of the past 20 years, in particular the decline of subsidies for small farmers and the policy of unprotected employment.



Velasco and París / INTRODUCTION 7

The structural context of indigenous migration includes the destruction and appropriation of natural resources in indigenous territory. The territorial base of reproduction of indigenous peoples is affected not only by the priva-tization of forests, mineral deposits, and aquifers but also by displacement, as depopulation overloads members of communities with the care and usu-fruct of those natural resources and the reproduction of the system of com-munity governance.

In the context of international migration, the notion of ethnic territory acquires a new meaning. The massive displacement and distant resettlement of the continent’s indigenous peoples in the past two decades calls for the articu-lation of various territorialities from a transnational or trans-state perspective (Torres and Carrasco, 2008b). A notion of territoriality that includes the geo-graphical space defined by social interactions, relations, and shared practices (Sack, 1983: 55) allows us to understand the connection between places in which new nuclei of indigenous population exist and their places of origin and the de-territorialization and re-territorialization of many cultural practices and symbols. Paradoxically, for indigenous peoples, this spatially and politically trans-state condition at its different levels continues to have a fundamental impact on living conditions through its social and agricultural policies and its politics.

IndIgenous MIgratIon In LatIn aMerIca: ethnIc ancestry and transnatIonaLIsM

The study of international indigenous migration as a multiethnic process (Fox and Rivera, 2004b) poses a challenge to understanding ethnic diversity at the national, regional, and local levels not only of the countries of origin but also of the receiving countries. In addition, it is difficult to approach the ethnic diversity of Latin American migration with only a single ethnic-national model in mind. The historicity of indigenous migration is expressed in two clear ten-dencies. The first is the connection of ancient displacements of ethnic territories with internal labor migration to the cities and the agro-exporting regions and with international migration between Latin American countries (for example, between Bolivia and Argentina or between Nicaragua and Costa Rica) and between them and more distant ones such as the United States and Spain. Secondly, international migration of indigenous people has a transnational pat-tern largely because of the intensity of the links that stem from collective ethics and community life, with diverse mechanisms of material and symbolic exchange between the populations of origin and the displaced.

Contemporary international indigenous migration is inscribed in a very long history of regional displacement of ethnic territories whose borders do not correspond to those of the present-day state (for example, the Quechuas in Peru, Bolivia, and northern Argentina, the Mapuches in Argentina and Chile [Torres and Carrasco, 2008a: 11], the Mayas in Mexico and Guatemala [Camus, 2008], and the Odham on the northern border of Mexico [Castillo, 2012]) and internal administrative borders that function at the regional level (as in the case of the Mixtec cultural region, which is divided by the administrative borders of




the states of Oaxaca, Puebla, and Guerrero in Mexico). Speaking of the com-plexity of indigenous mobility, Torres and Carrasco (2008a) rethink the distinc-tion elaborated by the Economic Commission of Latin America and the Caribbean between international migration, transnational migration, and ancestral territorial movement. The definition of the last of these is particularly striking: “While it crosses international jurisdictional borders, it occurs in ancestral territorial areas within ethnic boundaries in which customary law was and is exercised” (CEPAL, 2006: 200, cited in Torres and Carrasco, 2008a: 10). The distinction between “international” and “transnational” is based on the kinds of links maintained with the communities of origin. As the authors note, this typology recognizes the antiquity of indigenous migration in Latin America. However, contemporary indigenous migration combines spatial log-ics related to urban economies, agro-industrial enclaves, and global production chains beyond state borders that can be best understood in terms of a notion of indigenous territoriality that includes new indigenous settlements in different places (the product of migration to cities or to other rural regions in the same country or abroad) in addition to those in the places of origin. This territoriality involves multiple referents for the construction of ethnic and racial difference beyond the limits of a single national state, and this makes it possible to speak of a transnational or trans-state territoriality.

According to Torres and Carrasco (2008a), since the 1990s Latin America’s indigenous people have been experiencing a wave of transnational migration. The Kitchwa Otavalo of Ecuador migrated to Colombia, Venezuela, and Peru in the 1940s, and in the 1990s they headed toward Mexico, the United States, and Spain (Caguana, 2008; Ordóñez, 2008; Ruiz, 2008). That same decade, the Kitchwa Saraguros of Ecuador traveled to Almeria, Spain (Cruz, 2008), and the Quechua of Peru to the United States (Paerregaard, 2008). Maya migration from Guatemala to Mexico (Camus, 2008) and to the United States (Popkin, 1999) is marked by the civil war and Pentecostal ecclesiastical networks. According to Popkin (1999: 271), Maya Kanjobal international migration can be divided into three phases: the pioneers of the 1970s, the refugees of the civil war in the 1980s, and the young migrants of the 1990s taking advantage of the social networks constructed in the previous decades that were grounded in contacts with Pentecostal missionaries and the conversion of members of indigenous communities. In the case of Mexico, according to research reported in Nolasco and Rubio (2011), the current international displacement of indigenous peoples has to be understood in the context of the old regional displacements of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the rural-urban migration of the 1950s, and the movement to agro-industrial regions in the 1960s. The history varies locally and regionally and is apparently older than the movements of nonindigenous populations (Castilleja, 2011).

The studies of Mexican indigenous migration collected by Nolasco and Rubio (2011) analyze migration in terms of circuits of transnational exchange, both material and symbolic, highlighting the diversity of exchanges between residents of places of origin and places of destination. Their collection is an important contribution to the literature on Mexican indigenous migration, which is dominated by studies of migrants from Oaxaca (see Escárcega and Varese, 2004; Fox and Rivera, 2004b; París, 2006; Velasco, 2008). In addition, the




studies share a novel approach in which the unit of analysis is not indigenous peoples but territories or multiethnic regions. They include Barabas and Bartolomé’s (2011) research on the migration of Chatinos, Chinatecos, Chochos, and Cuicatecos from Oaxaca, that of Castilleja (2011) on the Nahuas, Masahua-Otomís, and Purépechas of Michoacán, that of Villela (2011) on the Mixtecs, Nahuas, and Tlapanecos of Guerrero, that of Otis (2011) on the Coras and Huicholes of the western Sierra Maestra, and that of Báez (2011) on the Otomís and Nahuas of Hidalgo. Whereas the regionalization of Mexican migration to the United States takes the administrative organization of the federal states as a reference, indigenous peoples overflow intrastate borders, and understand-ing their migration patterns requires a different regionalization, one that pre-cedes the modern Mexican national state. These researchers delineate three moments of indigenous Mexican displacement in the twentieth century: in the 1940s and 1950s, intraregional movement for seasonal work; in the 1960s and 1970s, with the change in the economic model to import substitution, migration directed to cities and agro-export zones; and, finally, in the 1980s and 1990s, with the rise of neoliberalism, migration to the northern Mexican border and to the United States.

The macro-structural changes in Mexico affected not only the indigenous peoples with the greatest demographic density and sedentaries but also nomadic or seminomadic peoples such as the Coras and Huicholes (Otis, 2011), the Cuacapás, Kumiais, and Paipais (Garduño, 2003), and the Odhams (Castillo, 2012). Otis (2011) documents two types of mobility among Coras and Huicholes of the western Sierra Madre: the old pattern of seasonal mobility within their territories and ceremonial residence and a more recent one extending outside their territories for the sale of handicrafts in cities and for employment. In the face of depletion of natural resources (for example, water), the decline of agri-culture, and the changing expectations of youth, Huichol and Cora migration to the cities in the 1980s and to Colorado in the 1990s soared (see also the case of the Odhams of Sonora [Castillo, 2012]).

In summary, indigenous migration is older than mestizo migration, and experiences of migration vary with the economy and the territorial ecology. The spatial logic of mobility responds to a cultural regionalization that goes beyond regionalizations produced by nation-states’ political administration and forces us to rethink the relation between local community and indigenous peoples and evaluate the concept of circuits of transnational interchange vis-à-vis that of transnational community for indigenous migration.

the transnatIonaL character of IndIgenous MIgratIon

At the end of the 1980s, Michael Kearney and Carole Nagengast (1989), observing Mixtec migration to California, coined the term “transnational indig-enous community.” Although the transnational approach (Glick Schiller, Basch, and Blanc-Szanton, 1991) became the target of serious criticism (Waldinger and Fitzgerald, 2004) and self-criticism (Glick Schiller and Levitt, 2006), two decades later it retains its vitality in studies of indigenous migration




(Cruz, 2008; Paerregaard, 2008; Ruiz, 2008). In contrast to ancestral population movements, labor migration and migration for family reunification disrupted the relationship between indigenous community, identity, and territory and created new forms of community in dispersed populations. Community life, together with language and myth, was the vehicle for ethnic reproduction under conditions of migration (Sánchez, 2007: 364).

The notion of a transnational indigenous community managed to articulate the duality of origin and destination and of modernity and tradition in a new field of multiterritorial integration and differentiation (Besserer, 2004). At the same time, as Nagengast and Kearney (1990) showed in their study of the Mixtec political consciouness resulting from international migration, it dis-rupted the idea of a shift from rural indigenous subject to urban indigenous subject and then transnational indigenous subject different in terms of identity and politics. In the 1990s and the first decade of the twenty-first century, there was an increase in studies of Oaxacan indigenous migration. Several writers (Escárcega and Varese, 2004; Fox and Rivera, 2004b; Velasco, 2008) focused on the ethnicization produced by migration, particularly at the level of collective action and transnational ties. The Mixtec-Zapotec case served as a referent for identifying the mechanisms and agents of community reconstitution in the country of arrival, obscuring other indigenous migration flows.

While the constitution of the transnational indigenous community had empirical expressions in ritual family and community life (Mummert, 1999), the hometown associations and ethnic and panethnic organizations were the basis of the development of a transnational indigenous community and of the emergence of a transnational ethnic consciousness (Kearney, 2000; Kearney and Nagengast, 1989). However, they also made political ethnicity highly vis-ible, resulting in a profile of a transnational indigenous community focused on political agents. As Weber (2008) shows, the Nahuas and Purépechas migrated to the United States before the Mixtecs and Zapotecs as the Bracero Program incorporated Nahuas from central and southern Mexico and Purépechas from Michoacán. Why were they not as visible as the Mixtecs and Zapotecs, and why did they not achieve panethnic and transnational organizational forms?

One crucial element of current indigenous transnationalism is the massive expansion of the media in the 1990s. Without faster and cheaper communica-tion such as the telephone, the cell phone, and the Internet, it would be difficult to understand the intensity of interaction over distances and the maintenance of community ties. In addition, the existence of settled nuclei of immigrants in the places of destination facilitated the migration of other family or community members and the extension of migrant networks.

According to Kearney (1994: 64), one of the most important effects of inter-national migration is the reproduction of autonomy as indigenous peoples. Solís and Fortuny (2010: 130), comparing the processes of transnational organi-zation linked to international migration of indigenous Hñahñús from Hidalgo to Immokalee, Florida, and of Mayas from Yucatán to Los Angeles, report that transnational indigenous organizations seek not only to better living condi-tions in their place of origin but to gain autonomy vis-à-vis local governments.

However, transnational processes and conditions are differentiated within and among indigenous peoples. Waldinger and Fitzgerald (2004) point out that




the transnational studies of the 1990s generally present a more local than trans-national image and a homogenized general image of individuals, families, and communities as transnational. This critique applies to the studies of indigenous migration that are dominated by the experience of Mixtec and Zapotec migrants and focus on their political and cultural activism. In the following, recovering the self-critical approach of Glick Schiller and Levitt (2006), we outline some of the differentiation documented in the literature on this issue.

Fox and Rivera (2004b) address the issue of binational or transnational civic participation, showing the development of a generation of transnational indig-enous intellectuals emerging from the experience of national and international migration. Their book introduces the concept of “civil society” and revives Besserer’s (1999) concept of “transnational citizenship.” The latter concept functions as an umbrella for considerations of both immigrants’ participation in the United States and the reconstitution of indigenous governments in their places of origin (see Kearney and Besserer, 2004). It also examines the chal-lenges of community citizenship, the continuity of indigenous forms of govern-ment, and the integration of migrants at a distance. It is evident from this collection that civic and political transnationalism are different conditions among the various indigenous peoples studied. The organization repeatedly studied in this book and others is the Frente Indígena de Organizaciones Binacionales (Indigenous Front of Binational Organizations—FIOB), which was initially made up of Mixtecs and Zapotecs and gradually came to include Triquis and Purépechas.3 A model of transnational activism, this organization has been a referent for observing collective action among other communities or indigenous peoples. In light of this model, the differentiation in political trans-nationalism among indigenous communities and indigenous migrant peoples is evident. For example, the Purépechas and the Hñahñús continue to present a community identity linked to local places of origin, with few ethnic or pan-ethnic organizations; the Triquis have a pattern of displacement linked to com-munity violence in their places of origin (París, 2008) and the Coras (Otis, 2011) a pattern of displacement to Colorado, where they experience invisibilization; and the transnationalism of the Nahuas of Veracruz (Rodríguez, 2011), work-ing in the stables of Wisconsin, stresses religious and local over ethnic loyalties.

dIfferences In transnatIonaLIsM

As with migration in general, indigenous women participate differently in migrant networks with regard to family and community control in spatial mobility (París, 2006), domestic tasks and forms of participation in indigenous associations, organizations, and government (Stephen, 2007; Velasco, 2005), and new community responsibilities in the places of origin (Maldonado and Artía, 2004; Velásquez, 2004). The participation of women in associations and in decision-making positions is still incipient, with the restriction on women’s leadership emanating from maternal ideology, their responsibility for the care of children, and the community’s view of women’s duty (Romero Hernández et al., 2013). Gender structures the options for spatial mobility and reproduc-tion at a distance. Women experience greater isolation because of domestic




responsibilities and even less access to communication and transportation technology. In their places of origin, women have heavier workloads in order to make up for the absence of men. Besides domestic chores and child care, they are frequently obliged to work in the fields and to replace their husbands, fathers, or sons in community responsibilities (D’Aubeterre, 2007). In their places of destination, they frequently do paid work and play a key role in inter-mediation with institutions such as clinics, schools, and churches.

The studies carried out in the middle of the past decade in Mexico, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia (Escárcega and Varese, 2004; Fox and Rivera, 2004b; Torres and Carrasco, 2008b; Velasco, 2005) rarely consider youth as a social category of interest. This category is interesting for its inclusion of young people born in the places of destination, young people born in the places of origin and raised there with absent parents, and young people as labor migrants in contexts of high risk and labor precariousness, with differential access to community net-works (Aquino, 2010). In these three respects the transnational horizon for youth is different from that of the pioneers of indigenous migration of the 1980s and 1990s. In the places of origin, many young people are being brought up by their grandparents in their parents’ absence. They grow up in contexts of fam-ily separation, as Sawyer et al. (2009) and Cariño (2012) point out, and also in cultural contexts for transitioning into adulthood that are marked by migration (París, 2010: 141). In the receiving countries, where young people grow up without grandparents and ties to the place of origin are increasingly more sym-bolic than practical, integration or adaptation to new ways of life and citizen-ship is the source of concern. For example, an emerging preoccupation among Mixtec youth is schooling as a means of integration (Sawyer et al., 2009); they see the United States as a source not only of more job opportunities but also of more opportunities to go to high school and college. However, in this process of integration ethnic origin and ascription reemerge as elements of conscious-ness more defined by the terms of citizenship. This is not a new phenomenon; the second generation of urban indigenous people offers empirical antecedents that can serve as a reference. However, the issue of citizenship in a dual national framework and the requirement of legalizing one’s status present offer impor-tant challenges to integration and motives for collective action in the receiving countries such as are now occurring with the Dreamers movement or the Indigenous Oaxacan Youth in California (see ECO, 2013).

Studies of migration from Mexico and Peru show how differences in the legal status of indigenous migrants translate into differences in their transna-tionalism. Although family and community networks function as a protective niche for undocumented immigrants, their mobility and communication are very restricted, and this limitation intersects with other forms of subordination such as gender and generation to produce invisibilization and suffering (Paerregaard, 2008; Stephen, 2008). This is observable in the experiences of kid-napping to which they are subjected en route to the United States (Stephen, 2008) and in deportation and family separation, especially for mothers and their children and for young people who have grown up in the United States and must return to their parents’ places of origin as foreigners.

Variation in transnationalism is also dependent on local and regional history—in particular on when migration became massive and on the employment




niches in which migrants became established. Ethnic reconstitution and his-torical continuity depend on ethnic contexts in the regions and countries of both origin and destination. Thus the ethnic transnationalism that Kearney refers to becomes an increasingly differentiated phenomenon among the diverse indigenous peoples that experience international migration intersected by racism, social exclusion, and extreme exploitation as a labor force linked to global consumption markets.

This multiplicity of sources of differentiation leads us to rethink the use of the notion of “transnational community” and its application to collective action, ritual life, and systems of community government and citizenship. A concept such as “transnational circuits of material and symbolic exchange,” as sug-gested by Barabas and Bartolomé (2011), may be more useful for understand-ing other areas of family and community life.

the PoLIcy scenarIo

The immigration policies of the receiving countries are increasingly chal-lenging for poor and indigenous immigrants. Labor migration of indigenous Mexicans to the United States originated with the Bracero Program. Between 1942 and 1967, the Mexican state served as a “ ‘superenganchadores’ hook-up” (López and Runsten, 2004), an intermediary in the contracting of cheap labor to fill the labor shortage in U.S. agriculture and industry. From 1954 to 1965, farmers in northeastern Mexico protested about the mass exodus of labor to the United States and pressured the federal government to establish agreements so that day laborers contracted by the Bracero Program in the country’s center and south had to work for specified periods in Mexico’s agricultural fields (Sánchez, 2004: 252). The Bracero Program thus not only opened migration routes to the United States but also produced migration in stages, including temporary or seasonal work in the agro-industrial regions of northeastern Mexico. Indigenous migration along that corridor is an antecedent of migration to California and then to Oregon and Washington. Many indigenous people, mainly from Oaxaca but also from Michoacán, Guerrero, Puebla, and Chiapas, headed for Sinaloa and Sonora to work in horticulture or in the cotton fields. Closer to the border, the pioneers—largely young men—would cross seasonally to seek better wages in California. The nexus between agriculture and indigenous migration was very visible in the 1980s (Zabin, 1992). Durand (1994) asserts that California agriculture was ethnicized by contracting indigenous Mexicans in place of mestizo labor and even labor from other countries and paying them lower wages. In those years, young men and whole families headed to the agricul-tural areas of California and, to a lesser extent, Arizona, Texas, and other states. Others went to metropolitan areas to work in restaurants, gardening, office cleaning, and other services. Women were mainly employed as domestic work-ers or in restaurants and trade. Indigenous people migrated through previ-ously established links with contractors or employers and through networks of compatriots and neighbors. California continued to be the principal destina-tion, although the migratory networks extended throughout the West Coast, the Southern states, and the East Coast. In California, for example, Purépecha




labor from Michoacán and Mixtec and Triqui labor from Oaxaca rapidly increased. In contrast, Zapotecs (also from Oaxaca), Nahuas and Hñahñus from central Mexico, and Mayas from Chiapas, Mexico, and Guatemala mainly migrated to big cities such as Los Angeles and San Francisco. In the early 1990s, Runsten and Kearney (1994) estimated that there were 45,000–55,000 Mixtecs working as agricultural day laborers and that they constituted 6.1 percent of the labor force in that sector. A decade later, Fox and Rivera (2004a) reported that indigenous migrants made up 10.9 percent of the agricultural labor force of California and that there were more Mixtecs in California than Native Americans of any other group.

In 1986, the U.S. Congress passed the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA), which opened the way for accelerated regularization of the migration status of more than 2 million Mexicans and Central Americans. Many Mixtecs, Purépechas, Zapotecs, and Mayas, in particular, were able to legalize their sta-tus, and this allowed them to find more stable and better-paid work, generally in cities. While the purpose of the IRCA was to halt undocumented migration and increase border control, the effect was the opposite: family reunification and the consolidation of migration networks led thousands of immigrants to settle in the United States and other new migrants to undertake the undocu-mented journey to the North (Durand, Massey, and Parado, 1999). According to the results of a survey coordinated by Runsten and Kearney (1994), the immediate effect of the IRCA on indigenous migration was to facilitate cross-border mobility rather than settlement. The indigenous rodinos4 brought their families and settled them on the Mexican side of the border. This is how nuclei of indigenous migrants—Mixtecs and Zapotecs from Oaxaca, Purépechas from Michoacán, and Mixtecs from Guerrero—emerged in the city of Tijuana, where they established their residences and traveled for short periods to work in the California fields (Clark, 2008; Velasco, 1996).

In the mid-1990s, the U.S. government designed a new border and migration control strategy called “Prevention through Deterrence.” This model was imposed on the Tijuana–San Diego region in 1994 with Operation Guardian. It multiplied the border patrol infrastructure in that region, which had been the traditional corridor for border crossing for the vast majority of undocumented indigenous migrants. This provoked a change in the pattern of migration: flows were diverted toward more distant and desolate regions, particularly the bor-der between Sonora and Arizona. At the same time, because of the increase in the cost and danger of crossing, undocumented migrants tended to stay in the United States year-round (Massey, 2007).

Within the United States, migrants confronted increasingly restrictive and punitive policies. In 1996 the U.S. Congress approved the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA), which established harsher sanctions against undocumented migrants, including periods of detention of over a year for those who recrossed the border after being deported. In addi-tion, it authorized an increase in the number of border patrol agents and the construction of a fence along the border with Mexico. It also increased the num-ber of reasons for the deportation of migrants and made them retroactive. This gave the immigration authorities broad powers to detain and expel migrants without due process. Finally, it considerably broadened the collaboration




between immigration authorities and local police forces (Hagan, Eschbach, and Rodríguez, 2008: 65; Kanstroom, 2012: 12).

Some indigenous people from southern Mexico and Guatemala, among them the Triquis of Oaxaca, began to emigrate to the United States at this time, when the risks of crossing the border were considerably greater than before. Crossing the border in the desert of Sonora and Arizona cost the lives of thou-sands because of the extreme temperatures (see EMIF-North, 2010). The cost of undocumented crossing and the probability of being apprehended at the bor-der also increased considerably. To be able to undertake the journey, migrants incurred debts in their communities, which came to represent an enormous burden on the families. The rates of interest charged by lenders or by the coy-otes themselves came to 10 percent monthly or 120 percent annually. The migrant who was unable to cross, was deported, or was unable to find work that paid enough to repay his debt was at risk of losing all his assets (Rus, 2012; Stoll, 2010).

According to the Pew Hispanic Center, between 1987 and 2007 the undocu-mented population steadily increased, reaching a peak of almost 12 million. Mexicans and Central Americans represented some two-thirds of that popula-tion (Passel and Cohn, 2009). Between 1998 and 2007 the percentage of indig-enous people in deportation proceedings was 5.2–7.5 percent (Velasco, in this issue), similar to the percentage of indigenous Mexicans attempting to cross the border illegally.5

The undocumented immigrant population declined annually between 2008 and 2011, to almost 11 million, as the economic crisis and restrictive immigra-tion policies forced many to return home (Passel and Cohn, 2012). This decline does not mean that undocumented migratory flows stopped. Despite the enor-mous infrastructure of border control established in the southern United States, many indigenous migrants continue to undertake the northward journey. They are forced to take on greater debt than before to pay the coyotes and must sub-mit to conditions of enormous geographic and labor mobility to be able to sur-vive with temporary work and pay their debts. Many very young men—some just entering adolescence—work seasonally in the fields of the West Coast. As Zabin (1992) documents, they give agricultural capital the enormous advan-tage of cheap labor and extremely mobile and flexible labor compared with mestizos from Mexico or workers of other nationalities. They travel with the harvests and eventually find work in the service industry. Because of the inse-curity of the border regions and strict border control, indigenous migrants’ stays in the United States have been considerably prolonged, even during peri-ods of labor market contraction or economic crisis. Indigenous migrants have great mobility between different states and different jobs, making them true labor nomads (Aquino, 2010: 41). Further, their ethnic ascription makes them more vulnerable to discrimination and racism, for example, in the county courts, where they must depend on translation into their mother tongues.

Kearney (1998: 125) points out that the main objective of the restrictive immi-gration policies was not to stop undocumented workers but to increase their alienation by geographically separating the production and the reproduction of the labor force. Fear causes them to put up with harsh working conditions, strict discipline, and much lower salaries. However, since 2008 we have seen




that exclusion and expulsion of migrants has also increased. Thus the deporta-tions, border control, and the U.S. economic crisis have forced the return of millions of migrants to their countries of origin, some of them after they have lived in the country for many years.

In the indigenous communities of Mexico and Central America, young men who have been returned or deported are increasingly numerous. These “Northerners” (Alarcón, 1992) are culturally very different from the migrants who are settled in the United States with documents and return every year during holiday periods or to assume traditional offices. While they have enough economic resources to invest in celebrations, construct large houses, and display many symbols of prestige, the forced returnees find themselves impoverished and lacking in opportunities to return north in the short term.

the contents of thIs Issue

The transnationalization of indigenous migration is marked by the develop-ment of the mass media and is expressed on various levels of the life of indig-enous peoples. Some aspects of this transnationalism are traced in the following pages.

state, ethnIc conscIousness, and transnatIonaL coLLectIve actIon

Oaxacan Mixtec migration was studied by Michael Kearney and Carole Nagengast for decades, and on it they founded the novel concept of transna-tional ethnic consciousness and a new relationship between Mexican indige-nous peoples and the Mexican state. This issue therefore begins with a text by Gaspar Rivera-Salgado in honor of Michael Kearney, highlighting his contribu-tions to the concept of indigenous transnational communities and to the strug-gle for the rights of indigenous migrants in the United States. Extending Kearney’s intellectual work and drawing upon his own investigative and polit-ical experience at the heart of the FIOB, Rivera-Salgado shows the reconfigura-tion of ethnic identities and the emergence of panethnic identities in indigenous migrant organizations and their relationship to the movement for human and labor rights of migrants in the United States. He also examines the develop-ment of citizen practices that allow multiple relations with communities of origin and complex forms of political and cultural participation in more than one nation-state.

In response to Rivera-Salgado’s text and also recalling Michael Kearney’s experience as an anthropologist and a binational citizen, Lynn Stephen ana-lyzes this concept of citizenship, understood as a set of rights and responsibili-ties derived from participation in indigenous trans-border communities. Through his work with and within these communities, Kearney developed his multisituational anthropological practice in total harmony and consonance with his citizenship practices. Stephen herself identifies with this vision of fieldwork as a continuous and horizontal dialogue with leaders and represen-tatives of the trans-border communities.




Following these two articles that expressly dialogue with Michael Kearney’s contributions, the issue presents two articles that go beyond the Mixtec case and, because of that, present more diversity of paths to collective action and ethnicization. “Transnational Ethnic Processes: Indigenous Mexican Migration to the United States,” by Laura Velasco Ortiz, analyzes indigenous migration in terms of transnational ethnic configurations and ethnicization. Velasco reflects on the historical state framework to understand the continuity of ethnic identities in the context of transnational migration and the formation of pan-ethnic identities. Through the analysis of the cases of the Purépechas of Michoacán, the Nahuas of Alto Balsas, and the Mixtecs of Oaxaca, she describes the processes of classification and ethnicization or racialization that emanate from state policies and from the collective action, whether ritual, artistic, or political, of indigenous immigrants.

“Purépechas in Tarecuato and Chicago: Shifts in Local Power Structures through Transnational Negotiation,” by Stephanie Schütze, analyzes the effects of negotiation between Purépecha migrants and their community of origin on local power at the municipal level in the state of Michoacán. She focuses on the relations of a hometown association in Chicago with the mestizo authorities in the place of origin, who seek political support among the migrants in the place of destination. Negotiations of this kind, she points out, would be impossible without migrants’ resources of remittances and political capital. Indigenous politics from a distance is more efficient to the extent that they manage to nego-tiate with municipal authorities in another context. Her article places the home-town association in the context of ethnic relations with mestizos at the local or municipal level. Thus the state emerges in very specific relations in which indigenous and mestizo interests converge. The political resources of interna-tional migration change the balance of power relations at the local level.

These optimistic views of the effects of international migration on ethnic identities and ethnic consciousness find their counterweight in two articles that look at obstacles to indigenous peoples’ historical continuity in the exercise of justice and the system of indigenous governance. “Justice and Its Margins: Understanding the Effects of Indigenous Migration from Mexico to the United States,” by Yerko Castro Neira, examines the way in which indigenous peoples relate to the justice systems of two contrasting states, Oaxaca and California. It concludes that indigenous peoples end up experiencing these situations in similar ways because transnationalism does not change their marginal position vis-à-vis the exercise of justice and the state.

In “Transnational Migration, Customary Governance, and the Future of Community: A Case Study from Oaxaca, Mexico,” James P. Robson and Raymond Wiest present the results of their study on the demographic and cultural impacts of transnational migration in the adaptation of indigenous government structure to the circumstances of migration. They report incongru-ence between individual and collective rationales for maintaining community cooperation and point to a decline in participation in the two most important institutions of community government, which rely on voluntary work. As a result, these institutions have lost control over collective action.

These last two articles describe different paths of transnationalization that do not always imply politicization of migration networks. One of them offers




a critical view of the reconstitution of identities on the basis of transnational collective action focused on the structural limitations or, rather, the costs of community life for the reproduction of indigenous government institutions. There is a shift toward the individual orientation that migrants sometimes have to adopt to survive in the countries of destination.

The persistence of issues of community identity in studies of indigenous migration goes hand in hand with a recurrent reflection on what it means to be an indigenous person away from home and on the new bases on which a sense of belonging or ethnic consciousness is constructed.

structuraL vIoLence and InterethnIc reLatIons In LocaL and transnatIonaL contexts

The local and regional structuring of transnational migration processes is the axis of analysis of two articles with different approaches: the regional economy and community violence. In “From Amate Paper Making to Global Work: San Pablito Migration from Puebla to North Carolina,” María Eugenia D’Aubeterre Buznego and María Leticia Rivermar Pérez present their study of migration from an Otomí village known for its intensive production of amate paper (paper made from bark) as a node in the migration corridor that extends from the junction of the state of Hidalgo’s southeast and the northwestern Sierra de Puebla. San Pablitos’ migration first to southern Texas and later to North Carolina is examined in this article as a response to two local processes (the collapse of coffee cultivation and the contraction of the labor market in Mexico City) and the transnationalization of labor markets through the movement of Mexicans to the United States. The article is a contribution to the literature on structural conditions that articulate local and transnational processes.

In “Breaking the Spiral of Violence: Politics and Migration in the Lower Triqui Region,” María Dolores París Pombo reports that in the Triqui region of Copala, Oaxaca, the political violence associated with factionalism and armed confrontation between leaders, neighborhoods, and political organizations has provoked the out- migration of more than half the population. She examines the effect of state intervention on the spiral of violence and links the physical violence with the structural violence represented by exploitation and domina-tion. She goes on to show how the migrants’ experience of a new institutional context and new political relationships at their destination in Mexico’s Northeast has allowed them to overcome political factionalism and direct vio-lence there.

“Trapped Behind the Lines: The Impact of Undocumented Migration, Debt, and Recession on a Tsotsil Community of Chiapas, Mexico, 2001-2012” by Diane L. Rus and Jan Rus, offers a novel and detailed analysis of the social impact of international undocumented migration on a community in the municipality of Chamula, Chiapas. The authors observe an increase in inequal-ity, vulnerability of women and children, and indebtedness and devastating effects on couple and family relationships.

These three articles call attention to the exploitation and subordination that indigenous people experience in globalized and polarized economies. They show that migration flows are embedded in broad and complex processes of regional economic integration (Sassen, 1998: 55) marked by labor flexibilization




and precariousness. Migration creates vulnerability in that it implies the loss or erosion of productive peasant unity—the commodification of social relations and the weakening of ties of mutual support.

generatIonaL changes

More than two decades after the peak in research on international indige-nous migration, studies on generational change and the emergence of young indigenous people, sons of migrants, have begun to appear. In “Identity Strategies and Consciousness Shifts in Sanmiguelense Mixtec Youth in Transnational and Transcultural Spaces,” Georgia Melville uses the concepts of dual consciousness, agency, and knowledge to explore the different strate-gies adopted by youth from San Miguel Cuevas, Oaxaca, for functioning in a transnational community there and in Fresno, California. Her discussion of the emergence of the category “Mixtec-Mexican-American,” involving simultane-ous ascription and de-identification, is an important contribution.

In “Maya Cultural Resistance in Los Angeles: The Recovery of Identity and Culture among Maya Youth,” Giovanni Batz uses his own experience to ana-lyze the strategies of young people for resisting discrimination and marginal-ization in the United States, among them assimilation to Latino culture and a return to their Maya roots. He shows that young people’s attitudes range from indifference toward Maya culture to advocacy of difference in the face of the absorbing force of Latino and Mexican identity in Los Angeles, with some iden-tifying with both the Latino community and Guatemalan Mayas at the same time. He points to the effects on identification of the absence of grandparents, who generally play a fundamental role in the transmission of values and Mayan traditions to younger generations.

“Transforming Borders through English Use and Service-Oriented Cultural Capital: A Case Study of Indigenous Honduran Immigrants,” by Shannon Reierson and Sylvia Celedón-Pattichis, addresses the rearticulation of identity in terms of the trilingual condition of the Lenca indigenous population of Honduras, an aspect that clearly distinguishes them from the nonindigenous or mestizo population. They examine the role of English in the strengthening of ties and broadening of social networks and as a factor in social mobility or even a resource for emancipation—as “transformational liberatory capital.”

The influence of Michael Kearney on these contributions is apparent in their stress on three themes: the constitution of ethnic consciousness beyond the ter-ritory of origin, local-transnational collective action, and panethnicity. At the same time, the contributions highlight new themes: generational changes, new forms of transnational ethnicization, the exercise of community justice in trans-national frameworks, and the challenges of transnationalism to community government structures. Dual ethnic consciousness, especially among youth, changes in the ethical bases of indigenous government systems, and interethnic repositioning are also highlighted here. Identities are being altered by new frameworks of ethnic alliances, new forms of capital (such as transformational liberatory capital), and, paradoxically, new exclusions. Increased state control on the part of the United States, with an increase in deportations and family separations, has effects on flows of forced and voluntary return.




This issue adopts an interdisciplinary perspective that addresses not only structural and historical factors but also actors and subjective processes. The use of decolonizing methodologies allows for reflection on the construction of ethnic consciousness, with liberating implications in revealing the mechanisms of domination, in particular in the study of identification among youth. The articles place contemporary indigenous migration in historical perspective, pointing to a sequence of stages: local, regional, national, and transnational. This allows us to observe the connection between regional migration and inter-national migration in the context of the global economy, in which local ethnic displacements are articulated in the logic of transnational capital and the neo-liberal state. Understanding indigenous migration calls for historical perspec-tives with longer time-spans.

notes

1. In 2010 Mexico had 6,986,413 speakers of indigenous languages; comparable data for Bolivia and Guatemala are unavailable. The sources for these data are as follows: Bolivia: Instituto Nacional de Estadística, Censo de población y vivienda, 2001. Brazil: Instituto Brasileño de Geografía y Estadística, Censo demográfico 2010. Chile: Instituto Nacional de Estadísticas, Estadísticas sociales de los pueblos indígenas en Chile censo 2002. Colombia: Departamento Administrativo Nacional de Estadística, La visibilidad estadística de los grupos étnicos colombianos, 2005. Cuba: De Mato (2012). Ecuador: Instituto Nacional de Estadísticas y Censos, Censo de población y vivienda 2010. Guatemala: Instituto Nacional de Estadística, Principales etnias censo 2002. Honduras: Instituto Nacional de Estadística, Pirámide poblacional, 2001. Mexico: Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Geografía, Censo de población y vivienda, 2000 and 2010. Panama: Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Censo, Censo nacionales 2010. Peru: Instituto Nacional de Estadística e Informática, Censo nacional 2007, XI de población y VI de vivienda.

2. This figure refers to those who declare a single race. With the addition of those who report a combination of two or three races, the total of those declaring themselves to be of Hispanic or Latino origin is 1,190,904 (Humes, Jones, and Ramírez, 2011: 13, Table 7).

3. The FIOB was founded in 1991 as the Binational Mixtec-Zapotec Front. At its 1994 assembly it changed its name to the Binational Oaxacan Indigenous Front to include the Chatinos and Triquis who had joined the organization. Finally, at its 2005 assembly it adopted its current name (retaining the acronym) at the request of Purépechas from Michoacán who wanted to be included.

4. The colloquial term for those who legalized their immigration status under the IRCA (named for Peter Rodino, one of the law’s sponsors).

5. According to EMIF-Norte (2010), between 2005 and 2010 the proportion of speakers of indig-enous languages in undocumented migration flows from Mexico to the United States was 5.7–7.8 percent.

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