Not Just Mexico's Problem: Labor Migration from Mexico to the United States (1900 - 2000)

IntroductionEbbs and flows in Mexican migration to the U.S. correspond not with economic underdevelopment or stagnation, but with the vagaries of neoliberal economic development itself. This article will review the history of Mexico-U.S. labor migration using phases in Mexico's political economy as a guide. This history begins with the first steps toward modernization established at the turn of the twentieth century by Porfirio Diaz and ends at the present period. At every juncture, I address the political and economic trends of the period, the impact of these trends on Mexican workers and agrarians, major patterns of movement and demographic characteristics of migrants, and the implications of the period for future migrations. I also discuss the social and political trends in the United States that shape the direction, flow, and perceptions of labor migration from Mexico. Finally, I examine how political rhetoric surrounding transmigration has produced a politics of exclusion in the United States, and I consider the implications of this exclusion for current and future Mexican workers in the U.S.1876 - 1910: El PorfiriatoIn 1860, about half of rural Mexico was controlled by ejidos, corporate local communities engaged in subsistence and local-market production (Weaver 2000, 51). By the end of the thirty-four year reign of President Porfirio Diaz (1876-1910), 5 million rural Mexican had lost their land rights (Pedraza and Rumbaut 1996, 254); by 1910 less than 5% of rural households retained control over land and large haciendas increasingly dominated the countryside (Cardoso 1980, 7). The development strategy of Porfirio Diaz was based on liberal economic policies that promoted direct foreign investment in Mexico's agriculture, industry, mining, petroleum, and infrastructure (Kirkwood 2000: Massey et al. 2002). Capital investment in agriculture accelerated production, and the new large-scale plantations converted cultivation from subsistence goods for local markets to cash-crops for export (Cardoso 1980; Kirkwood 2000; Massey et al. 2002).The impact of liberal development on Mexico's peasantry was manifold. Without land, peasants were no longer self-sufficient in food. Mechanization of agricultural production reduced the demand for labor and further depressed wages for sharecroppers on the large haciendas, a main source of work for landless peasants (Cardoso 1980). Domestic craft production was undermined by the introduction of mass-produced wares to local markets (Massey 1988; Massey et al. 2002). Simultaneously, the costs of living had increased because Mexico was now importing basic foodstuffs (Massey et al. 2002). The penetration of capital development into rural Mexico destabilized traditional communal subsistence practices (Foster 1979 [1967]) and, through the new railroads, provided cheap access to industrializing centers in the cities (Cardoso 1980). Mexico's burgeoning urban sector swelled with rural migrants after 1900. While only 9.3% of the Mexican population lived in urban areas in 1900, that number had grown to 15.6% by 1930 (Weaver 2000, 129). Large reserves of displaced labor put downward pressure on wages in the cities, resulting in violent labor strikes between 1905 and 1910 (Kirkwood 2000; Massey et al. 2002, 30).The railroads had an additional impact on rural Mexico: they provided labor recruiters from the United States with passage into Mexico's interior (Cardoso 1980; Cornelius 1981; Gutierrez 1995). As Mexico's industrial labor market quickly became saturated, growers in the southern and western United States found themselves experiencing a severe labor shortage brought on by restrictive immigration policies that cut off migrant labor supplies from Asia in 1907 (Gutierrez 1995; Massey et al. 2002). Labor recruiters (enganchadores) used the new rail system to travel from the southwest U.S. into the fertile west-central states of Guanajuato, Jalisco, Michoacan, and Zacatecas (the region known as el Bajio), where they employed notoriously coercive means of recruiting workers to go north. …