Mixtec transnational migration is the phenomenon in which Mixtec people have migrated between Mexico and the United States for over three generations.
The Mixtec people are an example of a social group in which migration had not led to a loss of cultural identity, but has rather generated territorial expansion and cultural reaffirmation.
Mixtecs have migrated to various parts of both Mexico and United States. In recent years they, along with Zapotecs and Triqui, have emerged as one of the largest groups of migrants in the United States. Large Mixtec communities exist in the border cities of Tijuana and San Diego. According to statistics compiled by the National Geographic and Statistical Institute, out of the 241,080 Indigenous people living in the border cities, 72,000 (30 percent) are migrants.National Profile of Indigenous Peoples of Mexico. 2008 TravelYucatan.com v5.0 Mayan Culture History Arts & Sciences , an estimated 150,000 Mixteco people were living in California, and 25,000 to 30,000 in New York City.
The migration of Indigenous populations to various cities of the United States constitutes an important source of income for the Mixtec, who have a long tradition of migration and are the most numerous in the United States according to the Mixtec Integrated Development Program. The remittances sent between 1984 and 1988 amounted to $2,000 million pesos annually. Mixtec communities are generally described as transnational and transborder because of their ability to maintain and reaffirm social ties between their native homeland and diasporic community.Stephen, Lynn. 2007. Transborder Lives. Indigenous Oaxacans in Mexico, California, and Oregon. Duke University Press. Durham and London For more than two decades, anthropologists have documented people who move from one country to another and who build transnational links.
Transnational migration Nina Glick Schiller defines transnational as "those persons who having migrated from one nation-state to another live their lives across borders, participating simultaneously in social relations that embed them in more than one nation-state".Glick Schiller, Nina. 2003. “The Centrality of Ethnography in the Study of Transnational Migration: Seeing the Wetland Instead of the Swamp.” In American Arrivals: Anthropology Engages the New Immigration, ed. Nancy Foner, 99-128 Santa Fr: School of American Research Press
Lynn Stephen states that while the term transnational migration suggests a more or less permanent state of being between two or more locations, some people may spend a good part of their time in this state, others may live for longer periods of time in one place or another, and still others may leave their home communities only once or never. All the people living within a transnational social field are exposed, in different levels, but nonetheless in some shared way to "a set of social expectations, cultural values, and patterns of human interaction shaped by more than one social, economic and political system".
Transnational social fields By conceptualizing transnational social fields as transcending the boundaries of nation-states, individuals within these fields are, through their everyday activities and relationships, influenced by multiple sets of laws and institutions that exist within many states and cross their border.Levitt, Peggy and Nina Glick Schiller. 2004. “Conceptualizing Simultaneity: A Transnational Social Field Perspective on Society.” International Migration Review, Fall. The national and the transnational part of migrant histories and experiences, particularly when it comes to the recognition or lack thereof of basic human and labor rights connected to their positions in the relation to the legal frameworks of the nations they are moving between Migrants Rights. When Mixtecs come into the United States, they cross a new set of regional borders that are often different from those in Mexico, but may also overlap with those of Mexico; for example, the racial/ethnic hierarchy of Mexico, which lives on in Mexican communities in the United States, including ethnic, cultural, and regional borders within the United States.
Background According to social researcher Laura Velasco-Ortiz, several decades of Mexican migration to the United States have led entire communities to concurrently develop economic, cultural, and social ties in the US and Mexico. Evidence also suggests that these migrant populations have modified the construction of the sense of territorial belonging historically associated as the foundation of local, regional, and national identities. Velasco-Ortiz proposes a reconceptualization between the relation culture-territory in the process of transnational migration among Mixtec communities.Velasco-Ortiz, Laura. El regreso de la comunidad: migracion indigena y agentes etnicos (los mixtecos en la frontera Mexico-Estados Unidos). Tijuana, BC: El Colegio de la Frontera Norte, 2002.
Mixtec identity The use of ethnic labels has enabled migrant workers to distinguish themselves in local ethnic hierarchies and differentiate themselves from other Mexicans and Central-Americans. According to Michael Kearny, the use of pan-ethnic labels has also provided a way for so-called illegal or alien Mixtec migrants to construct a new form of identity based on their transborder existence. Mixtec identity arises as an alternative to nationalist consciousness and as a medium to circumscribe not space, but collective identity precisely in those border areas where nationalist boundaries of territory and identity are most contested and ambiguous.Kearney, Michael. 1998. “Mixtec Political Consciousness: From Passive to Active Resistance.” In Rural Revolt in Mexico and U.S. Intervention, ed. Daniel Nugent, 113-24. La Jolla: Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies, University of California, San Diego. However, according to Lynn Stephen, culturally Mixtecs and other Indigenous migrants of Latin American origin are still not seen as part of the Mexican's state.
History of Indigenous migration Mixtec migration within Mexico in particular has been tied to the commercialization of Mexican agriculture beginning after World War II. For the past two decades, liberalization of trade barriers between Mexico and United States has made it much easier for US agricultural products to enter Mexico and for Mexican products to enter the United States. According to Melinda Burns, the Mixtecs form part of a de facto border exchange, one in which the U.S. exports cheap corn to Mexico and imports Mexican corn farmers to labor in the fields of California.
In most Oaxacan communities underemployment is high during the slack months of the agricultural year. The situation in many communities became dire in the 1990s as subsidies and credits for small farmers were significantly downsized; they had to compete with subsidized imported corn and other products that hit the Mexican market as a result of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).Stephen, Lynn. 2005. Zapotec Women: Gender, Class, and Ethnicity in Globalized Oaxaca. Second Edition, Revised and Updated. Durham, NC., and London: Duke University Press. According to Stephen, Indigenous migration became more significant with the recruitment of Oaxacan men by the U.S. bracero program during World War II and after. The Bracero Program was a guestworker program between Mexico and the US that was started because of a perceived labor shortage in the agricultural and railroad industry. Braceros were to work under contracts that specified their transportation, wages, health care, housing, food, and the number of hours to be worked. The contracts were initially between the US and Mexican governments, but they were switched to private contractors who ignored the terms. It is estimated that over 4.5 million contracts were issued. The bracero program ended in 1964, and many Oaxacans among them many Mixtecs continued to migrate.
The greatest concentrations of Indigenous migrants are in the states of California and Oregon. Stephen states that we can no longer think of the cultural and historical entity we call Mexico as existing solely below the Rio Grande and the rest of the physical border, in the past they were part of Mexican territory.
The increasing presence of Mexicans in both California and Oregon and their links to Mexico are important parts of the histories of transborder communities. The arrival of Mixtecs is essential to the history of active recruitment of Mexicans as farmworkers beginning in the early part of the twentieth century. Oregon has more than 100,000 farm-workers, 98 percent of whom are Latino and primarily of Mexican origin. The most recent farmworkers, many of whom live permanently in Oregon and should be considered immigrants workers, are Indigenous.Larson, Alice. 2002. “Migrant and Seasonal Farmworker Enumeration Profiles Study: Oregon.” http://www.ohcs.oregon.gov The histories of Mexicans in California and Oregon, according to Stephen, are connected to the histories of places such as San Agustin, a Mixtec community in Oaxaca, through political, economic, and cultural connections. Martha Rees argues that the increase in number of female migrants to the United States is no longer a male strategy to reduce household expenses: "Migration is not solely a male strategy: in spite of low remittances, the number of migrants is positively related to consumer goods. Not all migrants cut themselves off from their families, not all operate solely as free agents or individuals, but remain tied to their household and communities through reciprocal relations".Rees, Martha. 2008. Ayuda or Work? Labor History of Females Heads of Household from Oaxaca, Mexico. University of Cincinnati
Migrant life Indigenous migrant and immigrant workers often try to remain invisible in the larger world to avoid detention and deportation by the U.S. Customs and Border Protection. According to Stephen, migrants are also objects of surveillance and invisibility on the US-Mexico border, the agricultural fields and in produce processing plants. Racialized readings of Mexican Indigenous immigrants and migrants as illegal, undocumented or not, result in surveillance from many people in the United States, from border guards to factory supervisors. Being an object of surveillance in the United States for one's legal status is a contradictory framework because of the encouragement of undocumented immigration through US immigration policy, as Stephen explains: "U.S. immigration policy in relation to Mexico and other countries has served primarily as labor policy, inviting workers in when they are needed and then showing them the door when it became politically expedient to 'defend' the border."
While US immigration policy has consistently maintained the defense of the border from so-called illegal aliens, deeper historical analysis of particular policies directed toward Mexico—for example, the bracero program of 1942–64, the IRCA, and the SAW program of 1986 and a close examination of the accelerated integration of the US and Mexican economies under economic neoliberalism and NAFTA—suggests that U.S. immigration policy toward Mexico has encouraged and facilitated increased immigrationMartin, Philip. 2003a. Promise Unfulfilled: Unions, Immigration, and the Farm Workers. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.Massey, Douglas. 1997. “March of Folly: U.S. Immigration Policy after NAFTA.” American Prospect 37: 1-16
According to the Department of Labor, about 53 percent of farmworkers in the United States are undocumented. In California, estimates are as high as 90 percent.International Forum on Remittances at the IDB Conference Center in Washington DC, on 18–19 October 2007.http://www.ifad.org/events/remittances/index.htm