Abstract
Since the late 1980s, indigenous Mixtecos of the Montaña region, in the southern state of Guerrero, Mexico, have become new members of the Mexican migrant working class in New York City (NYC). This article examines the contemporary history of proletarianization via migration of the Mixtecos of the Montaña. It shows to what extent the region became a supplier of migrant labor, and how its inhabitants transitioned from peasants and semi-proletarians of Mexico’s northwest agribusinesses to transnational migrant proletarians, as a result of major regional transformations related to state violence and drug cartel penetration. Indigenous Mixtecos have endured social inequality, racism, and state violence from post-revolutionary to contemporary neoliberal governments in Guerrero. Before their migration to NYC, they have gone through different rounds of proletarianization which differ from the Mexican mestizo migrant flow. The article aims to contribute to unravel such particularities, which have been subsumed as part of a homogeneous pattern in the history of Mexican migration and proletarianization in NYC.
Based on ethnographic research conducted for my doctoral dissertation (2014) and using oral history, the article traces, through the life story of a Mixteco migrant worker, the different rounds of dispossession in the history of proletarianization of Mixteco indigenous migrants from the Montaña.
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Notes
The Montaña is one of seven economic regions Costa Grande, Costa Chica, Acapulco, Zona Centro, Zona Norte, and Tierra Caliente, and it is divided into 19 municipalities, with predominantly indigenous population: Mixtecos, Nahuas, Tlapanecos and Amuzgos. Tlapa, the city and municipality, is the political and economic center.
At a national level, Guerrero ranked 30 out of 32 in the Human Development Index ( PNUD 2004).
Thomas and Znaniecki (1996) used migrants’ narratives to explore social change. In the 1920s, Gamio (1971) pioneered the examination of Mexican migrant adaptation to social life in the USA. Juan Pérez Jolote, by Ricardo Pozas (1952), is another example of an analysis of the collective past of Mexican indigenous peasants. Recently, Hellman (2008) compiled life histories to reconstruct large-scale social transformations related to Mexican migration.
This was also a period of tremendous growth of the Mexican population in NYC. According to the US Census, the population of Mexican-origin grew from 55,587 people in 1990 to 183,792 in 2000, and from 227,842 in 2005 to 319,126 in 2009. Between 1981 and 1990, 61,053 Mexicans arrived to the city, and from 1991 to 2000, 125,181 (Bergard 2005, 2011).
De Genova (2005) has shown that Mexican migrant workers are racialized as “illegal aliens” to reinforce their vulnerability as a deportable commodity. Hard and unskilled labor is also racialized and is intrinsically connected with “Mexicaness.” These forms of racialization show the influence of transnational migration on shaping social categories, and the production of new notions of affiliation and class-based identities (Striffler 2005). Hellman (2008) claims to have evidence of a racialization of “hard labor” associated with migrants from Oaxaca in NYC. However, I have not found evidence of racialization of Mexican labor, or that the hardest and lowest paid jobs are related to indigenous migrants. In general, the hierarchy of migrant wages in NYC is determined by economic sector, skills, and time of arrival, but not by ethnicity.
Bartolomé (1997) noted that in the twentieth century, these categories were tailored as part of the ideology of the Mexican State to justify economic exploitation and cultural discrimination based on an ethnic hierarchy, with indigenous people located at the base.
Unless noticed, translations in following sections were made by the author.
Fabila and Tejeda wrote an extensive unpublished manuscript entitled “Problemas de los indios Nahuas, Mixtecos y Tlapanecos de la Sierra Madre del Sur en el estado de Guerrero,” which is one of the first ethnographies of the Montaña. For a study of Mexico’s indigenous policies in relationship to Fabila’s research in Guerrero, see Overmyer-Velázquez 2010.
From now on, all quotations correspond to my interviews I conducted with Othón from 2010 to 2011.
Since the 1970s, agribusiness in Sinaloa has employed tens of thousands of migrant workers to cultivate cotton, sugarcane, wheat, sorghum, pepper, and tomato. According to the UN Children’s Fund, in 2009, the number of working children in Mexico between 5 and 17 years old was 3,647,067 (12.5% of the child population). 70% of this total lived in rural areas. The figure for the same year in Guerrero was 202,477 (20%) out of a total of 1,014,102 (UNICEF 2009).
Using life stories and Mexican music, Zavella (2011) has examined the extent to which subalterns and musicians articulate their feelings, confront gender issues, racialization or exploitation, and create a cultural memory.
Chalino Sánchez, a famous popular Mexican songwriter, worked as an undocumented day laborer in California. His songs portray the life and violence of rural towns. The rudeness that he describes in his songs resembles the daily life of the Montaña region (Quiñones 2001).
Between 1987 and 1993, subsidies and credits for agriculture in Guerrero were eliminated. As noted by Binford (2013), the dismantling of Mexico’s rural banking system allowed the massive penetration of multinational US capitalist agriculture as part of NAFTA.
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Corchado, R.A.H. From the Montaña to the city: a history of proletarianization of Mixteco indigenous from Guerrero, Mexico in New York City. Dialect Anthropol 42, 179–191 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10624-018-9495-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10624-018-9495-8