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‘Sometimes they achieve a good life, sometimes they come back in a coffin’ – exploring social worlds of mobility at the communities of origin in Chiapas, Mexico
Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies
... In some cases, it is not the state but the communal governance that takes up this matter. In this issue, Trzeciak (2024) discusses how certain habits adopted abroad by returning migrant women, such as wearing short skirts in public, have provided arguments to the opponents of emigration who view these changes as desmadre (chaos). Therefore, adopting a framework that goes beyond binary model (travel bans/no bans) and analyzing the attempts to regulate women's mobility in cases where no prohibitive policies are adopted is imperative. ...
... Indeed, as a social actor, and specifically as the basic unit of social reproduction (Merla et al, 2021), the transnational family also creates participation in these locales. This participation might be keenly appropriated and monitored by the community itself, as in the case of rural Lacandon jungle communities using a system of licence to leave and responsibility to return (Trzeciak 2024). This essential communitarian aspect is due primarily to the family's very social reproductive function, including its long-term burdens of financial responsibility, direct care, identity-building, and emotional support. ...
The article explores the practices of Ukrainian and Moldovan transnational family members in pooling resources within the Hybrid Transnational Social Protection (HTSP) nexus structured into state, universal, market-based and community-sourced protections. In doing so, it aims to show both the relational functioning of transnational family practices where protection resources, including migration itself are sought for the sake of the family as a whole, and the agentic quality of family actions where resource accession is not just passively received, but actively pursued as an example of autonomy, hence suggesting the family to be a platform of family members’ co-agency. Through qualitative methodology as employed in the CASTLE action research project, the analysis relies on selected data and specific cases in vignettes illustrating some of the most sensitive situations in the above context: severe illness of a child, COVID-19, the war in Ukraine. Overall, the paper proceeds to highlight a changed and more complicated picture of protection access within migration where, besides being a radically important, often life-saving step, migration becomes inscribed in a new setup where acquiring protection from diverse sources is a complex and creative endeavour. Therein, transnational families prove to be pioneers, indeed founders of global social relationships.
Rapid population ageing and international migration are demographic trends which intersect and contribute to far-reaching transformations of local networks and communities. Academic literature has often focused on the impact of migration on receiving communities or narrowly on ‘left behind’ individuals and households. Less consideration has been given to impacts on wider neighbourhood networks and social relationships in sending countries, or the agency of non-migrants in transforming and re-creating networks disrupted by emigration. This article draws on qualitative interviews among a German-speaking minority in Romania which experienced dramatic outmigration to Germany in 1990. The evidence shows that local networks adjusted to outmigration by bringing in new actors previously not involved in support provision; in this case, neighbours belonging to different ethnic groups with whom relations were previously distant. In addition, existing civil society institutions, such as the church, intensified and extended their role to offer practical support and physical care. By examining these transformations through the prism of care in later life, the depth of social transformations ensuant on migration can be brought into sharp relief.
Increasing feminisation of transnational labour migration has raised concerns over potential ‘care crises’ at home, and consequently a ‘care deficit’ for children left in origin countries. Our paper focuses on how left-behind children from Indonesia and the Philippines understand, engage and react to changes in their everyday lives in their parents’ absence. While many children had no say over their care arrangements, some were able to assert their agency in influencing their parents’ decisions and eventually migratory behaviours. Their thoughts and actions reinforce the importance of including children’s views in development and migration studies to improve both the children’s and families’ well-being, and make migration a sustainable strategy for all.
We offer the first global perspective on the well-being consequences of emigration for those staying behind using several subjective well-being measures (evaluations of best possible life, positive affect, stress, and depression). Using the Gallup World Poll data for 114 countries during 2009–2011, we find that having family members abroad is associated with greater evaluative well-being and positive affect, and receiving remittances is linked with further increases in evaluative well-being, especially in poorer contexts—both across and within countries. We also document that having household members abroad is linked with increased stress and depression, which are not offset by remittances. The out-migration of family members appears less traumatic in countries where migration is more common, indicating that people in such contexts might be able to cope better with separation. Overall, subjective well-being measures, which reflect both material and non-material aspects of life, furnish additional insights and a well-rounded picture of the consequences of emigration on migrant family members staying behind relative to standard outcomes employed in the literature, such as the left-behind’s consumption, income, or labor market outcomes.
Cristina Rivera Garza sugiere en Los muertos indóciles que una lectura de la narrativa documental en consideración del binomio comunidad/comunalidad servirá para plantear algunas preguntas nuevas a esos textos literarios. Este artículo revisa los dos conceptos, propuestos respectivamente por Jean-Luc Nancy en diálogo con Maurice Blanchot y por Floriberto Díaz, para hacer una lectura en esta clave de Juan Pérez Jolote de Ricardo Pozas y ahondar en la propuesta teórica de la escritora.
Hacia la mitad de los años de 1990, practicamente no había migrantes chiapanecos en los Estados Unidos; en 1997, el estado fue uno de los últimos en México tanto en el número de ciudadanos en el norte como en las remesas que recibía. Pero con el cambio del milenio, se despega la migración indocumentada chiapaneca. Entre 2004 y 2006, el estado es primero o segundo en México en enviar a jóveneas al norte. El texto utiliza los resultados de una encuesta directa para detallar el caso de la migración de tsotsil (tzotzil) mayas de una comunidad del municipio de San Juan Chamula. Empieza con la crisis de empleo que motiva la migracion, y resume las características de los migrantes (edad, nivel de educacion, estado civil, nivel de pobres, experiencia laboral), los gastos – esp. préstamos y deudas – ocasionados por el viaje, y los niveles de remesas recibidas. Argumenta que lejos de beneficiar a toda la comunidad, los primeros años de la migración hicieron a un pequeño grupo de contabandistas y prestamistas ricos, proveyó a los familiares de los mismos migrantes con ingresos mejores, aunque no espectaculares, e impobreció a familias que no participaron porque hizo más cara la tierra y causó un aumento el los costos de la vida adentro de la comunidad.
While migration scholars often neglect the national and transnational relations of production and exchange within which labor migration occurs, international political economists tend to treat labor migration as a mere side effect of transnational capitalism. By contrast, this article considers the constitutive role that post-socialist transformations and the EU integration played in shaping the various patterns of intra-European east–west labor migration since 1989. We argue that labor migration was not driven by development differentials between the west and the east as such, but rather by the particular type of development the latter adopted after the fall of communist regimes and by the way post-socialist countries were integrated in transnational circuits of production and exchange. We are sustaining our claims by a comparative assessment across time of the articulations between the different modes of production and different labor migration patterns during different stages of Romania's post-socialist transformation. This historical comparison enables us to insulate the influence of changing levels of development and modes of production on labor migration because our focus on a single country is keeping the influence of other national institutional factors constant.
This article analyzes the migratory experience of a group of Chiapanecan young sters of Tojolabal origin from the municipality of Las Margaritas, Chiapas, who migrated to the United States between 2003 and 2006. These young people were the first people to engage in the a migration adventure, which enables us to what gives us the possibility of closely observe the emergence of a transnational mi gration process from an area where this kind of phenomenon had not previously existed. The main objective of this paper is to show how Chiapanecan youngsters have managed to build up their migration processes on their own within a context characterized by unstable and fragmented social conditions—typical of the pres ent capitalist system—that have obliged them to change their living and working places continuously, as well as living with uncertainty and at risk. In other words, the author is interested in showing the personal and collective solutions that these new migrants have found in order to adapt to and work in a context defined by what Richard Sennet has called the culture of new capitalism.
In this article I make use of transnational Cape Verdean gossip in order to elaborate on social asymmetries between members of transnational families. Drawing on anthropological fieldwork carried out in Cape Verde, I reflect on the content of gossip stories as well as the motivations and reactions of those involved. Gender and resource inequalities are identified as the most prevalent issues, fixed on matters of intimacy, reciprocity, and transnational support. Furthermore, the analysis of the extended network of people involved in these mutual evaluations suggests that members of transnational social networks reflect on newly emerged kinship hierarchies by redefining gender norms, familiarity, and claims to knowledge. The article demonstrates that transnational gossip stories are not ‘just talk’, but they impose particular orders and moralities relevant for those included into them and hence, they should be understood as a powerful tool for exercising social control across national borders.
Taking its inspiration from the thought and action of Jean-Marie Tjibaou, this essay proposes a comparative analysis of “articulated sites of indigeneity.” It explores the advantages and limitations of translating North Atlantic cultural studies approaches into island Pacific contexts. Stuart Hall’s articulation theory is p roposed as a partial way beyond the stand-offs created by recent debates aro u n d the “invention of tradition.” The dialectic of indigenous and diasporic histories, roots and routes, is explored with regard to experiences of post- and neocolonial interdependence and pragmatic sovereignty.
We present theoretical arguments and empirical research to suggest that the principal mechanisms of cumulative causation do not function in large urban settings. Using data from the Mexican Migration Project, we found evidence of cumulative causation in small cities, rural towns and villages, but not in large urban areas. With event-history models, we found little positive effect of community-level social capital and a strong deterrent effect of urban labor markets on the likelihood of first and later U.S. trips for residents of urban areas in Mexico, suggesting that the social process of migration from urban areas is distinct from that in the more widely studied rural migrant-sending communities of Mexico.
This book provides a compendium of strategies for decolonizing global knowledge orders, research methodology and teaching in the social sciences. The volume presents recent work on epistemological critique informed by postcolonial thought, and outlines strategies for actively decolonizing social science methodology and learning/teaching environments that will be of great utility to IR and other academic fields that examine global order. The volume focuses on the decolonization of intellectual history in the social sciences, followed by contributions on social science methodology and lastly more practical suggestions for educational/didactical approaches in academic teaching. The book is not confined to the classical format of research articles but moves beyond such boundaries by bringing in spoken word and interviews with scholar-activists. Overall this volume enables researchers to practice a reflexive and situated knowledge production more suitable to confronting present-day global predicaments. The perspectives mobilise a constructive critique, but also allow for a reconstruction of methodologies and methods in ways that open up new lenses, new archives of knowledges and reconsider the who, the how and the what of the craft of social science research into global order.
The article explores the practices of Ukrainian and Moldovan transnational family members in pooling resources within the Hybrid Transnational Social Protection (HTSP) nexus structured into state, universal, market-based and community-sourced protections. In doing so, it aims to show both the relational functioning of transnational family practices where protection resources, including migration itself are sought for the sake of the family as a whole, and the agentic quality of family actions where resource accession is not just passively received, but actively pursued as an example of autonomy, hence suggesting the family to be a platform of family members’ co-agency. Through qualitative methodology as employed in the CASTLE action research project, the analysis relies on selected data and specific cases in vignettes illustrating some of the most sensitive situations in the above context: severe illness of a child, COVID-19, the war in Ukraine. Overall, the paper proceeds to highlight a changed and more complicated picture of protection access within migration where, besides being a radically important, often life-saving step, migration becomes inscribed in a new setup where acquiring protection from diverse sources is a complex and creative endeavour. Therein, transnational families prove to be pioneers, indeed founders of global social relationships.
Transnational parents are migrant mothers and fathers who have at least one child left behind in the home country. Despite their non-negligible prevalence in many destination countries, scarcity of data on the topic has caused a lack of attention to this phenomenon in both policy and scholarship. In particular, little is known about how the interplay between migration and family relations at a distance affects the individual well-being of both migrant parents and their left-behind children, especially in a European context. This article evaluates the subjective well-being of migrant couples currently residing in Italy who have children left behind, compared with childless migrants and with migrant parents living with their children in Italy. Multivariate logistic regression applied to individual-level data from Istat's Survey on Social condition and integration of foreign citizens, 2011–2012, shows that transnational parents experienced lower levels of self-rated health compared with migrants with different family statuses and that the well-being loss associated with transnational parenthood is strongly gendered. Controlling for individual characteristics, socio-economic conditions, the presence of minor children, and migration background, our analysis demonstrates that men's subjective wellbeing did not vary based on their family status while transnational mothers experienced significantly lower well-being compared with childless migrant women. Our research suggests the need for adopting a transnational approach to migration starting from data gathering, for instance through the design and implementation of multi-sited and retrospective surveys.
The resource mobilization theory has long emphasized the role of resources in facilitating collective mobilization. In turn, recent research on crime and insecurity in Mexico has drawn attention to the role of local networks of solidarity in facilitating mobilization against crime. We rely on these two literatures to propose that remittances — that is, the resources that emigrants send to their relatives left behind — deserve attention as international determinants of this type of non-violent anti-crime mobilization. Further, relying on recent research on remittances’ impact on political behavior, we hypothesize that the relationship between remittances and contentious action is non-linear, exhibiting a positive effect at low to moderate levels of inflows and declining at higher levels of remittances. We contend that at low to moderate levels, international remittances provide the necessary resources for collective activation. At greater levels of remittance inflows, however, lessened economic and security grievances imply a decline in the probability of protesting. Overall, we show that emigrant remittances matter for organizing protests against criminality at the subnational level but that they produce both an engagement and disengagement effect, depending on the size of the inflows.
Was bedeutet Migration für die Menschen, die an den Herkunftsorten bleiben? Die Studie rekonstruiert soziale Welten der Migration aus Perspektive der Herkunftsorte in Südmexiko. Sie basiert auf einer ethnographischen Untersuchung, die kollaborativ mit den Bewohner*innen indigener Dorfgemeinschaften in der südmexikanischen Region La Selva Lacandona durchgeführt und qualitativ ausgewertet wurde. Auf Grundlage dekolonialer, geschlechtertheoretischer und transnationaler Ansätze wird gezeigt, dass für die indigenen Dorfgemeinschaften Migration weniger eine Flucht vor den Verhältnissen der Armut und Marginalisierung bedeutet, sondern vielmehr die Möglichkeit bietet, das kommunale Leben am Herkunftsort aufrechtzuerhalten.
Many studies highlight the macro-level dissemination of global culture and institutions. This article focuses on social remittances – a local-level, migration-driven form of cultural diffusion. Social remittances are the ideas, behaviors, identities, and social capital that flow from receiving- to sending-country communities. The role that these resources play in promoting immigrant entrepreneurship, community and family formation, and political integration is widely acknowledged. This article specifies how these same ideas and practices are remolded in receiving countries, the mechanisms by which they are sent back to sending communities, and the role they play in transforming sending-country social and political life.
The expert interview as a method of qualitative empirical research, designed to explore expert knowledge, has been developed considerably since the early 1990s. A number of readers has been published1 and thus a gap in the methods’ literature has been dealt with, much to the benefit of many disciplines and fields of research in the social sciences. It can be assumed that through increased reflection on methodical issues research into experts’ knowledge has gained in professionalism and quality.2
In 992, Mexico modified its constitution as part of the reformation of its political landscape and recognised cultural diversity. This transition to de-mocracy is embedded in economic and social transformations of the Mexi-can society and shaped by a revised normative assessment of its indigenous peoples. In the southern state of Oaxaca, the local constitution acknowledged indigenous autonomy in accordance with traditional customs and legal prac-tices (usos y costumbres). I refer to a Zapotec community to discuss the enact-ment and controversial translation of this new constitutional status. I argue that already existing social and economic divides can be entrenched by the implementation of the new state law. Supporters of usos y costrumbres tend to essentialise 'culture' and 'tradition', whereas opponents appeal to notions of democracy and modernity to advance their claims. Both parties translate the Zapatista inspired international discourse on cultural rights into their ar-guments, but advocate antagonistic projects. In this article, I conceptualise 'translation' as cultural practice revealing the ambivalent implications of legal pluralism, autonomy, and self-determination.
A research methodology that combines theory, action and participation (PAR) committed to further the interests of exploited groups and classes has been initiated and tried in many Third World countries since the 1970s. PAR claims inspiration from phenomenological and Marxist trends adjusted to regional realities and factors; it challenges established academic routines without discarding the need to accumulate and systematise knowledge, and to construct a more comprehensive and human paradigm in the social sciences, and it proposes a series of techniques to combine knowledge and power without falling into the dangers of world annihilation This is illustrated with actual field studies and projects in Nicaragua, Colombia and Mexico.
This paper serves as an introduction to the three substantive papers in this themed section on the impact of migration on the well-being of the 'left behind' in Asia. In the light of recent migration trends such as the 'feminization' of migration and 'brain-drain' of health workers in the region, the paper provides a brief review of the existing scholarly literature on the vulnerability of different groups of the 'left behind', particularly women, children and the elderly. It argues that a multi-dimensional approach is needed, taking into consideration not only the economic impact of remittances but also factors such as social networks and gender effects.
The rebellion launched by the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) in 1994 in Chiapas, Mexico is best understood not as a guerrilla struggle for state power, but rather a social movement resisting the dominant mode of globalization being imposed from above. Examining the political, economic, and cultural dimensions of globalization as a set of contested processes, this case study of resistance shows how the Zapatistas have contested power in spheres above and below the nation-state, appealing to global networks and universal rights, but also to local practices and identities. Globalization can paradoxically open new political space for contestation as it ruptures existing patterns of relations between state and civil society. This movement points to an important alternative strategy of "globalization from below," based on the radically democratic demand for autonomy, defined as the right to choose the forms of interaction with forces that are reorganizing on a global scale.
This review surveys an emergent methodological trend in anthropological research that concerns the adaptation of long-standing modes of ethnographic practices to more complex objects of study. Ethnography moves from its conventional single-site location, contextualized by macro-constructions of a larger social order, such as the capitalist world system, to multiple sites of observation and participation that cross-cut dichotomies such as the “local” and the “global,” the “lifeworld” and the “system.” Resulting ethnographies are therefore both in and out of the world system. The anxieties to which this methodological shift gives rise are considered in terms of testing the limits of ethnography, attenuating the power of fieldwork, and losing the perspective of the subaltern. The emergence of multi-sited ethnography is located within new spheres of interdisciplinary work, including media studies, science and technology studies, and cultural studies broadly. Several “tracking” strategies that shape multi-site...
A middle-aged man moves from the hinterland of China to the east coast to find work as a construction worker; a young woman from rural Indonesia takes up a factory job in Jakarta; a Vietnamese woman joins her fellow villagers in Hanoi to work as a scavenger . . . Migration scholars policy-makers and the public media may see in these phenomena the migrant the journey and the arrival. But for the migrants these activities also signal departure separation and leaving family members loved ones and familiar places behind. Indeed leaving behind often entails emotional and psychological struggles as well as complex rearrangements of the material aspects of daily life of a magnitude as significant as moving to and settling in places of destination. An individuals migration presents a major rupture of the inner workings and everyday life of an entire household. While it is well recognised that rural--urban labour mobility continues to rise in terms of both magnitude and geographical scope across Pacific Asia -- more people are migrating from more places to more destinations -- the left behind (by definition a much larger group than the migrants themselves) are often forgotten. (excerpt)
The development potential of remittances has resurfaced as a topic of analysis, based in part on dramatic increases in migration and amounts of money ‘sent home’, and partly in the growing interest and involvement by states and non-state actors in gaining leverage over remittances. The trend is indicative of an emerging remittance-based component of development and poverty reduction planning. This article uses the case of Mexico to make two broad arguments, one related to the importance of extra-economic dimensions of remittances, particularly the social and political meanings of remittances, and the other based on a disaggregation of remittances into family, collective or community-based, and investment remittances. Key dimensions of this typology include the constellation of remitters, receivers, and mediating institutions; the norms and logic(s) that regulate remittances; the uses of remittances (income versus savings); the social and political meanings of remittances; and the implications of such meanings for various interventions. The author concludes that policy and programme interventions need to recognize the specificity of each remittance type. Existing initiatives to bank the un-banked and reduce transfer costs, for example, are effective for family remittances, but attempts to expand the share of remittances allocated to savings, or to turn community donations into profitable ventures, or small investments into large businesses, are much more complex and require a range of other interventions.
Confronting the Narrative: Gladys Tzul on Indigenous Governance and State Authority in Guatemala
- O J Hernández
- G Tzul
La Lucha sigue - Der Kampf geht weiter
- L Kerkeling
- Kerkeling L.
It’s Not Just About the Economy, Stupid”: Social Remittances Revisited
- P Levitt
- D Lamba-Nieves
- Levitt P.
Sistemas de Gobierno Comunal Indígena. Mujeres y tramas de parentesco en Chuimeq'ena
- G Tzul Tzul
- Tzul Tzul G.
Negotiating Land Tenure in Transborder Media Spaces: Ayuujk People’s Videomaking Between Mexico and the USA.” Working Paper for the EASA Media Anthropology Network’s E-Seminar
- I Kummels
- Kummels I.
Lacandonia al filo de agua
- Leyva Solano
- G Ascencio Franco
- Leyva Solano X.
Tell us Something About Yourself, Too - Reflections on Collaborative Research as a Tool for a Reflexive Methodology
- Miriam Trzeciak
- Friz
- Trzeciak Miriam Friz
The Past and Future of Migration Poverty and Small-Scale Agriculture in Mexico
- Zamora Delgado