Oaxaca in Motion: An Ethnography of Internal, Transnational, and Return Migration 9781477326060

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Oaxaca in Motion

Oaxaca in Motion a n e t h no g r a ph y of i n t e r n a l , t r a ns n at ion a l , a n d r e t u r n m ig r at ion

Iván Sandoval-Cervantes

University of Texas Press

Austin

Copyright © 2022 by the University of Texas Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America First edition, 2022 Publication of this book was made possible in part by support from the Pachita Tennant Pike Fund for Latin American Studies. Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to: Permissions University of Texas Press P.O. Box 7819 Austin, TX 78713-7819 utpress.utexas.edu/rp-form The paper used in this book meets the minimum requirements of ansi/niso z39.48-1992 (r1997) (Permanence of Paper). l ibr a ry of congr e ss c ata l ogi ng -i n-pu bl ic at ion data Names: Sandoval-Cervantes, Iván, author. Title: Oaxaca in motion : an ethnography of internal, transnational, and return migration / Iván Sandoval-Cervantes. Description: First edition. | Austin : University of Texas Press, 2022. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: lccn 2022002155 isbn 978-1-4773-2604-6 (cloth) isbn 978-1-4773-2605-3 (paperback) isbn 978-1-4773-2606-0 (pdf) isbn 978-1-4773-2607-7 (ePub) Subjects: LCSH: Migration, Internal—Social aspects—Mexico—Oaxaca (State) | Return migration—Social aspects—Mexico—Oaxaca (State) | Zapotec women—Mexico—Mexico City—Social life and customs. | Zapotec Indians—United States—Social life and customs. | Internal migrants—Mexico—Social life and customs. | Sex role. | Zapotec Indians—Kinship. | Zapotec Indians—Family relationships. | Oaxaca (Mexico : State)—Emigration and immigration—Social aspects. Classification: lcc jv7409.o39 s35 2022 | ddc 304.80972/74— dc23/eng/20220518 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022002155 doi:10.7560/326046

Contents

Acknowledgments vii

introduct ion. Noticing Internal and Transnational Migrations ch a p ter 1. Research in Zegache: Multiple Histories

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ch a p ter 2. Leaving Zegache: Internal and Transnational Women Migrants 30 ch a p ter 3. Labor Corridors I: Peasants and Soldiers

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ch a p ter 4. Labor Corridors II: Transnational Migration and Masculinity 61 ch a p ter 5. The Masculine Familiarity of Work; or, How Cooking Became Masculine 73 ch a p ter 6. Migration and Femininity: Beyond the Tutelage of the Mothers-in-Law 80 conclusion

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Notes 97 References 102 Index 110

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Acknowledgments

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his book is t he r esu lt of ten y e a r s of r ese a rch that included numerous moves, deaths, birth, and a global

pandemic. In writing it, I have received the support of many individuals and institutions. It is impossible to name everyone who has contributed to this book; my sincere apologies those who have been accidentally left out. In Zegache, I am especially thankful to Nicolas and María, who hosted me and provided delicious food, interesting conversation, and funny anecdotes, along with the occasional mezcal. Their company enriched my life. I also want to thank, in no particular order, Antonia, Sinforiano, Amado, Juan, Maura, Urbano, Misael, Felix, Mateo, Dolores, Erick, Rafael, Carmen, Guadalupe, Norma, Daniel, Catalina, José Luis, Tomás, Elmer, and many others who invited me into their homes and into their lives by sharing parts of their life stories. Portions of this book are based on two previously published articles: “Navigating the City: Internal Migration of Oaxacan Indigenous Women,” published in 2017 in the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, and “‘We Came for the Cartilla but We Stayed for the Tortilla’: Enlisting in the Military as a Form of Migration,” published in 2019 in the Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology. I want to acknowledge the fundamental role that the Department of Anthropology at the Universidad de las Américas–Puebla had in my training as an anthropologist. During my undergraduate years, I was fortunate to work with outstanding anthropologists and mentors such as Tim Knab, Robert Shadow, Olga Lazcano, Patricia Plunket, Gustavo Barrientos, and Gabriela Uruñuela. In addition, some of my peers from that time continue to be friends and sources of inspiration, and they have supported me in vii

many ways: Mónica Salas Landa, Paola Velasco Santos, Aarón Lopez Feldman, Marco Antonio Pérez Jiménez, Columba González Duarte, Denise Lechner, Natalia Martínez Tagueña, Isaac Guzmán, Nadia Santillanes, and Ernesto López Pillot. At the University of Oregon, I had the privilege of working under the supervision of Lynn Stephen. The support and friendship that Lynn provided me over the years shaped who I am as a scholar and as a person. I was fortunate enough to be part of some of her own research projects, which provided invaluable experience and knowledge. I also want to thank the wonderful members of my dissertation committee: Lamia Karim, Stephen Dueppen, and Kristin Yarris. Jessaca Leinaweaver, from Brown University, sat in my committee as an external member and gave her time and ideas generously. At Oregon, I was also lucky to meet supportive faculty and peers that made my time in Eugene, and the early development of some of this book’s ideas, much more enjoyable. In anthropology, I greatly benefited from classes led by Madonna Moss and Phil Scher. Outside of anthropology, I learned a great deal from Gabriela Martinez, Carlos Aguirre, and Stephanie Wood. Rupa Pillai, Joe Henry, Anna Cruz, Tobin Hansen, Maurice Magaña, Kathleen Piovesan, Rucha Chandvankar, Samantha King, and Gennie Nguyen all shared with me, in one way or another, the doctoral journey. It would not have been the same without them. A special mention goes out to Sandi Morgen, who was always supportive of my work and whose cheerfulness was contagious. She passed away in 2016, and so many of us miss her immensely. Various institutions have financially supported my research. At the University of Oregon, I received generous support from the Department of Anthropology, the Center for the Latino/a and Latin American Studies (CLLAS), the Global Oregon Translation Research Group, and the Center for the Study of Women in Society (CSWS). CSWS provided important support through the Jane Grant Scholarship that allowed me to focus on writing during the last year of my PhD program. In addition, other funding came from Institute for Social Studies (Erasmus University), the Oregon State Parks and Recreation Office, and the Sasakawa Young Leaders Fellowship Fund (Sylff ). Sylff, through the Graduate Fellowship for International Research, enabled me to conduct fieldwork for an entire year beginning in 2014. From 2016 to 2018, I held a visiting assistant position in the anthropology department of the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP), where I received the support and friendship of a number of colleagues, such as Howard Campbell, Joe Heyman, Carina Heckert, Aurolyn Luykx, Ophra LeyserWhalen, Gina Núñez-Mchiri, and Jeremy Slack, among others. During my time in El Paso, I was also reacquainted with my hometown of Ciudad viii

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Acknowledgments

Juárez, where I met new friends and colleagues, including Luis Rubén Díaz Cepeda, Ana Laura Ramírez Vázques, Victor Manuel Hernández Váquez, and Roberto Sánchez Benítez. At my current institution, the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, I would like to thank the members of the anthropology department and the College of Liberal Arts for their confidence and support during these pandemic years. Special mention goes to Chris Heavey, Daniel Benyshek, Barb Roth, Jennifer Keene, Alyssa Crittenden, Liam Frink, Deb Martin, Esther Williams, Heather Nepa, Jiemin Bao, Bill Jankowiak, Karen Harry, Alan Farahani, Jenny Byrnes, Lisa Johnson, John Tuman, Vincent Perez, and Anne Stevens. Haley Dougherty helped tremendously with organizing the references. I also want to thank, among other friends, colleagues, and commentators on my work, Elyse Ona Singer, Rihan Yeh, Ronda Brulotte, Matthew Gutmann, Jeffrey Cohen, Stephen Neufeld, Bianet Castellanos, Yoalli Meztli Rodriguez Aguilera, Alice Arican, Mark Stanford, Catherine Herfeld, Roberto Fumagalli, Eliana Santanatoglia, and Noé López. My sponsoring editor at the University of Texas Press, Casey Kittrell, deserves a special thank-you. His patience and support, along with the insightful feedback from the anonymous reviewers, greatly improved this manuscript. Of course, this would not have been possible without my parents, Alicia y Juventino, and my brother, Daniel, who have cheered for me ever since I decided to get a licenciatura in anthropology. Thank you for everything you have given me. I love you deeply. I also want to thank the rest of my family; I have too many tíos, tías, and primas and primos to name here, but Emilio, Cecilia, Betty, Marianna, Emilio Andrés, and Germán have provided delicious meals and family gatherings over the years. While writing this book, I experienced the deaths of my two abuelitas, Gloria and Alicia, and of my uncle, Luis. Galletita, our canine family member who passed away in 2018 after thirteen years of being with us, is also part of this project in one way or another. Finally, I want to thank my spouse and life-partner, Amy, and my daughter, Amalia Mayahuel. Thank you, Amy, for loving me and for always being there, for sharing your passion for life, and for pushing me to find my own path in life and in academia. I love you and cannot wait for what lies ahead. And thank you, Amalia, for everything you have given us during these pandemic years; you make us laugh and make me wish I was a better person. We love you more than you will know. Gracias por todo.

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Acknowledgments

Zegache’s church bell tower, with María Sánchez Hill in the background. Photo by author.

A local assembly at the municipal government offices. Photo by author.

Map indicating the diff erence in distance between Zegache and Mexico City and between Zegache and Oregon. Map created by Gabrielle Davila-Ortiz.

Oaxaca in Motion

Introduction no t ic i ng i n t e r n a l a n d t r a ns n at ion a l m ig r at ions

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n t he su mmer of 2011, dur ing m y fir st r ese a rch trip to the Zapotec town of Zegache, Oaxaca, I met Roberto Vázquez and his wife, Jimena Limón. Both of them were engaged in the collective enterprise of planting trees in one of the town’s cerros (hills). I had been doing research in Zegache for about two weeks and was invited to participate (or, rather, to “hang out”) in this reforestation effort by Jimena’s cousin, one of the leaders of the town’s comuneros (villagers who favor the communal ownership of land). People in Zegache had not been particularly friendly, and it had not been easy to make inroads through the local authorities. Nevertheless, it was easy to talk to Roberto and Jimena. Like many of their fellow Zegacheños, they had lived in Oregon and liked talking about it. In that summer of 2011, they expressed a desire to return to Oregon, partly for social and economic reasons. Their daughter, Noemi, was born in Oregon and was a US citizen; they also missed relatives and friends who lived in the Willamette Valley. In addition, the relationship with Roberto’s family in Zegache was not as amicable as it could be; tensions over ideas about kinship relationships were becoming too burdensome. Their transnational story of migration intertwined with their own family histories. Yet, their story was also one of migrating within Mexico. Jimena had worked in Mexico City for a number of years, and Roberto had enlisted in the Mexican military, which I consider to be a form of internal migration. Thus, both of them had moved within and outside Mexico. Located in the Zimatlán branch of Oaxaca’s Central Valleys, Zegache is a town of approximately 3,000 inhabitants that sits, almost equidistantly, between two highways that connect Oaxaca City to the Pacific Coast. Zegache is considered an Indigenous municipality, and most people speak or understand some Zapotec.¹ “Zegache” means “seven hillocks” (siete mogotes), 1

although locals often translate it as “seven jewels” or “seven stones,” a reference to seven landmarks that surround the town. Though it is not a long trip from Oaxaca City, getting to Zegache is not simple. By private car, one needs to find a poorly marked exit to a dirt road, which itself can easily become muddy. Public transportation to the town is not easy to find in Oaxaca City, and the cheap and formerly trustworthy bus system is now unreliable, with a history of highway accidents. Thus, as with many towns in Oaxaca, the slightly more expensive collective taxi is the preferred method for making the forty-minute trip. In addition, Zegache has lacked recognition as a tourist destination, even if that seems to be slowly changing; most people do not know where to find it even on a map. Zegache is a rural town with an economy that combines subsistence agriculture, remittances from both Mexico and the United States, and wages earned by daily commuters in nearby urban centers such as Oaxaca City and Ocotlán. Families often engage in agriculture while simultaneously participating in other forms of wage labor. As in other Oaxacan towns, Zegache has a long history of inter- and intracommunity conflicts over land that have persisted for centuries and have permeated other political issues, such as villagers’ alignment with political parties. In part, it had been these conflicts and the town’s relation to subsistence agriculture that took me to Zegache. I had first visited Zegache in 2010, the summer before I entered graduate school at the University of Oregon in Eugene. At the time, I was interested in understanding the role of subsistence agriculture in local economies, especially how people involved in milpa agriculture (a system that involves the combination of crops, usually squash, beans, and corn) interacted with genetically modified seeds and large transnational food vendors. During my anthropology undergraduate training, at the Universidad de las Américas–Puebla, I had conducted ethnographic research in two of Oaxaca’s eight regions (the Costa and the Sierra Sur), where I became aware of some of the intracommunity conflicts regarding religion and land tenure. Zegache, which is not too far from where corn was first domesticated and is famous for its maíces criollos (local varieties of corn landraces), which have been featured in the New York Times, seemed like the ideal place to conduct my original research plan: investigating agricultural practices in Oaxaca. After my first year of graduate school in Oregon, I returned to Zegache ready to start research on subsistence agriculture. However, as often happens with ethnography, my plans changed once research started. While some people were interested in discussing traditional subsistence agriculture with me, most people I encountered (especially the men) wanted to

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Oaxaca in Motion

talk about the United States. This was first made obvious when I encountered a group of men digging up a grave in the cemetery. One of them, Jimena’s cousin, saw me walking and waved his hand to get my attention. I walked up to them, and they started asking questions. As I gave them my two-minute speech about my research, I reached into my backpack and produced my adviser’s letter, printed on University of Oregon letterhead, stating my identity and credentials. Though they had been friendly, once they saw the dark-green letters on top of the letter their faces changed. They wanted to talk about their experiences in Oregon (a place I barely knew at the time) and their relatives in the Willamette Valley. Thus, even if I was not originally interested in doing research on migration, the interest that Zegacheños expressed in discussing their migration experiences led me to refocus my attention on transnational migration, not so much on subsistence agriculture. A couple of weeks after this interaction in the cemetery, I was telling a woman about my project and asked her if she would be interested in being interviewed. Teresa Ramos, who was in her early forties, said she was open to talking to me but clarified: “I’ll do it, but I’m not a migrant.” Still, I wanted to hear her perspective given my interest in understanding the role of women in transnational migration and in the local economy. A few minutes into the conversation, Teresa casually told me that she had just returned to Zegache about a year ago—she had lived in Mexico City for ten years. After this conversation with Teresa, it became clear that local discourses about migration tended to acknowledge transnational migrants as migrants but not internal migrants, even when transnational migrants and internal migration existed simultaneously in the community. I realized that the experience of migrating within Mexico was gendered in specific ways and was still prevalent in Zegache, even if migration to the United States was more noticeable. I also realized that the term “migrant” was used in specific ways that highlighted some forms of migration while obscuring others. Similarly, in academic writing, the term “migrant” has come to be tacitly understood as referring to someone who has migrated transnationally, often from the so-called Global South to the Global North. However, in recent years, the analysis of internal migration has resurfaced among social scientists. Anthropologists and geographers have reenergized the analysis of internal migration, its connections to globalization processes, and how it is intertwined with transnational migration.² These issues are relevant because of their empirical significance and because of the possibility of providing theoretical insights in migration studies in general (see King and Skeldon 2010, 1632).

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Introduction

The importance of internal migration can be better contextualized and understood when we learn that, for example, in 2009 there were around 740 million people who had migrated within their own countries. Compare this to the approximately 260 million transnational migrants registered in 2017 across the globe (Vullnetari 2020, 54). Even with the increased importance of transnational migration and remittances in Mexico, internal migration has not only continued but also increased in recent years. The Mexican National Population Council (CONAPO in Spanish) calculated that in 2015 the number of people who did not reside in their hometowns was close to 20 million, including 6 million people who moved between 2010 and 2015 (Consejo Nacional de Población 2017). By way of contrast, there were 11.6 million immigrants from Mexico living in the United States in 2017, according to the Pew Research Center (Gonzalez-Barrera and Krogstad 2019). People from Oaxaca have a long history of internal migration both within the state, particularly with people relocating in the Central Valleys, and across state lines. These population movements have been documented extensively by numerous scholars (e.g., Cohen and Sirkeci 2011; Cohen and Ramirez Rios 2016; Rees et al. 1991) and show Oaxacans from all regions engaging in short-term and long-term migrations within Mexico, often settling in other states, reinventing their communities, and creating new social networks and reinventing themselves (e.g., Hirabayashi 1993; Zlolniski 2019).³ Moreover, since the early 1990s, migration from Oaxaca to the United States has increased significantly, and Oaxacans have become an important sector of the Mexican immigrant community living in the United States. Oaxacans live all across the United States, but Oaxacan communities are especially present on the West Coast, particularly in California, Oregon, and to a lesser extent in Washington (e.g., Fox and Rivera-Salgado 2004; Stephen 2007). The history of Zegache reflects the ways in which internal and transnational migrations have been historically interwoven. The current number of people in Zegache living on the US West Coast, from California to Washington, is comparable with the number of Zegacheños living in Mexico City’s metropolitan area. Both forms of migration coexist, and internal migrants, transnational migrants, and nonmigrants constantly engage in conversations. In the following pages, I seek to contribute to the dialogues about the relationships between internal and transnational migrations by looking at how ideas about masculinity and femininity have shaped and have been shaped by different migration trajectories. Thus, I analyze how the people of Zegache, migrants as well as nonmigrants, have modified their ideas about gender and their ideas about social relationships because and despite of migration.

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Oaxaca in Motion

differ ent for ms of migr at ing As I learned more about Jimena and Roberto, I also learned more about the intricate connections between gender, family, and migrations in Zegache. At age fifteen, Jimena first moved out of Zegache, migrating to Mexico City to work as a domestic employee in the mid-1990s. A few years later, she returned to Zegache, now as a single mother. Her views on gender roles and family relationships had changed, and the way other people saw her had also changed. Not too long after her return, she decided to move to Oregon, where she had some relatives. In Oregon, she met Roberto, a fellow migrant from Zegache. They eventually married in Oregon, and their first daughter was born in Portland. Although Roberto ended up in Oregon just like Jimena, his migration story is quite different. Roberto, the oldest of three brothers, started working in the family field. At this time, in the late 1970s, tensions with neighboring communities over land disputes were high. Internal conflict in Zegache was dying out, but new conflicts were surfacing, and being involved in agriculture also meant having to defend one’s land. Roberto participated in defending la línea (the town’s boundary) from any encroachments on community land. Later, Roberto joined the military, where he learned to cook and moved to different places in Mexico. In the 1990s, partly motivated by the migration networks of a neighboring town, Roberto traveled to the United States. He lived in California and Washington before settling in Oregon in 1999. The trajectories of Jimena and Roberto are, of course, specific to their own situations and differ from the migration stories of some people depicted in this book. Yet, most people in the community share some of their lived experiences, and these represent migration trends associated with gender and with social relationships. Three phenomena that are shared widely throughout Zegache are present in the stories of Jimena and Roberto: migration to and from Mexico City, migration to the United States, and enlisting in the Mexican military. I argue that these three phenomena represent different forms of migration and are interrelated through gender and kinship dynamics. Of these three phenomena, two (internal and transnational migration) have been studied extensively in Oaxaca, and it is important to point out how these previous findings overlap and differ from Zegache’s migration trajectories. Oaxacans have migrated within their state and within Mexico. For example, people from different regions of Oaxaca, including the Mixteca and the Central Valley regions, have long histories of migrating sea-

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Introduction

sonally and permanently to other states such as Veracruz, Chiapas, Sinaloa, Sonora, Baja California, and Baja California Sur. An important route of internal migration took many Oaxacans to Mexico City and the surrounding metropolitan area, where they settled and formed strong communities (see Hirabayashi 1993). Oaxacans, hailing from multiple regions, have also been migrating to the United States at least since the Bracero program (a series of transnational agreements initiated in the 1940s under the Mexican Farm Labor Agreement that allowed Mexican men to temporarily work in the agricultural fields in the United States), but transnational migration became more common in Oaxaca in the 1990s, in part because of neoliberal policies that threatened Indigenous communities across Mexico. Transnational Oaxacan communities have settled throughout the West Coast of the United States (primarily) and have established important political and activist circuits. Some of the trends mentioned in the previous paragraph are present in Zegache as well. Migration to Mexico City’s metropolitan area continues to be the most significant, but migration to other states in central Mexico (especially Querétaro) is increasingly important, as are migration and commuting to Oaxaca City and other nearby urban centers such as Ocotlán. People from Zegache have participated in transnational migration since the 1990s. Although there is a continuum of a sort between internal and transnational migration in Zegache, akin to that which Jeffrey Cohen (2004) found in several Oaxacan communities, it is impossible to generalize about the relationship between internal and transnational migration either individually or historically in Zegache. Families show great diversity in terms of migration trajectories, combining migration to Oaxaca City, Mexico City, and the United States and enlisting in the military. This continues to align with Cohen’s comparative study because, as he points out, “it is probably not possible to develop a model of migration” (2004, 96) that can be applied uniformly throughout Oaxaca. One important point of contrast, however, is the significant number of men who join the Mexican military. Although the experiences of men in the military could be disregarded as merely occupational—and not at all the stuff of migration—I consider the act of joining the military as another form of internal migration (see Sandoval-Cervantes 2019). This form of gendered migration has not been studied in other Oaxacan towns, or in other parts of Mexico, but it is central in the history of Zegache and in how masculinity has been constructed in the community. The experiences of men in the military are particularly representative of what I am trying to accomplish in this book. First, thinking about the military as a form of migration, and not as simply occupational, highlights how 6

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Oaxaca in Motion

men who join the military cross internal borders and have experiences that are similar to transnational migration. Second, the geopolitical location of Mexico, and of Oaxaca, for that matter, have linked soldiering directly to globalization, even if it might not always seem to be “evidently” global. Third, the number of former soldiers who migrate to the United States is comparable to the number of men who join the military and decide not to migrate. Both forms of movement exist simultaneously and not necessarily in a continuum. Finally, the gendered identities of men who join the military are shaped through personal histories of work and family, and they are always changing and reflecting how men relate to their community. Throughout this book I analyze the interconnections of different forms of migrations, as well as how such intersections shape and are shaped by gendered social relationships. In other words, I analyze how people from one community relate to one another, in several locations and through different forms of masculinity and femininity, as they engage with globalization through migration. People define and redefine their gender identities as they become mobile, but these new configurations are not solely defined by those on the move; those who stay behind also actively participate in these changes, as they reflect on their own gender identities, family roles, and their place in a globalized world. In order to do this, I combine two concepts. I employ Lynn Stephen’s (2007) “transborder” concept as a way to frame the specific characteristics of internal and transnational migration.⁴ The transborder concept allows for the analysis of internal migration, which is sometimes lost in a merely transnational framework. It emphasizes “border crossing” but does not define borders strictly in terms of national boundaries (Stephen 2007, 23). Within this framework, internal migrants who do not cross the Mexico-US border still cross ethnic, cultural, colonial, and regional borders within Mexico. The other concept I use is Raymond Williams’s (1977) “structure of feeling.” This concept, which Williams uses throughout his work (1973, 1977, 2005), can broadly describe a collective-organizing view of the world, a view that would not be too different from the general anthropological definition of “culture” (2005, 23). Yet, two particularities make his concept compelling within the discussion of masculinity, femininity, and relatedness and how they are historically constructed. When Williams is analyzing literature and popular culture, he is concerned not so much with how certain elements relate in terms of “content” but rather with how things become related because they are placed within the same structure. This way of framing relationships allows an appreciation of how migration creates mismatches between community-accepted discourses on masculinity and femininity versus discourses that have been created because of migration (ei7

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Introduction

ther through movement or through absence). To make this concept more appropriate for the study of migration and gender, I discuss it alongside Bianet Castellanos’s (2009) “communities of sentiment” and Federico Besserer’s (2000, 2009, 2015) “sentimental regimes” (regímenes de sentimientos).

struc t ur es of feeling: a rt icul at ing inter na l a nd tr a nsnat iona l migr at ion As I have noted, there has been a resurgence of scholars interested in thinking about internal migration and its connections with transnational migration. However, this has not always been the case, and a look at the development of migration scholarship sheds light on some changing trends. Beginning in the 1970s, research on internal migration, especially women who are internal migrants, was seen as an important entry point for social scientists interested in gender and globalization studies (see Arias 2000; Ariza 2007; Rees et al. 1991). This was particularly true of anthropologists working in Mexico, who were seeing an increase in rural-urban migrations as the country experienced the so-called Mexican Miracle: a period of time of economic stability and growth that roughly occurred between the 1940s and the 1970s. Larissa Adler Lomnitz (1988) and Lourdes Arizpe (1977) and other scholars created a bridge between anthropological research previously focused on rural and Indigenous communities and growing urban centers that were becoming the home of Indigenous people. With the rise of globalization studies and the emergence of the transnational approach in the mid-1990s, following the foundational works of Glick Schiller, Basch, and Blanc-Szanton (1992), Kearney (1995), and Rouse (1991), Mexican scholarship on migration shifted its attention. The academic focus emphasized either female transnational migrants or the women “left behind” by male transnational migrants as internal migration became hidden from view in anthropological studies (e.g., Salgado de Snyder 1993). In addition, Ariza (2007, 463) contends that this shift also addressed a change in the Mexican socioeconomic context. The increase in transnational migration, particularly by males, meant that the number of internal migrants diminished. The notion that transnational migration displaced internal migration “on the ground” is not totally unsupported. Yet, it is important to analyze how this new focus on transnational migration transformed how anthropologists and social scientists thought about internal migration. The relationship between internal migration and transnational migration has been reframed in two ways. First, internal migration is seen as preceding trans8

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Oaxaca in Motion

national migration in an historical sense. Second, internal and transnational migrations appear as either/or options (see Ariza 2007; Cohen 2004, 2010; Cohen and Sirkeci 2011; Cohen and Ramirez Rios 2016; Kearney 1986, 1995; Rees 2007; Rees et al. 1991; Skeldon 2006). These two alternatives have the effect of obscuring the relationship between internal and transnational migration as they imply that internal and transnational migrations are not happening simultaneously. The implication has caused the field of migration studies to become somehow divided, resulting in the undertheorization of internal migration (King and Skeldon 2010, 1620). The notion of how to theorize internal migration in relation to transnational migration and to processes of globalization is an ongoing debate (see Castellanos 2010). There is no question that, even if we focus on transnational migration, we should still try to understand internal migration both as a historical process that may lead to transnational migration and as a phenomenon that should be understood “on its own terms” (Castellanos 2010; Cohen and Ramirez Rios 2016). In this sense, throughout this book I interrogate whether internal and transnational migrants have different characteristics and whether this even matters for explaining how migration transforms gender and family relations (see King and Skeldon 2010, 1627, 1640–1641). Thus, in the next chapters I look at internal and transnational migrations as interconnected phenomena. The interconnection, however, does not mean that both forms of migration are merely different in degree. In fact, I argue that it is important to keep the experiences of internal and transnational migrations conceptually separated, because even if they are connected in important ways, they can have fundamentally different effects. With this in mind, I employ the transborder framework (see Stephen 2007), which allows me to distinguish the experience of crossing internal borders from the experience of crossing national borders. In some cases, crossing an internal border (i.e., migrating within Mexico) can have a more significant impact on how people think about gender and family compared to crossing the international border into the United States. This is the case for many people from Zegache, including women who migrated to Mexico City and who started questioning gender roles and ideas about femininity (including who gets to migrate to the United States), as well as men who joined the military and whose experiences in the United States did not seem to differ significantly from those they faced in the army. Building on the excellent work of other scholars who have looked at migration from multiple and diverse angles, I approach migration with an analytical lens that sees gender, kinship, and migration as being constituted simultaneously when people move within and outside Mexico.⁵ What this 9

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Introduction

means is that the analysis becomes clearer: even if gender and family relationships dictate to a large extent who gets to move and who does not, these gender and family configurations change not only because of migrants but also because of things happening in multiple locations (see Besserer 2009, 75). Thus, a woman who migrates to Mexico City is not only engaged in a potential life-transforming journey; she is also potentially altering how other women and men think about femininity and masculinity. Some of these changes are almost imperceptible. For example, there are small, long-term changes in how masculinity is expressed through care and family relationships. Raúl Álvarez, who appears throughout this book, is a former soldier and a transnational migrant who could not see his three older children grow up while he was living in Oregon. However, he returned for his daughter’s quinceañera (the celebration of her fifteenth birthday) and later became his granddaughter’s main caregiver. His views on what his three daughters and his son can do has changed significantly over time, but this change has been gradual, occurring in small shifts, and it is intimately connected to how he perceives his role as a man who has been a soldier and a migrant and as a member of a transborder community such as Zegache. Other changes might appear more striking at first, and yet their acceptance might not be widespread. Carolina Carrasco, who migrated to Mexico City by herself at a young age, illustrates this pattern. She later returned to Zegache as a single mother. She has built a house in Zegache and has a small cafeteria that she runs herself, often catering to daily commuters and temporary workers. Nevertheless, she is still criticized by some for being a single mother and for having lived in Mexico City. Thus, even if ideas about femininity appear to have changed a great deal with women joining the labor force, changes have not gone unchallenged, and there is still the expectation that women ought to have male partners and engage in work inside the home. Here is where the concept of “structure of feeling” (Williams 1973, 1977, 2005) becomes useful, because it describes the rearrangements that are constantly taking place in how we experience and think about social relationships as social processes. For Williams (1977, 128), much of the social analysis that exists addresses “only the fi xed explicit forms,” and thus we only see “formed wholes rather than forming and formative processes.” The feeling in “structure of feeling” is used to better portray those rearrangements in how people perceive and react to things, not as “fi xed and explicit” but “in a living and interacting continuity” (Williams 1977, 128–132). In addition, using “feeling” as opposed to, say, “experience” or “thought” highlights the discussion of social processes that are “still in process, often indeed not yet

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recognized as social but taken to be private, idiosyncratic, and even isolating” (Williams 1977, 132; emphasis in original). In the context of Zegache, this can be used to describe and analyze how migrants and nonmigrants engage in ongoing transformations of their gendered relationships. In many instances, transformations such as those described above might appear as insignificant, in part because they seem individual, private, and idiosyncratic. But we also see that many of these “individual” experiences are felt throughout the community, albeit in slightly different ways. So, for example, not every migrant man returns for his daughter’s quinceañera and becomes his granddaughter’s main caregiver, but some might rearrange their lives and make accommodations that allow for different gender roles and expectations. These rearrangements can be small and seemingly insignificant, or they can be big and significant transformations. However, these transformations should not be assumed to represent changes at the social level. Some of these “emergent” trends will become fi xed and dominant in the new structure of feeling, while others will face pushback from previous dominant practices (Williams 1977, 122–123). Moreover, even some of the emergent trends that may promote a new form of gendered relationships can be incorporated into previous structural arrangements, perpetuating existing discourses about gender (Williams 1977, 124), what Andrews and Shahrokni (2014) label “patriarchal accommodations.” Thus, I revise the meaning of the phrase “structure of feeling” following Bianet Castellanos (2009) and Federico Besserer (2000, 2009, 2015) to make it more suitable to an analysis of gender and kinship in migratory contexts. That being said, Castellanos’s “community of sentiment” and Besserer’s “sentimental regimes” relate at least partly to Williams’s concept. For Castellanos (2009, 141), “the role of the emotive processes has been overlooked by scholars’ emphasis on the rational, the logical, and the structural.” In this way, Castellanos echoes Williams’s concern that social scientists often focus on what seems like “finished products” and not on other social processes that are not yet fully articulated or fully worked out. For Besserer (2015), emotions and feelings are central to the workings of power and social relationships. He proposes that social changes and accommodations are the result of “struggles of feelings” in which subordinated subjects reject the hegemonic “order of feelings” (Besserer 2009). Castellanos (2009) and Besserer (2015, 2009) contend that we should conceptualize feelings and emotions as central in migration processes and multi-sited migrant communities. Both authors focus on how feelings and the emotive are central to social processes, even when this might not seem

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Introduction

self-evident. Throughout the following pages, I analyze how feelings and emotional elements structure and restructure gendered kinship relations in Zegache. However, I take a broader approach to Williams’s “structure of feeling,” and I look at how different migration processes create alternative ways to interpret gender roles and social relationships. Some of these interpretations cannot be articulated or identified; instead, they are expressed in practices and in reactions that might seem a little bit off the mark or just different. Yet, these interpretations and practices start conversations in people’s homes and in their community. Such conversations, like the relationships themselves, might result in long-lasting change or might disappear with time. In addition, I take Williams’s (2005, 23) “structure of feeling” analysis as a way of organizing social and cultural elements that might not be related through their content but through the material and lived structures in which they appear. For example, as I explain in chapter 5, cooking becomes masculine in specific contexts and through specific histories of migration. This does not happen because there is something about cooking that is similar in “content” to other activities considered masculine (such as guarding plots of land and crossing the Mexico-US border) but because the history of Zegache has resulted in numerous men cooking in the Mexican army. In many ways, much of what can be considered traditionally feminine or masculine is not based on content but on the relationship it has to structures of power. Throughout this book, traditional or conventional gender norms are understood as emerging from structures of feeling that redefine what counts as acceptable masculine and feminine practices and discourses. Yet, it is important to point out that acceptable masculine practices and discourses are not created exclusively by and for men; rather they are the product of the community’s transborder history and can be upheld and challenged by anyone depending on their own position of power within the community. The same applies for acceptable feminine practices and discourses. By using the concept of structure of feeling, the life histories presented throughout this book can be understood as being part of the complex political history of Zegache and its relationship with regional, national, and international political processes. The personal stories of people such as Roberto, Jimena, Teresa, and Carolina might appear as personal and idiosyncratic stories of internal and transnational migration, yet they are part of that complex web of historical processes. In order to understand how ideas about gender change, we must look at how different forms of migration transform conversations and practices around kinship and relatedness in general. I discuss the concept of relatedness throughout the book, but I want to provide a brief definition here and link the concept to Williams’s struc12

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ture of feeling. Relatedness, as proposed by Janet Carsten (2000), refers to a local set of practices, discourses, and meanings that create connections. These connections go beyond the definition of kinship that focuses solely on biology and beyond the definition of kinship that sees family (both consanguine and affinal) as a finished product. Rather, as used here, relatedness is seen as an ongoing process that includes an analysis of how incipient relationships become permanent and how relationships that seem stable dissipate almost entirely. As many of the life stories presented here show, people make decisions to stay put or to migrate based on all sorts of relationships, including friendships (see Bell and Coleman 1999; Desai and Killick 2013; Pauli 2013). The “structure of feeling” framework allows us to see how friendships and other temporal forms of relatedness affect how people live their lives in the transborder community of Zegache, Oaxaca.

struc t ur e of t he book In addition to an introduction and conclusion, this book contains six numbered chapters. The chapters are ordered in a sort of circular way that starts in Zegache, moves to Mexico City, then to Oregon, and finally returns to Zegache. In chapter 1, “Research in Zegache: Multiple Histories,” I provide further context by combining a description of my ethnographic work, a reflection of my positionality as a male researcher studying gender, and a historical sketch of Zegache. I conducted ethnographic research in three locations: Zegache, Mexico City, and Oregon. Each location presented different challenges and possibilities that in some way reflected the historical processes of a particular place; in the cases of Mexico City and Oregon, the processes linked directly to the migration of people from Zegache. Some differences appeared in the willingness of people to talk to me (an outsider asking questions about their lives and their families), and other differences appeared in the steps required to meet up. In Mexico City and in Oregon, time and distance influence the social lives of the people of Zegache in ways not present in Zegache. I end chapter 1 by introducing the families that are central to this book. In chapter 2, “Leaving Zegache: Internal and Transnational Women Migrants,” I compare the experiences of women who migrate internally with women who migrate transnationally. I contend that the comparison illuminates the importance of analyzing the experiences of internal and transnational migrants separately. Families in Zegache are more willing to allow their daughters to migrate to Mexico City, hoping the geographical proximity means that internal female migrants can return more promptly if their 13

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Introduction

presence, and/or work as care providers, is required. However, this established networks of women in Mexico City that experienced migration without the direct supervision of men and thus became more critical of gender roles and gender expectations. Women who migrate transnationally often do so as part of a family or kinship group: as wives, sisters, or daughters. As they migrate in that context, they take with them many of the social expectations that also exist in Zegache. This is not to say that gender does not change with transnational migration; rather, it is meant to question how different types of borders create different experiences that are not dependent on the distance of the migration but on the networks that are accessed. In chapters 3 and 4, “Labor Corridors I: Peasants and Soldiers” and “Labor Corridors II: Transnational Migration and Masculinity,” I explore the construction of masculinity in connection to mobility and labor in Zegache, in the Mexican military, and in the United States. I contend that, for men in Zegache, work has historically been associated with risk and sacrifice. As agriculture became increasingly difficult, men had to become mobile and started traversing “labor corridors” that emerged from gendered, racialized, and socioeconomic arrangements that channel the mobility of specific populations. Thus, men started joining the Mexican military as a way to obtain a salary, a formal education, and medical insurance. Joining the military also provided men with technical skills and abilities that could be transported back to Zegache as well as to the United States. As men returned home from the military, many decided to head north, where they would find jobs that utilized, in one way or another, the training they received while in the army. In the United States, men from Zegache work in all types of occupations, including industrial agriculture, commercial kitchens, harvesting hops for beer, and cutting Christmas trees. Their masculinity was redefined as they traveled through the labor corridors and were no longer directly exposed to intra- and intercommunity armed conflicts. In chapter 5, “The Masculine Familiarity of Work; or, How Cooking Became Masculine,” I use the example of some men from Zegache who have learned to cook as they moved through the labor corridors. Cooking, an activity that would more easily be associated with women, became masculine precisely because it was associated with risk and sacrifice, as most men learned to cook while in the military. In chapter 5, I show that men and women cook differently: Although women continue to do most of the cooking, women’s cooking is seen as an act of care and domesticity; men’s cooking, by contrast, is seen as an act of labor and a result of men’s mobility and is thus incorporated into the masculine repertoire without significantly changing gender roles. In chapter 6, “Migration and Femininity: Beyond the Tutelage of the 14

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Mothers-in-Law,” I return to Zegache to analyze how migration has transformed practices, discourses, and conversations surrounding gender and relatedness. In particular, I analyze the convergence of migration and femininity in the relationship between the mother-in-law, the daughter-in-law, and the husband/son. This triad and its relation to gender and migration has received limited attention (for one notable exception, see Pauli 2008), yet this relationship is fundamental in understanding daily struggles and negotiations. This is accentuated in certain places, including Zegache, where patrilocal residence patterns are the norm (i.e., upon marriage, the wife moves into or close to the husband’s parents’ house). Although the motherin-law is usually in some type of conflict with the daughter-in-law, transnational migration of men has created new ways in which such conflict is expressed while opening up new conversations around gender and kinship. All these chapters address the importance of including internal migration as part of migration studies. Using the concept of “structure of feeling” and the transborder framework, I contend that transformations of gendered social relationships occur with the crossing of different types of border and through various ongoing conversations that are taking place in Zegache and in other locations simultaneously. In this sense, my discussion continues the conversation about the relationship between internal and transnational migrations through gender and kinship lenses. Why are internal and transnational migrations different? Why do internal and transnational migrants experience different transformations? In the following pages, I respond to these questions by contending that the difference between internal and transnational migration resides in how different borders pose different challenges to men and women. Thus, the gendered practices and conversations around relatedness and gender will change depending on which borders are crossed and how they are crossed. In addition, such practices and conversations are also accepted, challenged, and negotiated with other people who crossed other borders or who simply stayed put and did not cross a border at all.

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Introduction

chapter 1

Research in Zegache m u lt i pl e h i s t or i e s

W

hen i fir st a r r i v ed to zeg ache in 2011, i saw a divided community. It was divided along political lines that connected different forms of land tenure to political factions. Migration had created other divisions: between men who migrated and those who did not, between women who migrated internally by themselves and those who never left Zegache, and between men who joined the military and other men who followed a different path. These divisions are part of larger trends regarding how femininity and masculinity are constructed as women and men become mobile, but there are other factors that occur within families and influence how gender and kinship become intimately connected. All these divisions are dynamic and show how Zegache is inserted within a “multiscalar” history that includes the regional, the national, and the global (see Sassen 2003). These divisions are part of my ethnographic research. As I started conducting ethnographic research with male and female migrants, I realized my approach needed to be situated within larger gender dynamics that reflected the convergences of gender, kinship, and familial migration trajectories that I was encountering. In this chapter, I discuss some of these convergences and how they are connected to the history of migrations in Zegache. The stories, narratives, and other information analyzed in this book were collected over twenty-plus months of short- and long-term ethnographic research, spanning from 2011 to 2016, with members of the community of Zegache in Oaxaca, in Mexico City, and in the United States, particularly in Oregon’s Willamette Valley. Throughout the years, I have maintained contact with some people from Zegache through phone calls and social media.

16

I compiled over fifty interviews from people in the community, as well as hundreds of informal conversations through participant observation in private homes and at public social gatherings. My ability to collect interviews was determined largely by the gender and migration trajectories of the people with whom I talked. I discuss methodological issues of formal and informal interviews for this project in the section below titled “Masculine Fieldwork and Ethnographic Research.” My methodological approach to collecting histories of migration is based on understanding how people from the same families migrated, as well as how their stories of migration overlapped and diverged. Focusing on families allowed me to analyze how kinship relationships influenced migration and also how they were transformed by migration. Because of my general interest in relatedness, and not only in the family, I use a loose concept of family that is not based solely on biology but on the narratives and practices of the people themselves. Throughout my research, some families expanded while others contracted. In an effort to understand how gender and kinship roles created different migration experiences within the families themselves, I talked to members from the same family who lived or had lived in different locations. Thus, although this book discusses many issues that were important to many people in Zegache, I focus on five families. A careful look at family dynamics allowed me to perceive how structures of feeling were experienced during daily activities. Moreover, comparing different families and interactions from other social settings also allowed me to understand how social processes that might seem private and idiosyncratic were widely shared. I engaged in multi-sited ethnography (Marcus 1995) as I followed families from Zegache to Mexico City and from Zegache to Oregon. However, I was rarely a passive observer: I actively connected families as I often transported medicine or food (medicine from the United States to Mexico, food from Mexico to the United States). I was also commissioned to give messages, sometimes good, such as when I was able to give people details of their relatives from across the border, and sometimes bad, such as when I was asked to give debt notices to Zegacheños and Zegacheñas in the United States. As I followed families and learned about family migration histories, I was able to situate migration history within specific sociohistorical contexts. In this chapter, I provide a brief historical account of Zegache and its migration routes. Then, I discuss how ethnographic research varied depending on the location as well as how individual migration histories influenced who was willing to talk to an anthropologist researching their life histories.

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Research in Zegache

zeg ache: a br ief histor ic a l introduct ion Zegache has a long history of interweaving land ownership conflicts and opposing political regimes. In 2011, the conflict between comuneros (villagers who favored the communal ownership of land) and propietarios (those who claimed to be private proprietors) was in full bloom as reflected in the power struggles between the PRI (Partido Revolucionario Institucional/Institutional Revolutionary Party) and the PRD (Partido de la Revolución Democrática/Democractic Revolution Party).¹ These conflicts influence how gender identities, especially in regard to masculinity, shape migration trajectories within and outside Mexico. It was during the period following the Mexican Revolution (i.e., post1920) that the current political divide in Zegache was inscribed, primarily as an agrarian conflict.² As the Mexican bureaucracy established new landuse regulations, different local groups reframed an age-old conflict as a dispute over land and land tenure. This prompted the opposition of comuneros and propietarios. The conflict between these two factions was made evident in the struggles over local authority positions, both municipal and agrarian. These positions of formal authority were part of a civil-religious cargo system. This system involved the sponsorship of ritual activities for the community’s pantheon of Catholic saints (see Chance and Taylor 1985; Monaghan 1990; Stephen 2005). Taking on the sponsorship, known as a mayordomía, was a major financial undertaking that also resulted in the sponsors (mayordomos) receiving prestige and status. The civil-religious cargo system was also tied to the customary system of Indigenous government system now called usos y costumbres. Usos y costumbres does not appoint local authorities based on representative democratic electoral processes but on different criteria that included communal service and prestige.³ However, the system faced serious challenges in the 1990s. Even when usos y costumbres was legally recognized in Oaxaca during this time, some villagers from Zegache pushed to change to the party- and ballot-based electoral system of choosing local authorities. In the late 1990s, Zegacheños and Zegacheñas embraced several national political parties (especially the PRI and the PRD), and thus the conflict was redefined as an electoral dispute specifically between those two parties. The PRI supporters started fighting for the preservation of communal land ownership (comuneros) and the PRD supporters began pushing for private land ownership (propietarios). These transformations were taking place as changes in migration patterns were also occurring (see Fox and Rivera-Salgado 2004; Riosmena and 18

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Massey 2012; Rothstein 2016; Massey et al. 2006). Although Zegache has a history of migration that dates at least to the 1950s, when women’s migration to Mexico City increased and seasonal migration within Mexico (especially to Chiapas) became common practice for many Zegache families, it was in the 1990s that migration to the United States intensified. This uptick mirrors migration patterns in other rural communities. Under new regulations under NAFTA (the North American Free Trade Agreement, which went into effect in 1994), subsistence farmers in Mexico ceased to have access to government subsidies for basic crops and lost most or all access to credit. For those on the edge of survival, the lack of support meant they could not continue to rely on subsistence and small-scale commercial agriculture to survive. Wage labor was essential, yet a lack of jobs in Oaxaca encouraged many to migrate within Mexico and even more to the United States. Even as transnational migration became common in Zegache, however, internal migration did not stop. In fact, internal migration and transnational migration continually intersect in social and personal accounts. These intersecting accounts capture how globalization is a differentiated process that enables and restricts mobilities (Sassen 2000), creating “global households” (Safri and Graham 2010) and connecting family networks in multiple locations through commodity and noncommodity chains of production. Globalization has informed both internal and transnational migration, something I will emphasize in an effort to articulate the ways in which Zegache’s history is located within a multiscalar perspective.

t he history of migr at ion in zeg ache To understand the history of migration in Zegache, we must look beyond transnational migration, a rather recent phenomenon, and consider internal and seasonal migrations. This expands the scope of how gender and family roles influence who gets to go where and for how long. This also goes beyond the focus on transnational experiences (crossing international borders), which often leaves out other “borders,” such as racial, ethnic, and class boundaries, that internal migrants commonly cross (see Stephen 2007, 5–6). Although transnational migration in Zegache dates at least to the 1960s and is connected to the Bracero program, it was not a common option in the community until the 1980s, peaking in the 1990s and 2000s. Before transnational migration was popular among Zegacheños and Zegacheñas, people in the community engaged in other movements. For example, in the first half of the twentieth century, in the aftermath of the Mexican Revo19

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Research in Zegache

lution, entire families from Zegache were displaced as local conflicts escalated and men and women were forced to flee Zegache and resettle in other parts of Mexico. Before the 1960s, migration in Zegache mostly meant migrating seasonally to the neighboring state of Chiapas to pick cotton. Although men and women participated, migrant farmworkers were mostly men. This type of migration allowed young people of both genders to earn cash while creating relationships outside the sphere of the house or the barrio. For example, Teodoro Danigui (currently in his late seventies) told me that he met María Meléndez, his wife, through a relative while on his way to Chiapas. Seasonal migration extended until the 1970s, but it stopped when cotton from India and China replaced Mexican cotton. Internal migration to Mexico City increased in the 1960s as young women started traveling on the now-defunct train system to Mexico City for thirty pesos (the equivalent to US$2.40 at the time). The increase of female migration to Mexico’s capital was caused by a period of accelerated urbanization and industrialization that led to a growing urban middle class. The “Mexican Miracle,” as it is often called, refers to a period of economic stability and growth that occurred roughly between the 1940s and the 1970s. The Mexican peso, for example, maintained a stable exchange rate against the US dollar for a period of twenty-two years between 1954 and 1976.⁴ Economic stability was reinforced by industrialization and infrastructure projects that intensified urbanization as people moved to the cities (especially to Mexico City) in search of work. As the urban middle class grew, and as the labor supply surpassed labor demand, men and women started taking jobs in the service sector. Some of these jobs were in the formal economy (e.g., working in supermarkets and factories), and others were in informal sectors of the economy (domestic work and child care). The many women from Zegache who moved to Mexico City worked as domestic employees in middleclass households and were able to find employment through social networks of Zegacheñas already living in Mexico City. Men also migrated to Mexico City, and many joined the Mexican military in the 1960s. They were often deployed to other parts of Mexico, including Mexico City, Chiapas, Chihuahua, Tabasco, and the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. Many of the men who joined the military were young and single, and when they decided to marry they would marry a woman from Zegache or one from a town near their military base. If a man was deployed within the state of Oaxaca, then his wife and children would stay in Zegache, but if he was deployed to Chihuahua or to Chiapas, this often meant that wives and children would go along. In the same way, women from other states sometimes moved back to Zegache once their husbands retired 20

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from or quit the Mexican military. Enlisting in the Mexican military is often the only option available for young men who lack economic and social resources to migrate to the United States, who lack formal education and technical skills necessary to find jobs in urban centers, and who can no longer rely on subsistence agriculture (see Sandoval-Cervantes 2019). Joining the military provided young men access to formal education, technical skills, social security, and a steady salary. The experiences of men who joined the military are similar to those of Zegacheñas who migrated to Mexico City during the Mexican Miracle. Women from Zegache migrated to cities as increasing demand for labor emerged in new factories and urban middle-class households. In the same way, the greater participation of men in the military was connected to national and international political and economic contexts that expanded the activities and swelled the ranks of the army. Generally speaking, the military engages in three main actions: providing support in cases of disaster (Plan DN-III-E), fighting and controlling insurgent movements, and suppressing the illegal drug trade. The changes in the dynamics of the military have been caused largely by the ways in which the last two actions (counterinsurgency and combating illegal drugs) have been approached at the national and the international levels. During the 1960s and 1970s, the military was concerned with combating a growing number of guerrillas and other social movements in the context of the Cold War and the Cuban Revolution of 1959. In addition to counterinsurgency activities, the military’s presence in Chiapas, Guerrero, Oaxaca, and Michoacán was predicated on the fact that drug cartels operated in those states. The “war on drugs,” initiated by the US government and further pursued by Felipe Calderón Hinojosa in 2006, increased military spending, and the army increased the number of soldiers deployed (from 9,000 in 1985 to 94,000 in 2010) to combat the production and trafficking of illegal drugs (Castillo García 2010). The expansion of the military, thanks in part to the increased participation of men from Zegache, coincided with neoliberal structural adjustments that contributed to the intensification of transnational migration in Oaxaca. Joining the military, much like transnational migration, became an important option for Zegacheños. The participation of men and women from Zegache in formal and informal cash economies transformed the town’s infrastructure, which in turn opened other ways to participate in the cash economy. This is reflected by the transportation system. Before the 1970s, traveling to and from Zegache was an undertaking; public transportation was limited, and in most cases people had to walk at least four miles to reach the highway to board a bus to Oaxaca City. The rise in migration from Zegache to the United States 21

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seems also to be connected to the consolidation of social migrant networks in the neighboring community of Santiago Apóstol, as people from Santiago were in the process of consolidating migrant communities in California and Oregon. The introduction of public buses to Zegache combined an increasing demand for public transportation to Oaxaca City (due to all the men who joined the military and who traveled constantly to Oaxaca City) with an increase in remittances and capital earned in the United States by neighboring Santiago Apóstol. The constant interaction with people of that town, who used the same bus system, also provoked a rise in transnational migration in Zegache. At the same time, Indigenous populations in southern Mexico intensified their transnational migrations because of economic structural adjustments that had started in the 1980s. The structural adjustments comprised a wide range of governmental actions and in general reflected the slowing of the economy. In the countryside, the halting of land distribution to peasants and the ceasing of price supports for crops such as corn, beans, and wheat forced small Mexican farmers to compete with US producers (see Fox and Rivera-Salgado 2004; Rees 2007; Riosmena and Massey 2012; Massey et al. 2006; Stephen 2002b, 2007). The effects of the adjustments and the expansion of regional migratory networks transformed how Zegacheños moved and worked. The end of price supports for corn had deleterious effects in Zegache not only financially but also in the use of land. Most of the families in Zegache rely on unpredictable seasonal rainfall to grow crops, and price supports and corn subsidies were important safety mechanisms when rains became erratic. At the same time, as the urban middle class shrunk, jobs in Mexico City became scarcer. Thus, for many Zegacheños, transnational migration became a more reliable way to earn an income. The first groups of Zegacheños to travel to the United States in the early 1990s were led by men from Santiago Apóstol who acted as coyotes (guides or smugglers) and cultural brokers in the United States. Men continued to join the Mexican military in hopes of acquiring enough capital to make the longer trip to the United States. Women were not migrating in significant numbers to the United States during these first years, and even to this day the majority of migrants from Zegache in Oregon are men. This does not mean that women have not migrated to the United States in significant numbers. That being said, the difference in migration patterns is connected to gender roles in Zegache and in Mexico as a whole. In many instances, the men’s desire to migrate to the United States is often the result of a combination of factors that include contributing to the household economy through remittances, saving money to pay debts, improving and/ or constructing their own house (often adjacent to their parents’ residence), 22

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and obtaining enough money to get married (considering the local marriage protocol) (see Sandoval-Cervantes 2017). Women who migrate to the United States are often part of familial networks. In other words, while men migrate to the United States to find work and thereby acquire new experiences as individuals or to accumulate savings, women often migrate within a specific structure that already delineates what their role in the United States will be. However, as I demonstrate in different contexts throughout this book, such generalizations erase some alternative migration trajectories that continue to exist. These alternative migrations are not meant to be considered unique or exceptional; rather, they are a fundamental part of how migration narratives are constructed and how people in Zegache discuss migration. In addition, some of the migration trajectories that do not fit within a general narrative also display the ability of people to make decisions in Zegache and while on the move.

m a sculine fieldwor k a nd et hnogr a phic r ese a rch My account covers more than twenty months of short- and longterm ethnographic research, spanning from 2011 to 2016, with members of the community of Zegache in Oaxaca, in Mexico City, and in Oregon’s Willamette Valley. I conducted summer research in Zegache in 2011 and 2012. Although I visited Zegacheños and Zegacheñas living in Oregon intermittently from 2011 to 2013, I conducted more frequent and systematic research from January to June 2014 in Woodburn and Salem, Oregon. From September 2014 to August 2015, I carried out ethnographic research in Zegache, in Mexico City, and in Oregon. Throughout my ethnographic research, I collected over fifty interviews from people in the community, as well as hundreds of informal conversations that were part of my participant observation both in private homes and in public social gatherings. The history of Zegache was always tangible in my research. The divisions between comuneros and propietarios, the generational divide, and migration experiences were all embodied in the people I talked to, and they influenced my interactions within the town and the translocal community. In addition, other fissures that were more intimate and more familiar heavily influenced my research experience. For example, during my research, I had to be mindful of how I moved through Zegache and through Oregon; my presence, and my comings and goings, were noted, observed, and often discussed among Zegacheños and Zegacheñas. Not only did I have to be 23

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mindful of interacting with people affiliated with different political parties on the same day who sometimes lived on the same street; I also had to be careful in my encounters with members of the same family who were not on speaking terms. My caution extended to what I said and how I said it. This was part of an ongoing internal ethical discussion that pushed me to consider my own positionality as an outsider who was in some ways implicated in spreading information in the community. In other words, I was continually reflecting on what it meant to be truthful and how my words, and my very presence, were being interpreted and used within the community. This was mostly true while conducting research in Zegache, as people would often ask me directly what other people had told me (people who, I knew, had a disagreement with them in one way or another). In Oregon, the situation was slightly less stressful, but the fact that I had to drive and use a vehicle made my presence known in certain spaces where people from Zegache gathered. This was not the case in Mexico City, where the size and the intense traffic of people and vehicles made my physical presence less noteworthy. Yet, as I explain below, Mexico City presented a different set of challenges. Other factors influenced my research. As a cisman, my gender influenced my research from the very beginning. After I managed to obtain permission from the local authorities to carry out fieldwork by explaining to them the objectives of my project (initially, regarding traditional subsistence agriculture), they gave me a list of names of people who might be able to help. The names were all men. As the focus of my research changed from subsistence agriculture to migration, my interlocutors continued to be predominantly men, as most transnational migrants in Zegache were male. But as I sought to include more women, I also started seeing how women with different life histories reacted to my presence. The various attitudes of the men and women whom I tried (successfully and unsuccessfully) to interview reflected the articulations of their social positions and the ways in which I was gendered. Some of the men I interviewed, whether or not they were migrants, showed some nervousness when I asked if I could record the conversation. Once the interview started, however, most narrated their life histories with detail, emphasizing the challenges they had faced and how they overcame them. In short, for most men the formal interview process was a space of masculine performance. On more than one occasion the men I interviewed took the opportunity to show me short videos, recorded on their phones, that portrayed them working in the fields of the Willamette Valley or when they were soldiers. The attitudes of women were more varied. Women who were migrants or who had been migrants, although more hesitant to be interviewed than 24

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men, were also eager to recount their accomplishments and the hardships they endured. This was not the case with women who had not migrated. Women who had not migrated would often talk openly about their lives and their families in public spaces and informal settings. Sometimes they would agree to be interviewed, but as I arrived at their homes many would change their minds or express a degree of suspicion that they had not expressed earlier. I describe two encounters of this nature to illustrate this point. In the first encounter, I was getting lunch at a local stall in front of the church in Zegache. The vendor, Mireya Gonzalez, was a woman in her late thirties or early forties. After a few minutes, she started inquiring about my work in Zegache. I told her about my interest in studying the role of family ties in how men and women migrate. She talked openly about the migration of her husband and her son and how she did not know where her son was. She told me where she lived and agreed to be formally interviewed. The first time I arrived at her house, a male relative responded to my call at the door. As Mireya came to the gate, she said that she was sick and started asking me all sorts of questions about my research; she also expressed doubts about whether interviewing her would be useful or not. I reassured her by saying that her experiences were important; I also told her that she could demur at any point in time. She told me to come back in a week or so. When I returned, she was feeling better. As we talked through the gate, there was a man fixing a mototaxi inside Mireya’s garage. He did not intervene in the conversation but he was listening, and Mireya was well aware of his presence. “You know, I’m really sorry, but I don’t think I want to do this anymore,” she said. In the second encounter, on the street where I lived in Zegache, there was a small corner shop where I bought supplies from time to time. The owner, Laura Hernandez, was a woman in her late fifties. Her demeanor with me was not always warm, but after being a customer for a few months I thought she might be willing to be interviewed, since we had already talked several times. When I asked her to talk about her experiences, a young couple came out of Laura’s house and saw our interaction. With a slight tone of nervousness, Laura addressed them: “He says that he wants to know about my experiences, but what experiences have I had, right? I’ve always lived here. I don’t really have any experiences.” The three of them smiled at each other. I thanked her for her time and continued with my day. Although it is difficult to say with certainty that these encounters, and others that were similar, would have been different if I had not been a male anthropologist; the reactions and attitudes toward my research led me to reevaluate the relationship between methodology, the study of gender, and the positionality of all the individuals involved. I was aware that my pres25

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ence in the community was a contentious issue among some men and some women (one of my oldest acquaintances in Zegache told me, four years after we met, that some people in the community had questioned his decision to trust me as “too quick”). However, it was my interactions with women that made me reconsider the effectiveness of recorded formal interviews (see Boehm 2012, 25; Muelhmann 2013, 16), particularly with women who had not migrated. These experiences informed how I approached fieldwork with women. Instead of claiming a lack of accessibility to their experiences, I curtailed my efforts to participate in individual formal interviews and opted for more informal and oftentimes group discussions that took place while women were busy working either at home or at their place of work. This proved to be a much more effective and less stressful option for me and for the women I interviewed, especially in Oaxaca. Nevertheless, I still tried to interview women when they were willing to do so. I used different methodological approaches with different members of the same families: I would often interview the men and speak informally with the women. After I started conducting participant observation and ethnographic interviews, it became clear that families in Zegache were not easily identifiable, clear-cut groups and that neither a household approach nor a formal kinship approach would suffice. Familial groups changed throughout my visits; people who were close at one point became distant, and people who I thought were not related were connected in one way or another. For example, the family of Roberto Vazquez and Jimena Limón could easily be seen as three families: Roberto’s family (his mother, Maura, who lives in Zegache with her son Rogelio); his wife, Lourdes; and two grandsons. The youngest of Maura’s sons, Joel, lives in Woodburn, Oregon; he still calls her and sends money regularly but has not returned to Zegache in over ten years. Joel has a son who is a US citizen and who lives with his mother (but not with Joel). The eldest of Maura’s sons, Roberto, also lives in Woodburn with Jimena and their two daughters. Maura and Roberto had been quarreling for several years, and Roberto does not speak to Maura or to his brothers. In addition, Roberto’s wife, Jimena, had a son as a single mother who lives in Zegache with Jimena’s sister.⁵ Jimena and Roberto had no plans of returning to Oaxaca and actively avoided Joel at social events in Oregon. At different points during my research, I thought that perhaps the brothers would reconcile, but this did not happen, although it might in the future. The point is that, in approaching formal and informal conversations about kinship, the boundaries and scope of who counts as family were often contentious and the discussions about the responsibilities of care of different family members were no less contested. Instead, my conversations focused 26

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on kinship and care as active practices that allowed the people speaking to define their own networks of relatedness and to include people who would usually be left out of kinship charts such as coworkers and friends. As I connected with individuals who were related through kinship and care relations to the people I met in Zegache, I was able to conduct ethnographic research in Oregon and in Mexico City. Many of the responses that Zegacheños and Zegacheñas offered me in Oaxaca were also present in Oregon and in Mexico City, but each of those locations presented different research experiences and challenges. In Oregon, for example, migrants from Zegache were extremely busy and often had long commutes from work during weekdays; they also attended family gatherings in different towns spread apart (sometimes by hours) in the Pacific Northwest (e.g., Eugene, Corvallis, Salem, Woodburn, and the Dalles), which often complicated their schedules. Although women from Zegache living in the United States were more open to speaking with me, they were in charge of taking care of their children and providing food for me and for other men at social gatherings. Thus, for example, I could talk to them while waiting in line to get food at a festival. In Oregon, most people from Zegache were connected in one way or another, and I would hear about social events and celebrations from more than one of my acquaintances. In Mexico City, people were dispersed through different boroughs located at the outskirts of the metropolis, sometimes located in the neighboring State of Mexico (Estado de México) including Iztapalapa, Azcapotzalco, and the municipality of Naucalpan. In most instances, I would introduce myself through a phone call. In this initial phone conversation, I would be interrogated about Zegache and about the people I had met in Oaxaca; such attitudes, they would later say, were a product of bad experiences of extortion that they heard about or had experienced personally while in Mexico City. Although extortion is present throughout Mexico City, criminal groups who rely on robbery and extortion for survival have disproportionately targeted some of the neighborhoods where people from Zegache live. One of the ways to extort people is through a phone call, pretending to have a kidnapped relative and asking for a ransom, or simply pretending to be a relative asking for money. In many cases, people would call their relatives in Zegache to ask them about me before they agreed to meet. In relation to gender, however, things were quite different in Mexico City compared to Oaxaca and Oregon. For example, some of the women I met in Mexico City lived alone and met with me after overcoming their initial reluctance. These ethnographic experiences colored the ways in which I describe and analyze the histories of the men and women from Zegache who live in the 27

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different locations of Oaxaca, Mexico City, and in the Oregon towns in the United States.

w ho a r e t he fa milies? The historical events discussed above became recurring themes throughout my research. However, these events do not influence all individuals from Zegache in the same way. Although I interacted and spoke with many Zegacheños and Zegacheñas, I focus on five families that I was able to follow within Mexico and in the United States. I hesitate to talk about merely five families because of the dynamism that is manifested through relatedness. All these families showed, in one way or another, a great deal of flexibility and malleability, which I tried to document. Focusing on these families allowed me to see how small shifts resulted in the redefinition of relationships and how emergent trends were incorporated and resisted by the existing structure of feeling (see Williams 1997). However, my research is not based exclusively on these families, as I also participated in uncountable informal conversations. Moreover, the family as a unit is used here only as a heuristic device, as a narrative aid of sorts, because the people within these families had numerous relationships and ties to people in other families, and many of the interactions I had with them occurred in these multifamilial spaces. Below I offer a brief account of each family.

Familia Vázquez Bermudez At the time of my research, the Vázquez Bermudez family consisted of five people living in Zegache and one person living in Oregon. Maura Bermudez lived with her son Rogelio Vázquez, Lourdes Salazar (Rogelio’s wife, originally from Queretaro), and two teenagers (Rogelio and Lourdes’s children). Joel, the youngest of Maura’s children, lives in Oregon. Rogelio is a former soldier and migrant who was working in a lumberyard. He met Lourdes while he lived and worked in Queretaro; she was his supervisor. Joel also spent some time in the military and then migrated to the United States.

Familia Vázquez Limón Composed of Roberto Vázquez and Jimena Limón, this small family is an offshoot of the Vázquez Bermudez family, but due to familial conflicts it has kept an important distance from the Vázquez Bermudez family. 28

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Roberto, a former soldier and a migrant, met Jimena while both were living in the United States. They had a daughter while in the United States and then moved to Zegache, only to cross the Mexico-US border again.

Familia Álvarez García The Álvarez García family is composed of six people: Raúl Álvarez and María García and their four children. Two daughters commute to work in nearby urban centers, one son works in Zegache, and another daughter attended high school and aspired to join the military. Raúl is a former soldier and migrant; he also worked as a security guard and as a private driver. María has not migrated, but her sisters moved to Oaxaca City and Mexico City and later to Oregon.

Familia Carrasco Ramos Catalina Carrasco and Teresa Ramos are at the center of this family. Catalina migrated to Mexico City at an early age and lived there for a considerable amount of time, eventually returning to Zegache to take care of her father, who later passed away. Teresa, her niece, lives with her daughter in a separate space inside Catalina’s house. Teresa also migrated to Mexico City at a young age and returned to Zegache as a single mother. Both Catalina and Teresa have sisters living in Mexico City, and Catalina’s children live in the Mexican capital.

Familia Danigui Meléndez At the helm of this family we find Teodoro Danigui and María Meléndez. Teodoro is a retired soldier who is widely respected in the community and met María while both were picking cotton in Chiapas. Their two male children live in California; both of them are former soldiers. One of their daughters, Natalia, also lives in the United States after living in Sonora in northern Mexico. Their two youngest daughters are mostly based in Oaxaca City and Mexico City, although they often visit Zegache with their children for long periods. At the time of my research, Natalia’s son, Miguel Zepeda, was living with his grandparents. Miguel migrated to the United States with his mother and uncles and later returned to Mexico to join the military. t hese fa milies, a nd ot her s, a ppe a r t hroughou t t his book and will show the importance of considering both internal and transnational forms of migration when thinking about gender and relatedness. 29

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chapter 2

Leaving Zegache i n t e r n a l a n d t r a ns n at ion a l wom e n m ig r a n t s

I

n oc tober 2013, i wa s v isit ing jimena limón in zegache. Her husband, Roberto Vazquez, had managed to cross the Mexico-US border earlier that year, but she had been detained and sent back to Mexico. Sitting next to her that morning was her sister-in-law, Sofia Rentería. Sofia and Jimena were cleaning beans on the patio while chatting and tending to their children. Unlike her sister-in-law Jimena, Sofia had never lived outside Zegache. As Jimena talked about her plans to return to the United States, I asked Sofia if she had ever considered migrating. “Yes, when I was young,” she said, “but my mom wouldn’t let me. She said that women had to stay here and wait for marriage. I thought about going to Mexico City, but then you hear all of these stories of sexual abuse and rape happening in the city, so I stayed. Now, I tell my husband that I am leaving him to go with Jimena, he laughs and tells me to go. He says that he wouldn’t miss me, but I think he would.” This illustrates life experiences of women in Zegache, as well as how women discuss migration. The differences between Jimena and Sofia cannot be reduced to where they have or have not lived; migration is not a selfcontained event. Rather, migration experiences surpass the discrete event of migrating, informing how migrants think about themselves, even after they have returned to their hometowns and technically are no longer migrants. Moreover, migration influences what topics are discussed within the home, transforming family conversations. Jimena first moved out of Zegache when she migrated to Mexico City at age fifteen to work as a domestic employee. After Jimena returned to Zegache, she was no longer satisfied with remaining in her hometown, and so now, as a single mother, she embarked on a journey to the United States. In

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this chapter, I analyze how women in Zegache experience different forms of mobility by looking at how “intimate relations and labor migrations” are inextricably linked to the “realities of everyday lives” (Boehm 2012, 11). For women, mobility is enabled and constrained by different factors, including “non-commodity chains” of production and reproduction that are created through responsibilities of kinship and care and that often result in “the feminization of staying or not moving” (Boehm 2012, 47). However, the meaning of “staying or not moving” shifts once we move the lens of the analysis from the “transnational” to the “transborder” (Stephen 2007) and thereby bring internal migration into focus. Throughout this chapter, I contend that the effects of migration experiences are not commensurate with the distance traveled. Instead, the ways in which female migrants are able to think critically about gender roles have more to do with the social networks through which women move as they migrate. These social networks exist beyond the nuclear family structure (which is typically the family of procreation)¹ and often include both men and women, relatives and nonrelatives, and fellow villagers and new acquaintances. I focus on the experiences of female internal migrants who moved to Mexico City; I contend that they pose greater challenges to “traditional” gender roles² within their communities because their experiences as single young women navigating Mexico’s capital while relying on female social networks allow them to obtain social legitimation by “claiming” migration experience and courageousness.

women a nd tr a nsnat iona l migr at ion In 2013, I first met Silvio Salvador and Alejandra García in Salem, Oregon. Silvio was celebrating twenty years of his first journey to the United States. Alejandra moved to the United States after they got married in the late 1990s in Zegache. Silvio, like most men from Zegache who live in Oregon, works agricultural jobs.³ Alejandra has held temporary employment cleaning offices. When I asked Silvio why there were not more women from Zegache in Oregon, he replied: “There aren’t many couples here; it’s mostly single men or men who sent money back home who live here.” His statement—“there aren’t many couples here”—struck me as important. It highlights various aspects of how care and migration intersect. First, it suggests that women from Zegache in Oregon are almost always part of a married couple.⁴ Thus, in distinction to female migration to Mexico City, single women do not often migrate to the United States. Second, it emphasizes the

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significance for women to be present for their children in Zegache, while men’s responsibility is to find employment to provide for their families. Oaxacan migration to the United States and the consequent formation of Oaxacan transnational communities have been historically tied to the Bracero guest worker program and to the increase of Oaxacan migration to the United States that resulted from the combination of NAFTA and Mexico’s structural reforms that preceded that trade agreement. Although situating Oaxacan migration within a framework that highlights “regional” migration dynamics is useful (see Riosmena and Massey 2012), it is still important to consider the diversity of migratory trajectories even among Oaxacan communities (see Cohen 2004). Few men from Zegache were part of the Bracero program, and because transnational migration did not become a popular option until the 1990s, only a few men were able to regularize their status through the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986. It was not until the increased militarization and policing of the Mexico-US border in the early 2000s that men started settling in the United States permanently (see Massey et al. 2006, 119). Before that, Zegacheños were seasonal transnational migrants who returned to Zegache during the winter months (November through March). The characteristics of this movement limited the relocation of entire families; for their part, women did not regularly participate in seasonal transnational migrations. The jobs that migrants from Zegache maintain in Oregon are also important for understanding the underrepresentation of women, especially when comparing it to other ethnographic cases and with processes of internal migration. Other populations of Mexican origin have diversified the range of occupations, extending them beyond agricultural labor. This is apparent especially in the prevalence of domestic work and the service sector. Obtaining access to more diverse occupations is also a reflection of growing social networks that provide information about possible work opportunities; the longevity of such networks is a vital factor. Scholars have documented how men and women in other Mexican and Central American transnational communities have entered the service sector and how women have created social networks to help find jobs in manufacturing plants and as domestic employees (Aquino 2012; Andrews and Shahrokni 2014; Hondagneu-Sotelo 1994; Menjívar 2003). In contrast to these other communities, Zegache’s social networks provide a pool of jobs that are still mainly agricultural and thus more closely associated with men. Although this is changing, especially in communities of Zegacheños living outside Oregon (principally Washington and California), the occupations that be-

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come available through Zegache’s social networks continue to emphasize the connection between male migration and agricultural work linked to the Bracero program. In addition, most of the Zegacheño couples who live in Oregon comprise a man who has lived and worked in the United States for several years (and who is likely to have crossed the Mexico-US border without documentation several times) and a woman who migrated to Oregon after getting married (in most cases having crossed the Mexico-US border only once). This is the story of Silvio and Alejandra and other members of the Zegache community in both Oregon and California. I visited Silvio and Alejandra at their house in Oregon on numerous occasions, and even if the burden of cooking was relieved by the possibility of buying prepared meals, it was always Alejandra’s role to buy and serve food. When we attended events, she was also in charge of their children while Silvio socialized with other men from Zegache. Alejandra works temporarily, but she has not developed networks in her workplace, as her main responsibility is to her children and husband. In the same way, Zegacheñas who live in Oregon and are employed outside the home are responsible for taking care of their children or finding people who will. Ramona Sánchez moved to Oregon after she married an experienced migrant. She works the night shift in a cannery, “because this way I can take care of the children during the day.” The same gender logic applied to Rebeca Rojas, who works full-time in agricultural fields but is responsible for taking her two daughters to her sister-in-law’s to care for them while Rebeca and her husband are working. These examples show that women’s mobility as transnational migrants does not change gender configurations within couples but does allow some flexibility, as when other women can take care of one’s children. As women move across the border (often without proper documentation), they are relieved of their caretaking responsibilities with their family of orientation as their family of procreation takes priority. This move transforms two dynamics. First, it changes the relationship among siblings, particularly among sisters, in relation to who cares for aging parents. Second, it modifies the relationship between mother-in-law and daughter-in-law, because transnational women migrants are no longer under tutelaje de las suegras, or “tutelage of the mother-in-law” (see chapter 6). Transnational female migrants often enjoy more autonomy when engaging in social activities. Women occupy public spaces, especially in relation to their children’s school, such as attending school meetings (e.g., Goldring 2001), and they acquire skills that are often reserved for men in Zegache,

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such as driving a vehicle. These positions and skills, as well as the physical distance from extended families, grant women a certain degree of autonomy without completely ridding them of the “double day” (working at home after returning from working outside the home) and men’s supervision. However, the intermittent access to paid work and the pressure for women to think about child-rearing as their main occupation (see Pessar 2003) frame transnational female migrants’ experiences and their access to “the social process of employment” (Menjívar 2003, 121), limiting their exposure to social networks outside family networks of migrants from Zegache. Th is contrasts with women from Zegache who migrate to Mexico City.

nav ig at ing t he cit y: zeg acheña s in me x ico cit y When I first arrived here I lived with a woman from the pueblo. She was the one who told me to come with her, and I did. In the beginning we would go out, a pasear, a lot. We would go to Xochimilco, Chapultepec, up and down; and even though I don’t know how to read, I never got lost. el iz a bet h a r m enda r iz

The migration of Indigenous rural women to Mexico City was an important topic of study for Mexican scholars during the 1970s and the first half of the 1980s. These “internal displacements” were the “entryway” for the study of gender and migration, as well as a matter of national importance for a country believed to be on the threshold of “modernization” (e.g., Ariza 2007; Arizpe 1977; Kearney 1986). Structural changes, and the rapid rate of industrialization and urbanization, reflected the sustained and accelerated growth of Mexico City’s metropolitan area, which increased from approximately 3 million inhabitants in 1950 to 13 million in 1980.⁵ In 2015, Mexico City had a population of 21.2 million. The regional context that created a continuing demand for rural labor in the country’s capital, for women as well as men, interacted with local practices in ambiguous ways. Although the incentives to leave vary, during the 1960s and through the 1980s Zegache was not an easy place to live in, especially for women. In the next section, I present the histories of three women who migrated to Mexico City during the Mexican Miracle of the 1960s and 1970s. The histories of Carolina Carrasco, Elizabeth Armendariz, and María Lucerna show how care and kinship relationships produced gender

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violence (among other things) as they intersected with other forms of local violence.

The Violence of Caring Carolina Carrasco migrated to Mexico City in 1964 when she was sixteen years old. Carolina described her father as a violent man who, rumor had it, was responsible for the death of his wife when Carolina was thirteen. Being the oldest daughter, Carolina was obligated to take care of the house and her six siblings (three sisters and three brothers). Her father’s violent attitudes and behavior did not stop with the death of his spouse, however, and Carolina was also physically abused. “I wanted to find a way out of that situation, una salida. I couldn’t stay there. I felt bad for my siblings, they were still children. . . . So I married a man from a neighboring town, but he, too, was violent, so I went to Oaxaca [City] and from there I took the train to Mexico [City].” In Mexico City, Carolina found a job through an aunt who worked as a domestic employee. She also found another romantic partner with whom she had children and bought a house in Mexico City. After an initial period of five years without visiting Zegache, Carolina started returning and visiting her relatives. Finally, in 2000, Carolina relocated to Zegache to take care of her father, who had become ill; none of her siblings wanted to assume responsibility for his care. Carolina now complains that she cannot leave Zegache for more than a few days at a time to visit her daughters in Mexico City. The importance of kinship and caretaking relationships in Zegache, and the influence they have on internal migration, are also highlighted in Elizabeth’s experiences. Elizabeth confirmed that the town’s political and social climate had radically changed since she left for Mexico City in 1967 at age fourteen. In the 1960s, Zegache experienced a period of violent internal conflict that resulted in many deaths; women were also targeted, and stories of sexual abuse abound. At age ten, Elizabeth became an orphan: My aunt, my father’s sister, took care of me. She was all the family I had. I remember one day, I was still very little [una chamaca], I was walking on the main street when I saw a group of ten or twelve men on horses, rifles in hand, creating a dust storm. I started running, and when I got to my aunt’s house I said, “They are coming.” They [her uncle and aunt] grabbed their rifles and placed them in the holes that they had made in the walls, that’s why you see holes in houses’

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walls, to point the gun before asking who’s there. My uncle in one hole, my aunt in another one, with their rifles. They saw them approaching and pum, they let the first bullet fly. More were approaching and pum, the second bullet. One of them died there, others were injured. They left. That time we got away, they were coming for us.

After Elizabeth’s new guardians passed away in the midst of local violence, she decided to take the train to Mexico City. She paid thirty pesos (roughly US$2.40 at the time) for a one-way ticket. Although Elizabeth did not know how to read or write, she found regular work as a domestic employee and later in a clothing factory. She got these jobs through social networks of women from Zegache who lived in the capital. Although my last story shows a different trajectory from Zegache to Mexico City, it also involves violence. María Lucerna migrated to Mexico City with her family at age twelve after her father was accused of being sexually involved with a married woman and the woman’s husband threatened to kill him. In the 1960s, such a threat was not to be taken lightly. “My father had some ‘problems.’ He was muy mujeriego, a womanizer, and a man found out that he was seeing his wife and wanted to kill him.” María’s father sold his land and moved the entire family to Mexico City. After relocating, María had to work as a domestic employee, beginning when she was fourteen. María currently runs a small corner shop in Iztapalapa, Mexico City’s most populated borough and an area where many Oaxacan migrants settle. We talked while sitting inside the cagelike structure that surrounds María’s shop to prevent robberies: María: My father was too rigid. He forced me to be a maid [sirvienta] when I was fourteen years old. Iván: Where did you work? How did you like that kind of work? María: I worked downtown, and I had a terrible experience. I quit when I was fifteen years old. Iván: What happened after that? María: Well, I got married but now I’m separated. My husband was very lazy. Although I was working at home, as a homemaker, he still wanted me to continue working outside of my home. We have been separated for twenty years now, and let me tell you something, men are dead to me—honestly. I no longer need to be with a man now. Now I’m independent.

These stories are part of the larger life histories of three women who migrated to Mexico City in the 1960s and the 1970s, and they provide eth36

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nographic context for my analysis. They highlight the role of violence in shaping migration through kinship and care relations; they also show how migrating to Mexico City became a transborder experience that removed women physically and socially from Zegache in various ways. These experiences show the importance of female social networks and the transborder experience in Mexico City as a source of social legitimation. They also show how crossing internal borders has shaped gender and kinship roles in Zegache.

Working in the City and Female Social Networks Recounting her experiences in Mexico City, Elizabeth told me: When I first arrived here I lived with a woman from the pueblo. She was the one who told me to come with her, and I did. In the beginning we would go out, a pasear, a lot. We would go to Xochimilco, Chapultepec, up and down; and even though I don’t know how to read, I never got lost. But that woman started going out with a boyfriend, so she wanted her privacy, and I didn’t see her as much. Then I started hanging out with another woman from the pueblo. She was older, but I didn’t care . . . we would go everywhere. We would meet each other very early on Sunday, and then at night I would tell her, “OK, let’s go back to work but I’ll see you next Sunday.”

This passage presents two recurring themes in the experiences of women from Zegache in Mexico City. First, it points to the importance of female social networks. Second, it emphasizes the successful navigation of the city as well as some relative independence (and having at least one day per week off from work). These two aspects of women navigating Mexico City with the support of female social networks are fundamental to understanding how the transborder experience of internal migration can challenge traditional gender roles, even when such mobility is constrained by the family. Women are expected to migrate to Mexico City temporarily and eventually return to Zegache to take on family caretaking responsibilities. The importance of female social networks is clear in the cases of Carolina and Elizabeth, as both women relied on female relatives and friends to find jobs available to women. Female social networks create new ways in which migrant women socialize. These networks are based on kinship and care relations and do not involve male supervision. Although in Zegache there are spaces reserved for female socialization, such spaces perpetuate the symbolic and physical divisions and hierarchical relationships between women and 37

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men by emphasizing the role of the former as caregivers and of the latter as sustenance providers. The female social networks in Mexico City erase, or at least mitigate, this distinction. One of the most significant components of the transborder experiences of women within female social networks is the sense of autonomy they gain while navigating a difficult urban landscape. This sense of autonomy, articulated in Elizabeth’s pride of never getting lost despite not being able to read, is also found in María’s rejection of male support to run her business. For other women such as Lorenza Mendez, who lives in Mexico City, her experience of autonomy has led her to openly question the idea of marriage and to oppose traditional weddings because of the high costs involved.⁶ These transborder experiences extend beyond Mexico City, and their influence can be seen in other contexts. As the cases of Elizabeth and Carolina suggest, it is not uncommon for women in Zegache to have access to these networks. The most common route is through kinship. For example, Carolina’s sister and niece have both migrated to Mexico City. For women connected to these networks, mobility increases. The effects of these experiences are even palpable in women who return to Zegache and get married but remain more critical of their gender roles. This is especially true of women who openly question their husbands’ decisions. Cecilia Bonilla lived in Mexico City for six years and, when she returned to Zegache, married a local transnational migrant who returned to Oregon for a period of ten years after their youngest daughter was born. Cecilia’s husband had returned to Zegache six years earlier. When I interviewed Cecilia, she told me that she did not know what her husband had been doing in the United States, as he did not return with enough savings to justify his decade-long absence. Most women with migrant spouses who had no migration experience would not criticize their husbands’ decisions in such a concrete way.

Claiming Experience: Social Legitimation and Female Social Networks Women migrants who are part or have been part of female social networks challenge gender roles in Mexico City and in Zegache. The challenges they pose to traditional gender roles while living in the capital are enabled by physical distance and the establishment of social networks of mutual support among migrant women. Women in Mexico City are still part of kinship and care networks in Zegache and other places (including the United States), but the harshness of supervision by male relatives is weakened by spatial separation.

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One possible explanation of the challenges posed by internal migrants to traditional gender roles is provided by Andrews (2014), who contends that women with internal migration experiences are more critical of migration and thus tend to evaluate it in negative terms. In the case of Zegache, this is only part of the answer. It is possible to interpret these challenges to traditional gender roles as an effect of social remittances. Social remittances have been defined as “the ideas, behavior, identities and social capital that flow from receiving-to sending-country communities” (Levitt 1998, 927). According to Levitt (1998, 937–939), the potential impact of social remittances is related to four factors: the nature of remittance itself, the nature of the transnational system, the characteristics of the messenger, and the target audience. In addition, social remittances can be considered “negative” when they set “bad examples” for the “receiving community” (Levitt and Lamba-Nieves 2011, 19). Although the idea of social remittances is a compelling explanation for the challenges that the women described in this chapter present to traditional gender roles, I contend it does not fully explain how these challenges work, especially when we consider that some women who are returning migrants are labeled as “bad examples” and are challenging entrenched systems of gendered kinship and care responsibilities. In this sense, it is useful to think about social remittances as part of “affective struggles” in which women, located in a subaltern position, advocate changes in the prevailing order (Besserer 2000, 385). Following Besserer’s (2000) analysis of affective struggles in two Oaxacan transnational communities, where women faced resistance under regimes that continued to emphasize ritualized respect over free choice when it comes to women’s romantic partners, helps to contextualize the situation of returning internal migrants. In the case of Zegache, we must take a step back and analyze how female internal migrants are able to challenge traditional gender roles through their own transborder experiences. The potentiality of women’s challenges to conventional gender roles is validated by the fact that women who migrate to Mexico City and rely on female social networks can “claim” migration experience, which is often the monopoly of men (see Muehlmann 2013, 129; Tsing 1993, 128).⁷ Women from Zegache who acquire jobs and live in one of the biggest cities in the world, operate without male supervision, and thrive in occupations that are often reserved for women gain legitimation by asserting their ability to navigate a city feared in Zegache for its dangerous streets and criminal activity. Thus, women not only defy the narrative of fear of the capital instilled by relatives; they also create their own narratives of courage that partially legitimate their opinions and ideas.

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women w ho r et ur n, women w ho stay: c a r ing too much, a nd being forced to c a r e In the previous sections, I analyze the differences between female transnational migrants and female internal migrants. I contend that migrating to Mexico City represents a more direct confrontation to prevailing gender roles because it challenges the male-centered kinship structure in which these gender roles are embedded. In other words, taking advantage of female social networks creates new ways in which migrant women organize, without relying on male approval and instead relying on temporary relations of care. In addition, women who migrate to Mexico City are positioned differently in relation to other female migrants and to nonmigrants because they can “claim” migration experience often monopolized by men while also sending remittances to support their children, their parents, and other relatives. In this section, I explore how women who have never left Zegache think about migration as they reflect on their own upbringings in discussing migration with their relatives. In Zegache, young women are discouraged from migrating to Mexico City, as they are warned about the city’s potential for sexual abuse and violence. Numerous stories about women who migrated to Mexico City and were sexually assaulted abound in Zegache, although these are counteracted by the stories of women who have been sexually abused in Zegache. Returning to Besserer’s (2000) approach to sentimental regimes, one could say that internal migration emphasizes the apprehension that young women feel as they have a choice: migrate to Mexico City and become targets of sexual violence far from home, or stay in Zegache and become targets of sexual violence in their hometown. This dilemma was expressed by Rosa Dominguez in 2014 when she first told me about the domestic abuse that she had suffered and how “everybody knew about it.” She said that she had thought about moving to Mexico City when she was younger to take work as a domestic employee, but she had heard rumors of sexual assault by the employers and did not want to take that risk. She also told me about how one of her aunts had been sexually assaulted in Zegache and how, in order to escape the stigma of sexual assault, her aunt relocated to Mexico City. The threat of sexual violence and stigmatization that is associated with independent female migration reinforces gender roles even for women who have never left their hometown. However, female migrants are often at odds when they return to Zegache. On one hand, their personal and professional transborder experiences allows them to pursue less traditional gender roles in the community and allows them to “claim” migration experience and 40

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to challenge male relatives (as we saw earlier). On the other, they are frequently stigmatized, especially if they return as single mothers, particularly because they are not seen as viable romantic partners. Returning to Zegache is a highly gendered experience. For these reasons, many independent female migrants who return to Zegache do so only temporarily, as the challenges they pose to traditional gender roles are not easily accepted in their hometown.

Wanting to Go but Not Going: Women Who Stay Sofía, who appeared in this chapter’s opening vignette, is a woman in her midforties and has never lived or worked outside Zegache. Her husband is a former soldier and former transnational migrant; he did not like the United States, so he returned to Zegache to work in construction. Their house is not made of material (no cylinder blocks, no concrete), the walls are made out of wood, the roof is tin, and the floor is dirt; this is no longer common in Zegache. I met Sofía through her sister-in-law Jimena (Sofía is married to Jimena’s brother) in 2013. Jimena migrated to Mexico City when she was a teenager and later migrated to the United States. When Jimena introduced me to Sofía, they were sitting in Rosa’s front patio preparing food. The difference between the experiences of these women illustrates the array of experiences that women in Zegache represent. When I met Sofía, in 2013, Jimena told me that she insisted Sofía join her in the United States. I asked Sofía if she would like that; she told me she would and that she tells her husband (Jimena’s brother) that she wants to leave him: “He laughs and tells me to go. He says that he wouldn’t miss me, but I think he would.” Sofía’s desire to move, even if tenuous, reveals that her husband would need to approve her decision and might also need to migrate himself. Sofía’s “joke” about going to the United States could be seen as an indirect commentary on her husband’s control of her mobility in the context of the domestic violence and abuse that she has suffered. For her, migrating presents itself as an improbable option, and perhaps it would be easier for her to entice her husband to migrate and thereby gain some freedom and tranquility by staying behind. Sexual violence is simultaneously an incentive and a deterrent to migrate. Rosa’s story about her aunt is common in Zegache, as women were caught in the double-bind of either staying and possibly suffering sexual abuse or migrating and having people assume they had suffered sexual abuse even when they had not. Moreover, the migration of young women to the city was perceived as a lack of proper parenthood, signaling that a father could not take care of his own daughters. Marcia Erasmo, a women in her late 41

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seventies, told me that her father would not let her go to the capital (Marcia had female relatives there). “My father said: ‘You don’t need to go anywhere, you have everything you need here. You must stay here and get married. That’s what women are supposed to do.’” The threat of sexual abuse and potential violence in the capital becomes a central element in women’s experiences for those who stay put and for those who migrate; it reproduces the “sentimental order” of gender roles in Zegache that discourages women from migrating by themselves (see Besserer 2000). However, one thing is implicit in Rosa’s story: Staying can at least reduce the stigma of gender violence, because when “everybody knows,” the woman’s reputation is not at stake.

Divergent Experiences of Women in the City: Diff erent Experiences of Return Many female internal migrants decide to continue their lives outside Zegache. They form social relationships and start families in other cities (especially Mexico City) or join romantic partners in their own migration trajectories; they are also less likely to stay behind in Zegache. Women who do return to Zegache act on their critical perspectives regarding gender roles by establishing their own businesses or by relying on kinship networks that provide support for single women who, in some instances, are also single mothers. However, not all women are able to do this. Moreover, not all women even find it desirable to construct kinship and care networks outside their hometown’s well-established social networks. The experiences of migrant women in Mexico City are evaluated differently back in Zegache. The evaluation that the community makes of a returning migrant affects both men and women but is gendered in significant ways (see D’Aubeterre et al. 2020). Men who return without the material proof of being a successful migrant (e.g., a house, a car, savings) are labeled as lazy; they are also suspected of having vices such as drug or alcohol problems or having relations with other women. Although certain aspects of males’ behavior might still be criticized as not complying with local notions of masculinity (especially if their efforts show a lack of ability to cope with risk and to make sacrifices for their families), they are rarely ostracized or stigmatized. Women, by contrast, are evaluated harshly, ostracized, and stigmatized upon their return, as they are more willing to engage in activities outside their homes and in interactions that challenge local ideas of proper femininity (e.g., agreeing to be interviewed by a male anthropologist). After Carolina returned to Zegache, she opened a small cafeteria to pro42

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vide breakfast and lunch to daily commuters and temporary workers. Her rough and standoffish attitude has made Carolina a well-known local figure. However, her fame is accompanied by name-calling; some people call her a bruja, a “witch.” Carolina’s experience returning to her hometown without a husband and as a single mother is common among returning female migrants. Returning to Zegache is especially hard as a single mother. While single male returning migrants are seen as good matches for civil union and marriage, single female returning migrants are seen as having deviated from the standards of femininity and are not considered suitable marriage partners.⁸ Moreover, the unwillingness of men to accept a single mother as a romantic partner is justified locally because of the belief that it is more natural for a man to be reluctant to accept another man’s children. Thus, returning to Zegache is a temporary option for most women internal migrants. They often opt to return to Mexico City or to marry men who are more accepting of single mothers; those men are more likely to be older transnational migrants. Jimena returned to Zegache as a single mother; her transborder experiences in Mexico City made her less afraid of transnational migration and more aware of the relationship between autonomy and work. She decided to migrate to Oregon and leave her son with her mother. In Oregon, she started a romantic relationship with a Zegacheño twenty years her senior (fifty years old at the time) named Roberto. Roberto had a turbulent youth and was still single at fifty. They now have a ten-year-old daughter and work in Oregon’s agricultural fields. Ruth Dominguez has a similar story: when she returned to Zegache she met Cesar Danigui, a transnational migrant who had returned to visit. Cesar had lived in California for twenty-five years and never married. For Ruth, deciding to migrate with Cesar was a good choice. In their California home, she told me: “He has been very supportive. He has pushed me to learn how to drive so that I don’t have to depend on him to find work or to take care of the kids. He even helped me during my first day as a domestic [employee] here.” These two examples signal the importance of men’s changing attitudes toward “traditional” gender roles. Like Carolina and Jimena, Raquel Carrasco migrated to Mexico City and entered into a romantic relationship with a man in the capital and returned to Zegache as a single mother. Like these women, Raquel worked as a domestic employee, which is a highly stigmatized occupation, especially for young unmarried women. The stigma is often hard to shake, and it forces women to reconsider their life options in Zegache. In 2011, Raquel lived in Zegache, where she remained until 2014. When Raquel returned to Zegache, she worked at a small nonprofit organization that hires local people in both commercial and noncommercial restoration 43

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projects. However, in 2014 she left the community because she encountered “problems” at her job; she returned to Mexico City, where she now works in a factory. In this sense, it is important to point out that, although women who migrate without male companions do get a sense of autonomy as they are no longer under the authority of their parents or in-laws (see Stephen 2002a), stigma and social sanctions enforced through gossip and different forms of social isolation regulate women’s potential challenges to gender roles. Not all the women who return, or who plan to return, to Zegache share the stigmatization and the desire to leave. The case of María Lucerna is interesting, as she plans to return to Zegache after she sells her house and business in Mexico City. María sponsored the town’s most important religious celebration (she was the mayordoma for Zegache’s patron saint) in 2012. Thus, María has mobilized communal respect by engaging, as a single woman, in a ritualized activity conventionally performed by married couples or by single men (often migrants). Being a mayordoma was a lifechanging experience for María, as she had to invest decades of savings to host the patron saint’s fiesta. Nevertheless, María validated her position within the community by occupying a civil-religious position and by “appropriating” the sentiment of ritualized respect that is not often associated with a single woman (see Besserer 2000).⁹ However, for other women whose experiences living in Mexico City have been channeled through their kinship and care responsibilities, their options are different. This is exemplified by Cruz Martinez and Beatriz Danigui. Cruz migrated to Mexico City after her father gave her permission to migrate there temporarily. Cruz’s father, a former transnational migrant, returned to the community eight years earlier to find his wife sick and in need of special care. Cruz is an only child, and when her father returned to tend his fields, Cruz also had to return to take care of her mother. Beatriz worked in the local government for three years; four of her siblings (three brothers and one sister) are transnational migrants, and three other sisters live in Zegache and in nearby urban settlements. After Beatriz’s government job ended, her husband decided to move to Mexico City with Beatriz and their one-year-old son. For Beatriz, the experience of being a young mother in Mexico’s largest city had not been one of autonomy. Instead, she was afraid to go out with her son and spent most of her time alone inside the house, waiting for her husband. She returns to Zegache as often as possible, where she has the support of her parents and nephew, who often take care of her son. The gendered responsibilities of kinship and care became an important factor in Cruz’s migration trajectories. In Beatriz’s case, moving to Mexico 44

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City was experienced more as a form of confinement than as a form of mobility. The ways in which specific social networks provide different experiences is highlighted by the case of Beatriz, who did not migrate as a single woman within female social networks but as a wife and mother, part of a nuclear family of procreation. Although both Cruz and Beatriz level some criticisms toward traditional gender roles, they are not able to act on their views given their social networks and the lack of autonomy that connects them to Zegache and Mexico City.

conclusion In this chapter, I show that the gendering of migration in Zegache occurs through the different responsibilities of care and kinship that men and women possess and that shape how mobility and gender are connected. Single women in Zegache are discouraged, at the family and the community levels, to migrate to the United States, whereas migrating to Mexico City is permissible (as long as women continue to fulfill their roles as daughters), even though the risks (whether real or exaggerated) associated with that migration are ever-present. In addition, I highlight the importance of internal migration for women and the various ways in which it can affect women’s lives. As is the case in other ethnographic examples, men dominate transnational migration, and women who are involved in this type of movement are often seen as “associational” migrants who move to the United States with their spouses. Yet, the experiences of internal women migrants in urban Mexico should be taken seriously if we are to gain a better understanding of the diverse migration trajectories that women and men possess. This is not meant to take away the importance of transnational migration but rather to complement how Indigenous populations in Mexico move, and have moved, throughout history. More specifically, I contend that women from Zegache who engage in internal migration to Mexico City pose greater challenges to traditional gender roles in their community because their experiences as single young women navigating Mexico’s capital while relying on female social networks allow them to obtain social legitimation by “claiming” migration experience and courageousness. These feelings produced by internal migration filter through different social processes challenging, and being challenged by, conventional gender norms. The importance of internal migration not only stems from the challenges it poses to gender roles; it also illuminates the relationship between gen45

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dered kinship and care responsibilities. Although internal migration has not received as much scholarly attention as transnational migration, the experiences of female internal migrants in Mexico (and in other parts of the globe) must be understood as connected to global phenomena such as transnational migration and increased industrialization and urbanization. Women’s work (both paid and unpaid) is usually part of national and international networks. In the case of Zegache, studying internal migration is fundamental to understanding gender roles and the gendering of transnational migration processes.

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chapter 3

Labor Corridors I pe a s a n t s a n d s ol di e r s

C

onfinement a nd mobilit y go h a nd in h a nd in the shaping of migration trajectories. This becomes clear when looking at how men from Zegache move within Mexico and outside Mexico. As with women, the experiences of men from Zegache are diverse, and yet there are significant patterns. Most young boys start working in agriculture and tending to animals from an early age. Later on, as teenagers, males have several options: sometimes they can study, and sometimes they start working in Oaxaca City. For many, especially those approaching adulthood, there are two main routes: migrate or join the military. These routes are not self-exclusionary but complementary. As many of the life histories presented below show, men join the military and then later migrate to the United States, traveling along what I call “labor corridors.” The concept of labor corridors is based on Aihwa Ong’s (2006) notion of zoning technologies, but it differs in significant ways. Ong (2006, 103) defines “zoning technologies” as the “political plans that rezone the national territory” so that “sovereign states can create or accommodate islands of distinct governing regimes within the broader landscape of normalized rule.” In contrast to the “technological” and “economic” zones that arise out of zoning technologies, labor corridors are not necessarily planned; rather, they emerge from gendered, racialized, and socioeconomic arrangements that channel the mobility of specific populations (see Galemba 2017, 21, 31). Such arrangements are produced at the intersections of local, national, and global policies that might be linked (directly or indirectly, intentionally or unintentionally) to the populations they mobilize. The notion conveys the image of constrained and, at least partially, directed movement. The labor corridors that the men of Zegache traverse connect Mexico’s Indigenous communities, the Mexican military, and US commercial agriculture. 47

While women are mobilized primarily through care and kinship responsibilities, men are mobilized through their labor potential, as well as through the skills and knowledge they acquire along the way. The masculine identities of Zegacheños are anchored in diverse experiences of risk and sacrifice that have appeared within Mexico and between Mexico and the United States. Such experiences do not refer exclusively to the relation of men and labor regimes; they are also formed through historically situated family relationships. Therefore, to understand how masculinity is constructed in the different sites that men inhabit it is not sufficient to look exclusively at a particular nation-state or at a specific historical period. Instead, one has to look at how masculine identities have been constructed at different levels, ranging from the family to the transnational. The changing historical context of Zegache has modified not only how men relate to new activities but also how they continue to relate to other men and women within their families and communities. For Zegacheños, masculinity is linked directly to experiences of risk and sacrifice that have developed historically in relation to the defense of land, participation in the military, and, in recent decades, transnational migration. In contrast to assumptions that masculinity is mostly defined by breadwinning, I argue that breadwinning is important but is not by itself the determining factor of masculinity. As Matthew Gutmann (2007, 17) points out, male identity is defined as “what men say and do ‘to be men,’ and not simply as what men say and do.” The ways in which breadwinning is accomplished (i.e., the actions that allow a man to become a breadwinner) need to be couched in terms of sacrifice and risk in order for breadwinning to remain manly. Thus, for example, an office job is not by itself masculine; it would have to be “masculinized.” Emily Wentzell (2013, 26–27) uses the phrase “composite masculinity” to refer to how men “construct and revise their gendered selfhoods across time and context.” Wentzell’s perspective helps in understanding how men from Zegache “link specific acts, experiences, and forms of embodiment into situation-specific ways of being men” (Wentzell 2013, 26–27). They use versatility and creativity in “masculinizing” certain activities, such as cooking, to establish a historical and genealogical connection with other men and to offer a counterbalance in the face of their increasing participation in the service sector and the increasing number of women in the labor force. In this and the following chapters, I explore how risk and sacrifice were produced historically in postrevolutionary Mexico, as Indigenous agricultural populations became in theory Mexican peasants and were pressured to defend their land and other agricultural assets from competing factions and neighboring towns. The violent atmosphere that developed after the Mexi48

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can Revolution mobilized men and families as they moved out of Zegache and relocated to urban areas. After the violent aftermath of the revolution gradually ceased, men from Zegache started enrolling in the military. Enrolling in the military became a form of internal migration through which men were able to learn new skills, gain new experiences, and earn steady incomes. For many, however, being a soldier did not challenge their peasant masculine identity, as it was understood as part of being a family man (in terms of providing for one’s family but also in terms of a family tradition of participating in the military). The military became a way in which young, Indigenous, able-bodied men could receive formal education while earning a steady salary and gaining new skills. Like transnational migration, which came later, joining the military was also part of a system that mobilized marginalized groups. The relationship between becoming a soldier and then later becoming a migrant is not surprising, as the transnational labor corridor allowed soldiers to acquire diverse forms of mobility. For these reasons, most of the transnational migrants from Zegache are former soldiers. Crossing the Mexico-US border is viewed as a manly experience of risk and sacrifice. After these men arrive in the United States, notions of masculinity are broadened to include a sense of efficiency and accuracy in performing physically taxing tasks, as well as through a masculine familiarity with technology, particularly as more men started engaging in occupations that required operating machines. In chapter 4, I analyze how driving has been gendered as masculine. The gendering of driving, and the historical changes in Zegache’s occupations and mobility, indicate how ideas about masculinity are disputed and validated in specific historical contexts. The changing definitions of masculinity are part of the structure of feeling that permeates the labor corridors that men from Zegache traverse. As men engage in new and different occupations that change historically in response to global, national, and local demands, they participate in activities that have not been fully interpreted as masculine. These new practices, and the meanings surrounding them, interact with prevailing ideas about masculinity, femininity, and relatedness.

being a m a n in t he me x ic a n cou ntryside: pe a sa nts a nd m a sculinit y The Mexican Revolution was ambiguously received in the Central Valleys, where Oaxacans saw the armed movement as an imposition from Mexico’s northern mestizo elites (Chassen-López 1989). In some parts of the 49

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region, agrarian reforms, through which the new revolutionary government sought to establish alliances and legitimation, successfully transformed local politics and gained sympathizers (see Garner 1984; Ruíz Cervantes 1988; Stephen 2002b). In Zegache, the imposition of prorevolutionary factions created a long-lasting divide in the community that resulted in armed violence, which in turn stunted land redistribution. The current conflict between propietarios and comuneros is a legacy of the postrevolutionary conflict and continues to define how men move within and between transnational labor corridors. At the height of the violent period known in Zegache as the época de los valientes, or the “time of the brave men,” in the 1960s and 1970s, being a peasant was a task with a risk of violence. Land, oxen, and ploughs, assets necessary for subsistence agriculture, were targeted in the internal conflict as well as in the boundary disputes that Zegache had with the neighboring towns of San Martín Tilcajete and Santa Catarina Quiané. During this time, Zegache was still relatively disconnected from Oaxaca City, and state and federal authorities had little to no presence in the community. Thus, being a peasant in Zegache implied obvious risks and sacrifices. In order to understand the connections between masculinity, land, and agriculture, I analyze how violence in Zegache shaped ideas about risk and sacrifice. In turn, ideas about masculinity and peasantry overlapped with official and unofficial discourses that followed the revolution and the agrarian reform, which also realigned the relationship between Indigenous and rural populations in Mexico over the past hundred years. I contend that the current expressions of masculinity in Zegache remain rooted in a discourse that emphasizes family connections, land, as well as risk and sacrifice. These masculine expressions enable mobility through specific transnational labor corridors but restrain that mobility outside such corridors.

The Masculine and Non-Indigenous Identity of the Mexican Peasant Before proceeding to the specific analysis of how Zegache’s local violence shaped and continues to shape local masculinities, it is important to analyze the relationship between people’s access to land, peasant identity, and masculinity in Mexico. Some important contributions to this scholarship have been books by Ana Maria Alonso (1995) and Daniel Nugent (1993) exploring the formation of peasant communities in the state of Chihuahua (what was previously New Vizcaya and later became northern Mexico). Recent studies on rural masculinities have tended to focus on the experiences of migration, highlighting how migration has become a central component 50

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in establishing a masculine identity (e.g., Boehm 2012; D. Cohen 2006; Puga Aguirre-Sulem 2015). These two bodies of literature provide important insights into how masculinity is shaped within the family, within Mexico, and across the Mexico-US border. The Mexican Revolution, and the agrarian reforms that followed, created a discourse that defined rural and Indigenous peasants primarily in terms of a Mexican national identity and a male gender identity. Since Mexico’s war of independence, Indigenous identities have been considered problematic because they make salient the contradictions of an allegedly homogeneous, and uniform, Mexican mestizo identity (e.g., Brading 1988, 76; De la Peña 2005, 722; Stephen 2002b, 85). Although several attempts have been made to dismantle these Indigenous local identities, it was perhaps the agrarian reform and the Indigenous-as-peasant discourse, celebrated after the Mexican Revolution, that more clearly reshaped the relationship between Indigenous communities and the Mexican state (e.g., Dawson 1998; De la Peña 2005). In Zegache, almost everybody ascribes to the peasant identity.¹ Somos de campo (we are from the countryside), aquí puro campo (only agriculture here), and aquí somos campesinos (we’re peasants here) are common phrases used to describe the town and the town’s inhabitants, regardless of their identity as comuneros or proprietarios.² These emic descriptors signal a social class, a rural location, and a historic position in relation not only to the Mexican state but also to other Mexicans who inhabit urban spaces. Being a peasant from a rural town appears as an identity marker that is primarily defined by Zegacheños in opposition to the city and city dwellers. This is not to say that Indigenous identity does not have a significant role in Zegache; rather, it points to the significance of land and agrarian conflicts in the community. This can be contrasted with other Indigenous communities in Oaxaca, where the Indigenous rights movement, known as la emergencia india, has been more influential (see, e.g., Aquino Moreschi 2012; Stephen 2002b).³ The campesino identity is also gendered. Even if everybody identifies Zegache as a peasant community, men and women will often answer the question “What do you do for a living?” differently. While men will often say soy campesino, or “I am a peasant,” women will acknowledge “helping out” in agricultural work but emphasize their role within the home: “I’m a homemaker, but I do help my husband in the fields.” This gendering of the peasant identity is connected to the agrarian reforms. As Tanalis Padilla (2008, 163–164) contends, “agrarian reform, by upholding the peasant household as a unit with gender-specific roles, reinforced rural patriarchy,” and in some instances women were instructed by official pamphlets of their proper role as their husbands’ supporters. The gender-specific roles were also repro51

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duced in Zegache through local violence that drew direct connections between land ownership and courage, especially considering that men were the main beneficiaries of the agrarian reforms (see Razavi 2009).

The Risks and Sacrifices of Being a Peasant Although not entirely clear in the archival accounts available or in the oral histories that I collected, violence between families and between barrios (neighborhoods) intensified in the 1940s precisely because of the agrarian conflicts that followed the Mexican Revolution. In addition to its internal conflict, Zegache encountered boundary disputes with neighboring communities that aggravated local violence as men had to defend their land, often while armed. This context, as well as the relative isolation of Zegache due to the lack of roads and communication, made subsistence agriculture a risky occupation. Land, oxen, ploughs, and families had to be protected through violence; subsistence agriculture became a risky activity that nevertheless was necessary if land and property were to be maintained. “In 1974, when the conflict with Quiané was going strong, I decided to go back to tend my fields. My family thought that I was crazy, but I couldn’t abandon my land,” a man told me as we looked over the María Sánchez Hill, an important landmark in the region that is still disputed between Zegache, Tilcajete, and Quiané. “Back in those days,” he continued, “you always had to carry your rifle, just in case.” The violent atmosphere that surrounded those who had to watch over the town’s boundaries to protect their community’s territory and their own agricultural land was also experienced within the streets of Zegache. The histories of the partidos armados, or “armed parties,” as they are often described, abound in the older generations that lived through the violence, as well as in the younger generations that saw the last days of these groups of armed men. The valientes, or “brave men,” who roamed the streets of Zegache were involved in intracommunal and interfamilial disputes that led to a cycle of personal vendettas and revenge. Some people died, and others left the community. Subsistence agriculture became a dangerous activity, families fled the violence, and land was abandoned.⁴ Those who stayed faced difficult working conditions, as they had to protect not only land but also oxen and ploughs, two fundamental elements of the peasant masculine identity (see the poem by Manuel Mejía in Stephen 2002b, 46–47). Ploughs and oxen were the only means to prepare large plots of land, so they were particularly important before modern tractors were regularly used in the community. “There was a time when they stole oxen” is a phrase commonly heard when people narrate the not-too-distant past. “During that time,” one woman 52

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told me, “there were problems for the ploughs and for women. Since there weren’t any fences, people had to sleep with their plough tied to their beds.” Zegache’s peasant masculine identity was forged by resisting violence and by protecting the family, the land, the oxen, and the plough. A combination of factors gradually changed the violent atmosphere in Zegache, and eventually young men were encouraged to seek opportunities outside the town’s limits. A new labor corridor allowed for men from Zegache to be incorporated into the lower ranks of the military. This specific form of mobility created familial traditions of soldiering that both overlapped and clashed with the masculine peasant identity. In addition to the newfound mobility for young men, the cycle of revenge died out as men involved in such vendettas aged, were imprisoned, or left the community. A name that resonates with the end of this violent period is that of Eusebio Santana. Eusebio, who passed away in 2012, is considered by some a hero and by others a murderer. According to Eusebio’s family, “He wanted to clean the community. He got tired of all the valientes who were killing people in Zegache. This got him into a lot of trouble, so he had to leave Zegache. He was imprisoned for twenty years.” Implicit in these statements is Eusebio’s use of guns to threaten and harm other men from Zegache. Eusebio was one of the last chingones, referring to the men whose displays of violence were generally considered excessive and damaging but who were also seen as fulfilling a masculine role by undertaking risks and directly confronting local violence.⁵ During this time, other forms of masculinities were possible, and not all men were directly involved in violent episodes, even if they were accustomed to carrying guns. For the men who did not participate in the valientes’ vendettas, risk and sacrifice continued to be important means to reclaim membership in their community by the ability to aguantar (endure) local violence and successfully protect and maintain their land, their oxen, their ploughs and, by extension, their families. This sense of risk and sacrifice associated with the hard life of working in agriculture lingers today as families and men continue to contrapose the masculine experience of the peasant to the masculine experience of the transnational migrant. As a man told me, “Life in the country [as a peasant] is hard [La vida en el campo es difícil]; when men return from the United States, they don’t get used to life here.” Therefore, even if transnational migration has become a masculine experience in Zegache, staying in Zegache and maintaining a family presence are also constructed around the ideas of risk and sacrifice. This is especially true when it is compared to the Americanization that transnational migrants experience while in the United States; that is to say, the failure of returning migrants to adapt to life 53

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in the pueblo is interpreted both as a betrayal of their origins and a form of weakness. Staying in Zegache and maintaining a family presence reflect manly behaviors that imply sacrifice because men forfeit the opportunity to be surrounded by more material comforts. For women, however, staying is construed as natural behavior, an expected response to their kinship and care responsibilities. The gendered differences of staying are related to structural conditions around land inheritance and the permanence of last names. Land is generally (but not always) inherited by male children. This also means that the youngest son is pressured to return, or to stay, in order to preserve the family’s land. “Las mujeres son las que le dan en la torre al apellido [Women are the ones who destroy the last name],” said Benancio Matos. For Benancio, who was in the Mexican military for over twenty years, returning to the pueblo is important because Zegache’s agricultural fields face an important challenge as large numbers of young men leave for the United States: “In the past, everyone worked in agriculture; young and old. Now that young men don’t want to work in agriculture, well, then I don’t know who will stay here.” Benancio’s last comment, regarding the preoccupation with the future of Zegache as a rural and agricultural town in the face of transnational migration, is a frequent subject of debate among younger and older generations of men. Alejandra Aquino Moreschi (2012) documents a similar situation in the Zapotec Oaxacan town of Yalalag. In Yalalag, the high migration rates have led to a “communal disintegration” that complicates the functioning of local institutions, including agriculture (Aquino Moreschi 2012, 124–125). Other scholars have documented an increasing feminization of rural and nonindustrialized agriculture in Mexico linked to male migration (Preibisch et al. 2002). Increased migration rates and a lack of interest in agricultural activity by younger generations have increased concern among Zegacheños and Zegacheñas about the future of Zegache if agriculture is abandoned there. Ironically, past local violence and agrarian conflicts have connected the defense and maintenance of land to masculinity. For example, Manuel Martinez, who was in the military as a younger man and later lived in Oregon for ten years, remembers how he once returned from Oregon to Zegache as his family was being threatened by an opposing faction in the local agrarian dispute: “They were asking for money and throwing rocks at my house. I knew I had to come back.” Thus, masculine peasant identity has slowed down the process of feminization in Zegache and has framed generational debates around migration in terms of competing masculinities. The violent phase of local history known as the época de los valientes in 54

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the aftermath of the postrevolutionary agrarian reforms in Mexico created a robust and productive masculine identity deeply rooted in local agricultural practices while allowing the incorporation of new nonagricultural activities. The masculine peasant identity constructed around ideas of risk and sacrifice influenced men’s mobility and contributed to the participation of men in the military and in transnational migration. However, as the examples of Manuel and others show, agricultural labor continues to be an important occupation. Younger generations of men seek social validation from older men who endured the época de los valientes as they redefine their masculine identities within the transnational labor corridors.

from pe a sa nts to soldier s Men from Zegache who become soldiers and who migrate to the United States, two of the most common male occupations besides subsistence agriculture, do so because it is part of a familial tradition and a process of social legitimation that validates their own masculine identity with women and with other men. The experiences of risk and sacrifice, which informed much of the peasant male identity, shape younger generations of men who did not experience local violence to the same degree as their fathers and grandfathers but who partially inherited the discourse of risk and sacrifice as a frame of reference. Yet, by joining the military and by engaging in transnational migration, both of which involve risk and sacrifice, they are able to partake and to redefine their masculine identity through other experiences, skills, and knowledge. In addition, as with subsistence agriculture, the Mexican military and US industrialized agriculture are structured by transnational labor corridors that simultaneously mobilize and marginalize.

joining t he milita ry a s m a sculine tr a dit ion Numerous men have followed the trajectory from peasant to soldier to transnational migrant. In fact, joining the military is a common experience for men in Zegache, and although it is more common to specific families, almost every family in Zegache has or has had a relative in the military. In this section, I focus on the overlapping discourses and experiences of being a soldier and being a family man. The military offers tangible benefits such as a steady income, health insurance, and an inexpensive way to acquire technical skills and formal education. Men who join the military have the opportunity to travel within 55

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Mexico. Soldiers spend most of their time on military bases training, cleaning, and performing other maintenance activities; however, soldiers also have to make long expeditions in search of marijuana plantations, poppy fields, and clandestine drug-processing labs. Both in the military bases and in the field, soldiers not only learn and test technical and social skills; they also engage in interactions that cross ethnic, racial, and class boundaries. Thus, joining the military should be considered as a form of internal migration, especially in rural communities that might not have direct access to established transnational communities (see Sandoval-Cervantes 2019). The story of Miguel Zepeda cuts against the most common migration experience of men from Zegache: the narrative that a man goes from peasant to soldier to transnational migrant. His story highlights how single young men can become family men. Miguel, who was twenty-six years old when we met, is the third generation in his family to have joined the Mexican army. His grandfather completed his three-year initial contract in the 1960s, and his uncles (who now live in California) joined the military in the 1980s. Miguel first migrated to California when he was eighteen and joined the military at twenty-two. I met Miguel in October 2014 through his grandfather, Teodoro Danigui. At the time, Miguel was the only person living with his grandparents, Teodoro and María. He had recently finished his contract in the military and was deciding his next steps. Miguel helped his grandfather in subsistence agriculture, especially by driving a small pickup truck and a tractor that Teodoro and María’s son bought with remittances from the United States. Miguel, like numerous former soldiers, would often sport his military wear while working in the fields. He also showed me pictures while on military duty including, for example, next to marijuana and poppy plantations.⁶ I had seen Miguel a year before I met him, but in 2013 Miguel was withdrawn and rarely interacted with me. In 2014, he seemed much more confident and actively sought ways to discuss his military and migration experience. Miguel migrated when he was eighteen using a tourist visa that he got through his residence in the northern Mexican state of Sonora, where he lived with his mother (Teodoro and María’s daughter) for a few years. In the United States, Miguel worked alongside his uncles at a ranch in Jackson, California. It was the experience of working with his uncles (both former soldiers) that sparked Miguel’s interest in joining the military: “When we were up there, in the ranch [near Sacramento, California], my uncles started making fun of me. Telling me how I wouldn’t survive in the military, so I had to prove them wrong.” In the military, Miguel engaged in a number of tasks and occupations. 56

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After the initial training, he was part of a group of soldiers who searched for and destroyed marijuana and poppy plantations in the Sierra. He and his team would often be parachuted from a helicopter (Miguel showed me several short videos of these instances on his cell phone). During these long treks, Miguel was also in charge of carrying cooking utensils and supplies. He cooked in improvised kitchens in the mountains. Later in his short military career, Miguel was in charge of administrative duties at the military hospital in Oaxaca City. Thus, for Miguel, joining the military was not so much a decision influenced by national pride or a desire to serve; rather, it was a product of his family context in which men claim social legitimation through narratives of risk and sacrifice. Teodoro, Miguel’s grandfather, is the patriarch of the family and a well-known figure in the community. He lived through the época de los valientes, he picked cotton in the neighboring state of Chiapas, and he was a soldier for three years. Teodoro never migrated transnationally yet claims social legitimation through his military experience and having endured the época de los valientes. Miguel’s uncles, Ramiro Danigui and Camilo Danigui, are both former soldiers and undocumented migrants. The risk and sacrifice of being a soldier and of crossing the border without documents became central in the social legitimation of their positions as family men. Miguel crossed the border with a tourist visa and lived in the proximity of his mother. Thus, had Miguel not enlisted in the military, his transnational migration, using a tourist visa, would not validate his masculine identity in the eyes of his grandfather and his uncles, who claimed that being a soldier would prove impossible to Miguel. The differences between Miguel, Ramiro, Camilo, and Teodoro are both generational and historical. Men from Zegache who joined the military during the 1960s and 1970s were few, as this was not a generally available option in the community. The motivations for enrolling in the Mexican army were directly connected to economic necessity. Teodoro described his enrollment in the military: “I used to sell chiquihuite [basketry]; one day I went to Oaxaca to sell my merchandise. A man approached me and asked if I wanted to earn twenty pesos a day. Mozos [day laborers] used to earn two pesos. I didn’t think twice.” For Teodoro, the need to sustain a family influenced his decision to join the military given the few economic opportunities available to him. For many men of Teodoro’s generation, this was one of the first experiences outside Zegache. In fact, many retired soldiers from Teodoro’s generation often narrate how they never got the opportunity to travel within the state of Oaxaca and how they are more familiar with other Mexican states, particularly Chiapas, Chihuahua, and Guerrero. In this sense, the labor corridor from peasant to soldier was established through the con57

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text of local violence, the reduced economic opportunities for people from Zegache, and the historic racial dynamics of the Mexican military. In the generation that followed (in the 1980s and 1990s), the labor corridor was reinforced by familial traditions of soldiering. Ramiro and Camilo, and other men who joined the military in the 1980s and 1990s, also did so out of economic necessity, but they had been influenced by the experience of older local men, especially their own male relatives. For many, joining the military was a stepping-stone that allowed them to gain experiences, skills, and money that would allow them to migrate to the United States. Miguel and other young men who have joined the military in recent years have not only benefited from the experiences of previous generations but also had a different generational experience due to the construction of roads, schools, and remittances, as well as Zegache’s social networks in other parts of Mexico and in the United States. For example, Miguel was able to attend a private high school, paid by his mother, Natalia Danigui, while she lived in Sonora, Mexico. Miguel was also able to migrate to the United States by relying on economic and social resources that relatives, particularly his uncles, provided him. For Miguel’s uncles and for his grandfather, these two possibilities would have been difficult to imagine. For Miguel and other young men from Zegache, joining the military becomes a way to validate masculine identities in relation to Zegache’s robust conceptions of masculinity. This is significant given that Miguel’s generation was not subjected to local episodes of violence. They did not have to venture into the military; neither did they have to establish social networks in the United States. Joining the military allowed Miguel to establish himself as a family man by proving to a degree that he was willing to undertake similar risks and sacrifices that other men in his family have undertaken. Thus, even if Miguel’s masculinity differs from those of his grandfather and uncles, it is still anchored in a male peasant identity, and it is further cemented through the dangerous activities required to serve in the military. I end this chapter with a story narrated at a bocado, a festive gathering in which godparents are celebrated. Germán Oliva, a man in his late forties who recently retired from the military, said the following: When I was in the military, two young brothers from here ended up doing their initial training with me in Oaxaca. I knew their mother, so one day I was visiting my family and I went to see her. I asked her if her sons had sent her any money. She said they hadn’t. I knew that they had already received a couple of salaries, so I thought I had to do something about it. When I saw these two youngsters in Oaxaca, I told them that I needed some money; I needed them to “help 58

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me out” [echarme una mano]. Me being their superior, they couldn’t refuse. They lent me the money. Then I did it again, when they got their next paycheck. I was able to collect around 6,000 pesos [roughly US$500 at the time]. A few days later, the two young men came up to me, asking me for their money. I looked at them and said: “You know what? I won’t be able to pay you, I don’t have the money, but . . . you should give your mom a call.”

Germán’s parable touches on the intersection of sacrifice and family responsibility, and it sums up how ideas about masculinity are connected to breadwinning but especially to being a family man. Additionally, in order for such experiences to be socially validated by other men and community members, they need to include self-sacrifice and risk. Later that night it was revealed that one of the two brothers had drowned during initial military training. This tragic event only reified the risk involved in becoming a soldier. Such notions of sacrifice and risk also appear in narratives about male transnational migrants. Contrary to numerous accounts that address the transnational migration experience as a new rite of passage for rural and Indigenous men in Mexico, I contend that, because of the long history of violence and the enlistment of men from Zegache in the military, local conceptions of masculinity are not radically challenged through the transnational migration experience. This in no way means that ideas about masculinity do not change; rather, it means that masculinities cannot be theorized only in relation to one nation-state. They have to be theorized at different levels of analysis, including family relations that are outside the nuclear family.

conclusion Throughout this chapter, I contend that experiences of risk and sacrifice, associated with the masculine peasant identity, created at the intersection of national agrarian policies, local violence, and global forces, have colored what it means to be a man in Zegache. The transnational labor corridors within which men from Zegache move historically have been created through a combination of local, national, and international processes. Movement within these labor corridors is produced in specific historical contexts, which is also reflected in intergenerational disputes over changing symbols of masculinity, such as defending agricultural plots to crossing the Mexico-US border and trading the oxen-pulled plough for the tractor. Additionally, I contend that the masculinities of the men of Zegache are robust and productive and that Zegacheños are able to reframe new experiences in 59

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terms of a masculine identity that is still cemented in a male peasant identity. Such redefinitions of masculinity are rooted in structures of feeling that are spatially and temporally contextual. In contrast to the literature on masculinity that highlights breadwinning as the principal factor in masculine identities, I propose that, at least in Zegache, the ways in which one achieves breadwinning are more important in terms of “what men say and do ‘to be men’” (Gutmann 2007, 17) than simply focusing on what men do. Thus, it is not sufficient for a man to be labeled as “masculine” by simply providing for his family. This is an important element, no doubt, but a true family man must also prove that he is willing to sacrifice himself and take risks for his family. Risk and sacrifice solidify care and kinship relationships beyond the nuclear family and include men’s relationships with the community, the land, and the maintenance of the family name. This contrasts with how women’s care and kinship relationships become solidified through the concrete acts of taking care of family members and being present. In chapter 4, I analyze how labor corridors and masculinity cross over to the United States and what this means for the men of Zegache.

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chapter 4

Labor Corridors II t r a ns n at ion a l m ig r at ion a n d m a s c u l i n i t y

W

hen i a r r i v ed in zeg ache in 2014, i not iced signs promoting a local internet service. A few minutes after I had called the number in the ad, Pedro Durante was knocking on my door. Twenty-something Pedro appeared wearing a black North Face jacket, a very common sight in the Pacific Northwest, but not necessarily here in the Central Valleys. He wanted to go straight to the roof of my two-story building to find the best spot to place the antenna. He had started his business a few months earlier, and he was the one providing internet service to local authorities while also visiting other Oaxacan towns needing internet access. As we started talking, Pedro told me he had returned from the United States not too long before. Before migrating to Seattle, he had been a cadet in the Heróico Colegio Militar located in Mexico City and the major military educational institution. Influenced by his father, who was a police officer, Pedro had wanted to become a soldier from a very young age. However, Pedro had difficulty behaving properly in the academy and was expelled after finishing his second year. He returned to Zegache for a brief time and then migrated to Seattle, where he had a few male relatives. While in Seattle, Pedro became interested in computers and enrolled in courses at the local community college. The life trajectory of Pedro, who worked in subsistence agriculture before enrolling in the military academy and then later migrated to the United States, is common among the men of Zegache. Although not every man in the community has been a soldier or a transnational migrant, many have, and the vast majority have either been in the Mexican military or lived in the United States. In this chapter, I focus on the ways in which men from Zegache have established a set of masculine identities based on experiences of risk and sac61

rifice that historically have been facilitated and constrained by their mobility through labor corridors that extend across Mexico and the United States. These corridors have created a sense of familiarity that allows men from Zegache to acquire knowledge and skills, not readily available to women, that facilitate their movement while simultaneously redefining what activities count as masculine. Some ethnographic examples discuss the experience of transnational migration of Indigenous and rural men as a sort of “crisis” or “destabilization” of masculinity (see Alcalde 2011; Boehm 2012; Puga Aguirre-Sulem 2015). However, there are significant continuities that root Zegache’s multiple masculinities in experiences of risk and sacrifice that are prevalent in local masculine peasant identities. This is not to say that the military and transnational experiences are articulated or experienced in the same ways as the male peasant identity. As a matter of fact, these masculine identities often come into conflict with one another by holding different narratives of masculine risk and sacrifice. Accordingly, I move away from the concept of crisis by showing the ways in which men from Zegache are able to masculinize nonagricultural occupations as they move through labor corridors. Moreover, the idea that masculinity is re-elaborated as men moved through these labor corridors highlights that both internal and transnational experiences present similar yet different sets of circumstances and thus allow for an understanding of masculinity that emphasizes a transborder framework (Stephen 2007) and is not defined by methodological nationalism.

tr a nsnat iona l migr at ion: r isk, sacr ifice, a nd odd jobs Transnational migration is still predominantly male in Zegache, with most migrants working in commercial seasonal agriculture in Oregon. Although transnational migration does alter existing notions of masculinity, the already robust familial and local notions of masculinity that emphasize sacrifice and risk permit transnational migrants to frame agricultural work and other odd jobs within a masculine identity. This contrasts with the emphasis placed on autonomy that researchers have linked to Mexican masculinity and to Mexican peasant masculinity (see Alonso 1995; Puga Aguirre-Sulem 2015; Nugent 1993). Transnational migration gives shape to another segment of the labor corridor that historically followed the initial period when men from Zegache enrolled in the military. Former soldiers returned to Zegache during 1980– 2000 with important transborder experiences and with new practical and 62

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technical skills, acquired both within the military ranks and in their deployment destinations, that could be useful in nonagricultural occupations. Once in Zegache, however, they saw their work opportunities curtailed as national and international economic policies (e.g., NAFTA and other socalled structural adjustments) complicated their possible reincorporation into subsistence agriculture. In addition, neighboring communities had established strong transnational communities in the United States, particularly along the West Coast. The experiences of transnational migration are filled with difficult moments in which the migrant (and the potential migrant) must show valor and courage in the face of adversity. The act of crossing the Mexico-US border is in itself filled with danger, and people are constantly pushed to the limits of their physical abilities (see de León 2015; Reed-Sandoval 2020). However, the dangers and risks faced do not end once the border has been crossed. The historical predominance of male transnational migrants in Zegache is used discursively to validate the risks and sacrifices that men make when they cross the border, especially when they have crossed it on multiple occasions. This contrasts with women who live in the United States and usually cross the border fewer times. In fact, many men remember the exact number of times they have crossed the border. For example, a local musician told me that he had “jumped” over to the United States more than fifty times. Other men also narrated their multiple border crossings.¹ Although it is tempting to see crossing the Mexico-US border as a qualitatively different life experience compared to peasants and soldiers, for many men from Zegache the continuities are obvious. The skills and knowledge gained through agricultural work in Zegache and through the military do not appear as disconnected either from the act of crossing the Mexico-US border without proper documentation or from industrialized seasonal agricultural work in the United States. The continuity of the transnational labor corridors forges connections between masculine identity, skills, knowledge, and patterns of mobility. The continuities that link the segments of the labor corridors are articulated in Arnulfo Durante’s narrative about the difficulties of crossing the Mexico-US border as an undocumented migrant. Arnulfo retired from the military in his early forties after more than twenty years of service; his experience in the Mexican army had become routine: “I always get up at five in the morning and take a walk. That’s part of the discipline that I acquired in the army.” Arnulfo currently lives in a suburb near Seattle, where he works as the main (and only) cook at a small fast-food restaurant. Arnulfo crossed the Mexico-US border twice, once in 2008 through Tijuana, and then in 2012 through the Sonoran Desert into Arizona. I asked him if crossing the 63

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desert was difficult. He calmly replied: “Everybody told me that it was difficult, but in the military I would walk for weeks carrying heavy loads with little food. I had to walk for three days so it wasn’t too hard.” Arnulfo added: “We were close to the end of the trail, and the migra [Border Patrol] spotted us. The coyotes [guides or smugglers] told us to hide and to wait for them to return, but I followed them; I thought it was safer that way. At the end, only three [of more than twenty people] made it across.” Arnulfo’s narrative resembles the stories of other Zegacheños who, when asked about agricultural work in the United States, speak about their familiarity with agriculture since childhood. These narratives highlight the continuities in men’s different labor experiences and, in a way, diminish claims of masculinity based solely on transnational experiences. As in the case of Miguel Zepeda discussed in chapter 3, the social validation of a masculine identity is produced within intergenerational structures of feeling that revaluate labor and the masculine experiences of risk and sacrifice. However, transnational migrants are exposed to new occupations and to new labor regimes that differ in important ways from subsistence agriculture and military life. Masculine identity in Zegache is anchored in notions of risk and sacrifice, and transnational migrants move within specific transnational labor corridors that reinforce these associations. Transnational migrants often describe their own work in the United States in terms of risk and sacrifice, sometimes redefining these terms and redefining certain activities and occupations.

Piece-Rate Masculinity: Agricultural Work and Technology in the United States The act of migrating itself can be defined in terms of valor and courage. But being able to aguantar (endure) the adverse conditions and forms of labor encountered while in the United States can also be construed in terms of valor. However, not being able to endure those conditions can be interpreted as going against masculine notions of risk and sacrifice. Roberto Vázquez analyzes the experiences of his brother-in-law under such parameters. Roberto’s brother-in-law endured only a very brief period in the United States, and Roberto thought little of this: “He’s such a coward! He couldn’t even stay here for a year.” Although at first glance it might seem contradictory that the acts of staying in Zegache and staying in the United States can both be interpreted as masculine, they are not. In fact, they highlight the centrality of risk and sacrifice, signaling how breadwinning is not necessarily masculine but instead becomes so only when it is part of a larger narrative of masculine risk and sacrifice. 64

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Transnational male migrants from Zegache are already accustomed to working in agriculture when they arrive in the United States. However, a significant change takes place as they move from nonindustrialized agricultural activities oriented toward family subsistence to industrialized agricultural activities structured by global markets.² This change transforms how notions of masculinity are tied to a peasant identity. Men from Zegache move away from a masculine peasant identity tied to the defense of the family land and instead talk about their capacity and efficiency in performing specific agricultural jobs (such as picking vegetables and fruit). This contrasts with women, who are more likely to talk about other aspects of their jobs, such as their schedules and the people they meet. For men like Roberto, being able to pick strawberries with speed and accuracy has become a central element in the redefinition of a masculine identity. In this context, masculinity is redefined through the sacrifice of grueling physical work that often results in pain and chronic illness (see Holmes 2014). In addition, the risk of injury increases in piece-rate agreements (which are very common for Zegache migrants) that reward fast movements. During a baptism and first communion celebrated in spring 2014 at a farm near Woodburn, Oregon, Roberto showed me his crooked fingers, still red from strawberry juice. “Look at my fingers! They are still swollen from the picking.” I had picked up Roberto, Jimena Limón, and their two daughters earlier; it was a Sunday, but both Roberto and Jimena had gone to work for half a shift. “Today was a good day. I was the second-best picker; only a youngster surpassed me,” Roberto proudly told me. Jimena, who had also been picking strawberries that morning, agreed that “he is pretty fast,” but she did not comment on her own picking abilities. As with Roberto, many men from Zegache speak confidently about their efficiency at performing numerous and diverse tasks related to agricultural work. Such comments include references to the number of blueberry and strawberry buckets they can fill and the ways in which they master complex tasks that might include different types of machinery and technology. For example, Joel Vázquez and Rubén Guerra work in a plant nursery, and although their daily obligations change depending on the seasons, they often mention the bolear season as the most demanding and the most rewarding. Bolear refers to the process known as “earth-balling,” in which the roots of a tree or a shrub are dug out of the ground in a circular shape and later covered in plastic. Once the roots have been packed in plastic, they resemble a ball. Bolear requires learning to use special digging machinery that speeds up the process. Acquiring speed, however, requires accuracy, as placing the automatic shovel-like equipment inaccurately can also ruin the roots. Thus, an important part of being an effective boleador is directly re65

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lated to the ability to control and operate machines. Being good at bolear is quantifiable: the number of plants one is able to pack and how much time one spends on each plant depends on skill and efficiency. Although picking fruit and earth-balling are different processes, men from Zegache are able to articulate a form of piece-rate masculinity that links notions of risk and sacrifice to efficiency and the ability to learn new technologies. Thus, while other scholars discuss the experiences of Latino men in the United States as “stripping” them of their masculinity (Boehm 2012, 73) and as emasculating (Alcalde 2011, 465–466), I contend that, for Zegacheños living in the United States, this type of work is not necessarily an emasculating process. That being said, it is true that men from Zegache redefine their masculinity around notions of endurance and sacrifice in the context of physically demanding labor, new technologies, and new risks that include injuries and accidents. Thus, I agree with Patricia Zavella (2011, 87) when she states that she did not find sufficient evidence to support the idea that migrants experience “social death” while crossing the border. Men from Zegache did not lose their masculine identity after they crossed into the United States.

Christmas Trees, Hops, and Other Odd Jobs Besides picking fruit and vegetables and working in plant nurseries, two of the most common occupations for Zegacheños are harvesting hops (the female flowers of the hop plant used in beer production) and cutting and packing Christmas trees. Both occupations are seasonal and require a great degree of familiarity with complicated processes that involve specialized machinery; both take place within the transnational labor corridors and reinforce masculine notions of risk and sacrifice and the masculine familiarity with technology. Before proceeding further, it is important to note here that the participation of men from Zegache in harvesting hops and processing Christmas trees was produced in very specific circumstances that pushed them into seeking new opportunities. Numerous men from Zegache narrate how in the past they were able to migrate seasonally to Oregon. They would take advantage of the particularly short and intense agricultural season in the Pacific Northwest (Gamboa 1990). This changed after the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States. The Mexico-US border was militarized, and the human and financial costs associated with crossing the border increased. Male migrants were disincentivized to cross the border on a yearly basis (e.g., Lee 2008; Riosmena and Massey 2012; Massey et al. 2006). As Zegacheños started staying in Oregon during the entire year, they also realized that they could not 66

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limit themselves to the seasonal agricultural work from March to October, especially as electric bills went up during winter months. At the same time, year-round residence allowed Zegacheños to expand their social networks beyond their hometown networks, which included people from the neighboring town of Santiago Apóstol. Through these networks created in the Willamette Valley, in towns such as Salem and Woodburn, men from Zegache were able to find occupations to help them endure the winter and secured yearlong employment. Throughout my conversations with men from Zegache, I slowly became aware that, in addition to conventional jobs (such as tending cattle and seasonal agriculture), Zegacheños had also participated in a range of odd jobs. The men I interviewed had worked collecting moss for Christmas decorations and trapping bait worms for fishing in the forested areas between Washington and Oregon. Although the product of these jobs may seem festive, the men shared stories of long and lonely walks in dense forests in the Cascade Mountains as they climbed trees and descended to muddy riverbanks during unpredictable and inclement weather. In fact, the production of holiday commodities was a domain where men from Zegache would often be present, especially in cutting and packing Christmas trees and harvesting hops for beer production. Before proceeding to the narratives of the men who worked the Christmas trees and hops, however, I provide a brief description of these jobs to help frame how they fit within the labor corridors that link peasant, soldier, and migrant masculinity through the tropes of risk and sacrifice. Every year during August and sometimes September, men from Zegache participate in el jape, or the harvesting of hops. Across the Willamette Valley, it is easy to see where hops are growing: metal cables rise up from the ground to form a triangle from which the hop plants hang. The flowers, which appear in the upper part of the triangle, are harvested and immediately boiled in the nurseries’ facilities. Because the harvesting season is only two to three weeks, the nurseries and the hop farms have double shifts, meaning hop flowers are harvested and processed twenty-four hours a day. The process requires a complex interaction of people on the ground whose jobs require precision: Some of them cut the vines, while others drive a sort of moving staircase at a rhythm that allows the cutter (who’s riding on the top of the staircase) enough time to cut the flower; they cannot move too fast nor too slow. In addition, when the flowers are boiled they emit a strong odor that makes it difficult to breathe and that permeates the clothes of anyone nearby. Zegacheños have been involved in harvesting hops since the 2000s. Although some Zegacheños now work year-round in the production of hops, 67

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most only work during the August-to-September harvest. Even if harvesting is not particularly risky, men who work twelve-hour shifts and endure the strong scent of boiled hops discuss their experiences in terms of sacrifice. This is especially true for those who work during the night shift, which is mostly reserved for people who have gained the trust of the farms’ owners. Moreover, harvesting is experienced within the piece-rate masculinity framework that emphasizes efficiency and accuracy. Men talk about “finding their place” in the harvesting process, as not all of them are able to perform every task with the same efficiency and accuracy. This is also directly linked to learning new skills and knowledge about how to operate machinery that, although specific to the hop harvest, reshapes how men approach technology within the transnational labor corridors. But the cutting and packing of Christmas trees demonstrates best how risk and sacrifice permeate men’s lives and test their endurance. Harsh conditions, isolated forested areas, and the constant threat of injury from cutting and carrying heavy tress defines the month of November and part of December for the men of Zegache. Most of Zegache’s male transnational migrants I interviewed had participated in the Christmas tree industry at least once in their lives.³ The Christmas tree processing season lasts between four and six weeks, usually starting in November and extending to mid-December. During the cutting season, men work between twelve and fifteen hours a day seven days a week.⁴ In some instances, the trip to reach the spot where the trees are located takes several hours; in these hard-to-access spots, trees are hauled out by helicopters. The already difficult job of cutting trees and placing them on a conveyor belt, where they are mechanically packed, is even more difficult and dangerous, as trees can become slippery in the rainy and cold conditions. One person I interviewed, who had been working in the industry for almost ten years, told me that in 2013 a tree fell on him and broke his leg. This did not discourage him from returning in 2014. Other men from Zegache told me that they had tried cutting and packing Christmas trees but that it was too difficult and dangerous. Transnational male migrants continue to frame their masculine identity in terms of risk and sacrifice. However, the variety of occupations that they undertake while living in the United States is diverse and requires them to redefine risk and sacrifice in contexts that are different from Oaxaca’s agricultural fields and from the experiences in the Mexican military. Thus, a sense of piece-rate masculinity is created as men move through the transnational labor corridors that place them in industrialized agricultural fields, plant nurseries, hop harvesting, Christmas tree packaging, and other odd jobs. In addition, movement across these occupations allows a familiarity 68

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with technology that becomes gendered as masculine. Technology and the use of machinery, particularly driving, is reshaping masculine identities in Oaxaca.

t he plough a nd t he tr actor: dr i v ing, age, a nd m a sculinit y The oxen-pulled plough was not only a central element in agricultural labor; because it is considered a “man’s job” (see Gonzalez 2001, 136–137), it was also a symbol of the masculine peasant identity forged in Zegache in the aftermath of the Mexican Revolution. This was especially evident in the past when ploughs were targeted in familial and local disputes. However, migratory movements and joining the military have changed how animal-powered ploughs are perceived and used and thus have changed how masculinity is expressed intergenerationally through agriculture and through technology. My conversations with Teodoro Danigui exemplify how tractors are gradually replacing ploughs and how driving tractors is being gendered as male by younger generations of men. Teodoro, who used to use oxen, told me that “feeding them was a lot of work: we had to get fodder every day, give them a lot of water, and the bulls can be aggressive at times.” Now, Teodoro relies on his grandson, Miguel Zepeda (who lived in the United States and was also in the military), to drive the tractor that his son bought with remittances from the United States. Due to increased male migration, and to the fact that more children and youth are attending school instead of tending animals, providing fodder for oxen, horses, and mules (animals that are used to pull ploughs and carts) has become more burdensome; given the influx of remittances, animal power has been replaced by small trucks and tractors. This led to an increased reliance on motorized vehicles, an activity that is taken up mostly by men who have learned how to drive while in the United States or in the military. During one occasion, I accompanied Miguel and Teodoro to their agricultural fields. Miguel was driving an old Nissan pickup truck; Teodoro insisted on riding in the back of the truck while Miguel and I sat in the front cabin. I asked Miguel how he had learned to drive. He said: “I learned to drive all sorts of vehicles in the [United States]; my uncle [Teodoro’s youngest son] worked on a ranch and taught me.” As with hops and Christmas tree workers, being able to operate motorized vehicles and other types of machinery becomes a central element for male transnational migrants. These new abilities and knowledge also help to frame Zegacheños’ Indige69

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nous masculinities as more robust in contrast to other men who might have not taken as many risks as them. Miguel added: “[In the military,] at first they wouldn’t let me drive; I didn’t have any official proof. But one day we got stuck; the guy who had the driving certificate couldn’t really drive, so I told the commander, ‘I know how to drive’; at first he didn’t want me to do it, but I convinced him. After I grabbed the wheel, we got back on the road in no time.” The occupations that male transnational migrants undertake within the transnational labor corridors channel their mobility, and driving automobiles has become gendered as a masculine activity. Matthew Gutmann (2007, 190) discusses the importance of tracing how certain practices, such as alcohol consumption in Mexico City, become “degendered” over time. In the same vein, Jason Pribilsky (2012) analyzes how the administration of money is “regendered” as male in the Ecuadorian male migrant community in New York City. Here, however, I wish to underscore how the gendering of certain activities, such as driving, is connected to generational experiences of what masculinity is and to the creation and reproduction of the different forms in which men and women become mobile and immobile. The masculine familiarity with driving is clearly related to age, as it is mostly men under forty-five who know how to drive. Most have either lived in the United States or were once enrolled in the military; this is reflected in the few men over forty-five years old who know how to drive and who have been transnational migrants or soldiers. Some of the older men who do not know how to drive continue to claim that oxen-pulled ploughs are actually better for the soil and for agricultural production. One man in his eighties said this: “The tractor pushes and presses the soil down, it doesn’t let it breathe; the plough is softer and it mixes the soil but it lets it breathe at the same time.” This sort of commentary is part of a larger critique by older men toward younger generations who are not as invested in the land as they were and who are partially blamed for the reduction in corn harvests over the decades. Knowing how to drive has not only changed the way masculinity is expressed in the agricultural field, with men driving tractors and pickup trucks instead of animal-powered ploughs and carts; it has also changed how masculinity is constructed within the home as a dynamic set of intimate relationships that are reproduced through gender and age hierarchies on the road. Take, for example, the Rodriguez family. With three sons living in the United States, Lorenzo, sixty-five, and Marta, sixty-three, had two cars parked in their garage even though neither person drives. Marta told me that one of the cars did not work because it had not been moved in a long time and “animals have eaten part of the cables.” Lorenzo and Marta used 70

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a mule-pulled cart every day to tend their fields. If they need to use the car, they had to ask one of their sons (a former migrant who does not live with them) to drive them. Lorenzo never learned to drive. He never joined the military, and he did not migrate. As he took me to see his animals, including two bulls, Lorenzo proudly told me that he had never left Zegache; he never found a reason to leave. For Lorenzo, his oxen are still central to his notion of masculinity, a notion that is being displaced by younger men who drive. I previously analyzed Miguel Zepeda’s migration trajectory. In contrast to other men from Zegache, Miguel first migrated to the United States, returned to Oaxaca, and then joined the military. As part of this analysis, I claim that it is not the act of migration itself that allows men to claim a proper masculine identity (see D. Cohen 2006); instead it is how migration is constructed in terms of risk and sacrifice. In the case of Miguel, who migrated to the United States as a semidocumented migrant (using a tourist visa), joining the military was an important component in the social validation of his masculinity in the context of his family. In addition, driving and being able to manipulate machinery such as tractors has helped him cement his masculine identity, in contrast to older men from Zegache such as Lorenzo Rodríguez and Teodoro Danigui, Miguel’s grandfather. As migration trajectories change, and as more male teenagers are able to attend college, notions of masculinity in Zegache are changing; driving has become an important way in which young men are able to establish a masculine identity within their homes and community.⁵ Alberto Vázquez was eighteen years old in 2014. His grandfather, one of the valientes, had recently passed away. Alberto’s father and two uncles were in the military and later migrated to the United States. His father returned to Oaxaca, but Alberto’s uncles remain in the United States. Alberto attends college in Oaxaca City, commuting every day by bus. He listens to American and British pop music and plays in a rock band. I list these facts to establish how Alberto attempts to move away from notions of masculinity that men from his grandfather’s generation (such as Teodoro or Lorenzo) embraced and the masculinity embraced by his father and two uncles. Alberto, like Miguel, has also found driving to be a way to claim his masculinity. He is in charge of driving his mother and grandmother to the nearby regional market when his father is not around. If it were not for Alberto, both his mother and grandmother would have to take the bus, leaving their car parked at home. In this sense, Alberto continues to espouse the male control and supervision of women’s movement (see Stephen 2002b, 47). Driving has become a gendered activity directly connected to recent reconfigurations of masculinity in Zegache. The gradual substitution of animal traction by motorized vehicles does not originate from preexisting no71

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tions of masculinity but from a larger socioeconomic context that includes the participation of men from Zegache in the military and in transnational migration. Nevertheless, the gradual replacement of ploughs by tractors shows that generational and life experiences shape the ways in which masculinity is expressed, in this case through the gendering of driving motorized vehicles. In addition, the gendering of driving is related to the kinship and care structures and to the actual infrastructures that have limited women’s movement.

conclusion In this chapter, I build on the idea of labor corridors to highlight how transnational migration appears as a continuation of the risk and sacrifice that men from Zegache experienced working in agriculture and in the Mexican military. Many of the skills that men obtain while they are soldiers are useful in the United States: as they participate in industrial agriculture, they also deepen the relationship between their masculine identities and technology. Additionally, the masculine identities of the men of Zegache are robust and productive, and Zegacheños are able to reframe new experiences in terms of a masculine identity that is still cemented in a male peasant identity. Thus, for example, joining the army is not seen as a total departure from protecting the land and the family; neither is crossing the Mexico-US border perceived as a failure of their role as men. This does not mean that men from Zegache do not experience oppression in the military or in the United States; it means that men from Zegache have ample resources to interpret and address the changing circumstances they face in the labor corridors. This becomes clearer in chapter 5, where I look at how men have transformed cooking and have incorporated it into their manly repertoire.

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chapter 5

The Masculine Familiarity of Work; or, How Cooking Became Masculine

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iguel zepeda l e a r ned how to cook w hil e he was serving in the Mexican army. He returned to Zegache in 2014 but did not cook for at least two years. Before joining the military, Miguel lived in California for three years with his maternal uncle. When Miguel arrived in California, he noticed that his uncle was not himself. Miguel had an explanation: “My uncle was suffering from depression, and I quickly understood the reason: we weren’t eating in a very healthy way. We would just heat things up in the microwave and eat them. No wonder he was depressed! We quickly found a solution. My mom, who was living in a different part of California, would come over on the weekends, and she’d prepare meals for an entire week.” Miguel and his uncle would often finish the food before the week ended. Instead of learning to cook, Miguel and his uncle decided to ask Miguel’s mom (and his uncle’s sister) to move in with them. In this chapter, as another example of how internal and transnational migrations transform ideas about gender, I analyze how cooking became a manly activity in Zegache. I build on chapters 3 and 4 and contend that men’s migration trajectories, both within Mexico and outside Mexico, have created a distinction between cooking as work and cooking as care. In other words, men who cook are seen as workers, and their cooking is seen as directly connected to their mobility within the labor corridors that connect Mexico and the United States, whereas women’s cooking is situated within the domestic realm and connected only to the family.

cook ing in t he milita ry Miguel is not the only man from the community who has received training as a cook during military service. In fact, I met several men who 73

were accustomed to cooking for large crowds. Some, like Miguel, cooked for fellow soldiers while walking for several days across mountains looking for marijuana and opium plantations. Others cooked in large kitchens for hundreds of soldiers, sometimes cooking all three daily meals. In a way similar to driving (see chapter 4), learning to cook changes the outlook that men have in relation to the type of work they do, although this varies from person to person. For example, when I asked Arnulfo Durante if he found his job preparing hamburgers difficult, he told me, as he flipped a hamburger in a restaurant in a suburb of Seattle: “I used to cook food for 200, 300 people [soldiers]. Can you imagine? So, no, this isn’t too hard.” Arnulfo and Miguel’s connection to cooking is not through the act of cooking for a family, an activity that is still associated with women, but through the construction of cooking as a job that requires special knowledge acquired through internal and transnational migrations. In this sense, cooking in the military and in the United States informs new notions of masculinity that, like piece-rate masculinity described in chapter 4, reward efficiency, fast movements, and endurance. In other words, industrial/nondomestic cooking is considered a manly activity precisely because it is directly linked to masculine experiences of sacrifice and risk that men encounter in the transnational labor corridors. To explain how cooking (and other activities) become masculine I use the phrase “masculine familiarity of work” to convey three interrelated meanings of the word “familiarity.” First, I employ the concept of masculine familiarity of work following philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s “family resemblance” analogy. Whereas femininity centers on ideas of suffering and “being present,” masculinity is often constructed around the idea of risk and sacrifice associated with work. Wittgenstein proposes that, instead of looking for definitions based on necessary and sufficient conditions, or on an essential core that connects all the uses of a particular word, we look at how the word is used; when we do so, he says, we will find “a complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing” (Wittgenstein 1953, ¶66). In Zegache, the relationship between masculinity and work can be observed along the lines of a “family resemblance” (Wittgenstein 1953, ¶67), and even if the meaning of work has changed in the past century, the relationship between masculinity and work remains strong, connecting occupations that would otherwise seem to be incompatible. For example, occupations as diverse as being a soldier and cooking hamburgers are connected not because they necessarily have things in common but rather because they are part of a loosely defined family of activities that involve risk and sacrifice, particularly in relation to internal and trans74

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national migrations. As men redefine what counts as manly, they are also able to occupy positions of subordination that include activities traditionally construed as “feminine” without losing their sense of masculinity, even as more women are incorporated into the workforce in Mexico and in the United States. Second, “masculine familiarity of work” emphasizes how masculinity is constructed and formed within specific families. That is to say, contrary to other perspectives on masculinity that propose that masculinity is constructed vis-à-vis the state (or capitalism), I contend that masculinity is constructed within the home and in relation to other men and women who are part of a family (see, e.g., Gutmann 2007). This is related to the occupations that men (as sons and husbands especially) might undertake. These occupations are taken up, in many cases, not only because of pressures to become the breadwinner but also because it grants men social legitimation expressed in their ability to discuss matters such as agriculture, life in the military, and transnational migration with male relatives and other men from their community. The concept of breadwinning remains present, but it is only one of many elements that shape masculinity and not always the most determinant. By decentering the idea of breadwinner in the construction of masculinity, men are able to maintain their masculinity while simultaneously limiting the role of women through the creation of masculinities that are more encompassing (see Bridges and Pascoe 2014 for the concept of “hybrid masculinity”). Third, the fact that men from the same family have similar occupations also grant men certain familiarity with work. In this sense, familiarity is defined as a “thorough knowledge or mastery of a thing” that grants men social legitimation within families and communities. Such knowledge or mastery can also become a point of contention between different forms of masculinity. Nevertheless, both senses of familiarity described here work in tandem, redefining what “men being manly” means.

differ ent for ms of cook ing Although cooking is usually feminized in Zegache, migration and military training have allowed men to appropriate some forms of cooking and to inscribe cooking as part of their own masculine identities. But as the example of Miguel and his mother shows, gender still shapes how and why men and women engage in cooking. Thus, Miguel did not learn to cook through his mother, though he could have. He learned to cook in the military. In this sense, cooking is incorporated into men’s repertoires of knowl75

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edge not through women teaching men how to cook but through the experience of men teaching other men how to cook while in the military. As Miguel’s example suggests, knowing how to cook does not necessarily mean actually cooking. The expansion of the masculine repertoire of knowledge does not necessarily mean doing it; it only means reclassifying and reframing “womanly” activities as manly. Thus, men’s participation in jobs that involve cooking is not necessarily connected to the activity of cooking for the intimate relationships that constitute home life. In other words, although men in Zegache can definitely cook, cooking traditional dishes in Zegache is still an arena dominated by women, with the exception of barbacoa and carne de adobada, which are prepared by male specialists for festive occasions. This can be analyzed from two interrelated angles. First, men’s cooking skills are acquired to satisfy a different public. In a small cafeteria in Zegache, Felix Labrador sells sandwiches and other dishes that are not specific to Oaxaca but nevertheless are popular throughout Mexico (e.g., burritos, stuffed peppers). Felix is not from Oaxaca but has lived in Zegache since 2011, and he is married to a woman from Zegache he met in Nevada, where both were undocumented migrants. When I asked him if he ever cooked Oaxacan food, he told me: “People here are muy exigente [too demanding] with Oaxacan dishes. Besides, women jealously guard their recipes.” Thus, even if Felix has professional and international experience cooking Mexican and Italian food, his cooking abilities are not considered culturally appropriate when it comes to preparing Oaxacan food. People from Zegache celebrate his small cafeteria when they want to taste “something different,” meaning non-Oaxacan food. Second, it can also be true that preparing traditional Oaxacan dishes has been protected by women not so much to guard their recipes but to guard the social positions related to cooking, to help out other women, and to maintain access to social interactions that are considered part of the “women’s domain” (Stephen 2005, 260–262). This division becomes obvious during special occasions when men are responsible for killing and cleaning (i.e., removing feathers) chickens and turkeys that are part of the feast, while women prepare the mole and the tortillas. During one of these celebrations, a man told me that “we [men] better do a good job in cleaning these turkeys or the women might get upset.” These examples demonstrate how women are active agents in constructing the boundaries between what men can and cannot do regarding cooking and thereby play an important role in constructing the relationship between masculinity, femininity, and cooking in Zegache. Nevertheless, it is undeniable that the gendering of cooking is changing in the community. More men from Zegache have learned to cook, but 76

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this has not necessarily changed gender dynamics as to who cooks at home, since men seldom do. Thus, men who cook can still reclaim a connection between cooking and their masculine identities because cooking is reframed as a manly experience learned and practiced within the contexts of risk and sacrifice and is not related to only practices of care. As a woman in Zegache told me: “Sure, they learn how to cook cuando salen [when they leave Zegache], but once they come back here they seem to forget everything.” The woman who said this to me works full-time in a pharmacy, yet she still needs to prepare food for her husband and children. This highlights the fact that even if more men know how to cook and more women work outside the home it is still the responsibility of women to cook or to go out to buy food when they decide not to cook. In the same way, and despite the intimate and intricate relationship between men and animals (expressed in the oxen-powered ploughs, in the preparation of barbacoa and carne de adobada, and in their role of preparing animals for special occasions), it is still mostly women who provide the fodder and feed these animals. In fact, the phenomenon of men cooking is part of changing notions of masculinity that incorporate certain elements typically associated with women in Zegache without necessarily challenging gendered relations. In the same way, food and masculinity are also used to exclude certain people. For example, the relationship between alcohol, identity, and masculinity clearly appears when Catholic men talk about people from other religions who do not consume alcoholic beverages. Numerous scholars have documented the connection between alcohol distribution, consumption, and Indigenous religious celebrations (e.g., Greenberg 1981; Perez 2000; Stephen 2005). This analysis also applies in the case of Zegache, where looking at alcohol consumption as another vector through which masculinity is constructed can shed light on how other forms of gender expressions are being informed by religious practices. The changing dynamics of masculinity, religion, and alcohol consumption were present during certain periods of my ethnographic research when a man, beloved in the community and with an important political position, whom I will simply call “Baltazar,”¹ professed a non-Catholic religion and was rumored to be gay. Baltazar was born outside Zegache to a Zapotec father from another region of Oaxaca and a Zapotec mother from Zegache. Unlike other young people, Baltazar was fluent in Zapotec and well-versed in local customs. For example, during a religious festivity, Baltazar not only showcased his knowledge of Zegache’s history and traditions but also demonstrated extensive knowledge about regional cultural differences by discussing with me regional variations in language, religious beliefs, and traditional dishes. That 77

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day, and on numerous other occasions, Baltazar exhibited his vast knowledge about global current affairs. Since Zegache switched from the usos y costumbres regime to the party-based regime, people usually point out how local government officials know little about local traditions and customs and are elected merely because they have education and they know how to speak formal Spanish. Baltazar, however, seemed to have it all: formal education and extensive knowledge about Zegache. Still, the rumors about Baltazar not “being a man” were widespread. These rumors were based on the reading of Baltazar’s body language as “feminized” and on the fact that he was not married or coupled. As one acquaintance put it: “He doesn’t know the body of a woman.” They were also based on the fact that Baltazar did not drink and therefore “doesn’t smell like a man” (no huele a hombre), implying the close relationship between masculinity and alcohol, as one “smells like a man” only after a shot of mezcal or a beer. Under such expectations, men who do not drink cannot smell like a man. Masculinity therefore appears to be changing through the incorporation of activities, such as cooking, that are associated with other activities previously considered part of the masculine repertoire. At the same time, received notions of masculinity are used to establish who counts as a man and who does not. Composite forms of masculinity can incorporate elements previously associated with femininity, including cooking, yet this does not necessarily mean that men are concerned with issues of gender equality or that they are more accepting of alternative masculinities. While masculine gender roles have expanded and demonstrated more malleability than in the past, they continue to be exclusionary identities based on concepts of sacrifice, risk, and men’s familiarity with work. This apparent contradiction of changing but remaining the same highlights two important aspects of studying masculinity. First, analyzing masculinity must incorporate an intergenerational approach that allows us to see how men from different generations validate their masculinity among themselves. Second, it shows how masculinity is part of a system of gender relations in which men and women participate. Ideas about masculinity have been reshaped by the migration of both genders. Migration experiences in the community are constantly redefining what counts as masculine, even if the experiences of migrant men and women change through time.

conclusion Throughout this chapter, I highlight the fact that masculinity can change and incorporate new elements and also that changes in ideas about 78

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masculinity necessarily impact ideas about women and femininity. Changes in masculinity and femininity happen as part of a system, and a change in one provokes change in the other, though not always in harmonious ways. Men from Zegache are continually redefining—expanding and restricting—what counts as manly based on narratives that emphasize risk and sacrifice. Zegacheños incorporate new activities such as cooking into their repertoire of masculine occupations because such activities are conceptualized as part of their own trajectories of risk and sacrifice, which are necessary to traverse the transnational labor corridors that connect the agricultural fields of Oaxaca to the Mexican army and to commercial kitchens and industrialized agricultural fields in the United States. Yet, as shown throughout the book, masculinity is always changing: internal and transnational migrations are two of the factors influencing such changes, but other factors include new religious practices as well. Although notions of femininity change alongside notions of masculinity, they can be harder to notice in the short term. Transformations in femininity are often linked to changes in the ways in which women are policed, by both men and women, and by the ways in which the notion of the “community” defines what counts as “proper femininity.” It is true that the community also defines what counts as proper masculinity, but men are not policed in the same way as women. This is, in part, because men are seen as intrinsically mobile, whereas women are linked to specific spaces within the community and the home, as I will discuss in chapter 6. Therefore, men from Zegache learned how to cook as they migrated internally and transnationally. They have incorporated cooking into the masculine repertoire because it is connected to the risk and sacrifice they undergo as they look for work in the military and in the United States. “Manly cooking” is produced in a specific way to allow men to participate in jobs that involve cooking while still maintaining clearly gendered activities. In this sense, men develop a familiarity of work that creates connections between agriculture, soldiering, and cooking not through the “content” but rather because these activities become related as a result of men’s mobility as they traverse the Mexico-US labor corridors. Part of the process of renegotiating and redefining gender identities in a migrant, translocal community includes making sense of how mobility has rearticulated practices in new ways, effectively regendering them.

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chapter 6

Migration and Femininity be yon d t h e t u t e l ag e of t h e mo t h e r s - i n- l aw

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ccor ding to or a l histor ies, m a k ing tort il l a s is an activity where the nueras (daughters-in-law) and suegras (mothers-in-law) often see conflict. Many women narrate how daughtersin-law can be ridiculed in public if their tortillas were not round enough or big enough, as mothers-in-law would display odd-shaped tortillas out on the church’s patio. Moreover, if the nueras’ performance during the tortilla preparation was seen as deficient, the suegras would burn their nueras’ hands directly on the hot cooking surface, the comal.¹ Making tortillas, as an intergenerational practice in local society, and as an example of the tutelaje de las suegras (tutelage of the mothers-in-law), reflects how hierarchical relationships work among women. It also shows that gender and kinship relationships are often negotiated and disputed in spaces that are deemed feminine, where some women shape other women’s femininity. However, this relationship does not take place solely between mothers-in-law and daughters-in-law; men become involved, especially sons/husbands (see Pauli 2008). The complex relationship among mothers-in-law, daughters-in-law, and sons/husbands is one of the main mechanisms through which women and men negotiate gender identities, expectations, and gendered responsibilities. This relationship, as a triad, is central to understanding changes in the “structure of feeling” (e.g., Williams 1977) and, more specifically, in the “sentimental regimes” (see Besserer 2009, 2015) that create shifts in how femininity is policed by both men and women. The relationship between gender and internal and transnational migration has influenced not only who gets to go where but also how certain spaces and movements are gendered within Zegache and the region. For men, movement is seen as inherently productive and familial, but for women movement often brings about new sets of constraints. Thus, even when women become 80

mobile, their mobility has to follow certain temporal and spatial constraints. These temporal and spatial constraints on mobility show that women often face dilemmas that go beyond whether they should migrate or not, or whether they should return or not. These dilemmas around women’s mobility are deeply rooted in two interconnected factors: the idea of womanly suffering, and the surveillance of femininity. Yet, both of these factors are being constantly modified by migration histories of both men and women (see Haenn 2020). In Zegache, like in other parts of Mexico and Latin America, women’s roles are more closely associated with what has been defined as the “domestic sphere,” while men’s roles are seen as part of the “public sphere.” However, this dichotomy blurs how the distinction between “domestic” and “public” spheres is created as it ignores the dynamics that, based on ideas of proper femininity, pressure women into assuming roles as care providers while also policing other women’s mobility, both within and outside Zegache. In this chapter, I look at how migration and women’s mobility have reproduced and challenged care responsibilities in the Zegache multi-sited community. Building on the arguments presented in previous chapters, here I present the specific case of how some relationships among women have changed in Zegache because of migration.² To do this, I start by analyzing the role of mothers-in-law in Zegache. Following Julia Pauli (2008, 173–174), I contend that the tutelaje de las suegras is mostly a conflict over the demarcation and definition of domestic space as the space of proper femininity. Nevertheless, migration and other forms of mobility produce changes in how women are perceived within the community. Thus, women who have been or who are mobile (either through migration or through commuting to nearby urban centers) can produce “emergent” trends in the structure of feeling of Zegache. These “emergent” trends can open up spaces within the community that lead to new forms of relationships while they can also be absorbed by the existing discourses about femininity. Such conflicting forces effectively transform how proper femininity is surveilled, modifying ideas about mobility, space, and gender. The examples used here show that “[f]emale agency is not shaped solely by the male partner’s interests, support, or nonsupport [. . .] is negotiated in a much wider context than between individual men and women only” (Pauli 2008, 172).

t u tel aje de l a s suegr a s : how t he “domest ic spher e” is m a de In Zegache, women are expected to cook most of the time, for intimate family meals, special celebrations, and for jornaleros (hired day la81

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borers) who work in the family agricultural plot. Women are also expected to perform other activities related to the house, such as cleaning and taking care of infants. By contrast, men, because of their mobility, are seen as more capable of taking risks and making sacrifices to provide for the family, which typically involves men’s participation in agricultural production, construction, joining the military or the police, and different occupations as transnational migrants. It is interesting to point out that although women are also heavily involved in agricultural labor, they will often only identify themselves as “helpers”³ while men will actively identify as “peasants,” or campesinos. Thus, while women’s role as care providers reduces their mobility, men’s mobility is facilitated and encouraged, seen as connected to work. As is the case in other communities of Mexico, male migration has resulted in an increase of female household heads, at least as de facto household heads (e.g., Preibisch et al. 2002). In other words, although men who are absent from the community might still be perceived as household heads, their authority and decision-making power can be tenuous and mediated through women. This should not be mistaken with an idea of women’s empowerment since local customs of patrilocality and patrilineality are at play, significantly shaping decision-making processes. In Zegache, usually men inherit the family land, including agricultural plots and urban parcels, while women do not frequently inherit land from their parents. This leads to a patrilocal residence pattern as women, once they are married, move to the land inherited by their husbands, which is usually located within or next to the property of their husband’s parents and brothers. Thus, when men migrate, their wives are often heavily supervised by their mothers-in-law, leading to the tutelaje de la suegras. The tutelage of the mothers-in-law merits special attention, as it shows how kinship roles are gendered and how femininity is policed. It also shows how changing notions of masculinity and femininity disrupt patriarchal forms of dominance. The word “tutelage” derives its meaning from the Latin tutēla and is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “the condition of being under protection or guardianship.”⁴ According to the Royal Academy of the Spanish Language, such protection and guardianship often implies taking care of those who “do not possess total civil capacity.” In this sense, the tutelaje de las suegras can be defined as a responsibility bestowed on the mother-in-law, reinforced by gender and kinship roles, to act as both protector of the family and guardian of a newlywed woman who does not yet possess the knowledge of an experienced wife and mother. It follows that mothers-in-law are seen as having the capacity to police and chastise daughters-in-law if they (the elder women) believe they (the younger women) are not behaving in a properly feminine way. When daughters-in82

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law move in with their in-laws, following traditional patrilocal residence patterns, they also assume responsibilities within the home. This means that they are responsible for cleaning, cooking, and child-rearing activities that redefine femininity in terms of domesticity, linking the space of the home with the mobility of women. In some instances, studies analyzing the relationship between migration and gender roles attempt to provide a balance of women’s gains and losses in terms of autonomy. For example, Goldring (2001, 507) contends that, within communities of Mexican immigrants in the United States, men “tend to be more interested in returning to Mexico” compared to women. For Goldring, this discrepancy is explained because men lose authority in the family processes and control over the household as they lose status (see also Boehm 2012, 75–78; Pessar 2003, 29), while women experience “a relative gain in status in the United States” (Goldring 2001, 507). This also rings true in Zegache, but any analysis has to consider the role of the mothers-in-law in negotiating gendered performances within households in Mexico as well. In this sense, the analysis of gender roles must be based on an understanding that conceptualizes women (and men) as negotiating and constructing their gendered identities within complex kinship and care networks through multipronged relationships that take place in different spaces and across multiple generations. Social and technological changes have transformed how mothers-in-law police their daughters-in-law, yet the tutelaje continues to emphasize the importance of women’s domesticity and their responsibility to “be present.” Homemade tortillas have been displaced by products bought from tortillerías (places where tortillas are produced mechanically), and buying tortillas has become a more acceptable practice, thereby transforming the relationship between suegras and nueras. Moreover, the absence of migrant sons/ husbands in the house has modified the position of mothers-in-law in relation to daughters-in-law, as reporting “unfeminine” or “suspect” behavior can become controversial if it is not enforced by the son/husband. A strict mother-in-law will often report to her migrant son the comings and goings of his wife, yet this sort of behavior requires the support of the son/husband in order to be fully effective. These multipronged relationships create dilemmas of care that often go beyond the parties involved (Pauli 2008, 177, refers to this relationship as a “triad”). For example, a woman who works in Oaxaca City told me: “My motherin-law calls my husband [in California] and tells him that I have been gone all day, but my husband knows that I have to work, so he doesn’t say anything to me. I mean, I still make sure that my children have all of their meals.” In this case, the migrant son has to carefully consider how enforcing 83

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the tutelaje will be perceived not only by his wife but also by his children. As women enter the labor market in different capacities, the space of proper femininity is redefined and expanded, and yet it continues to be anchored in care responsibilities specifically in relation to providing care through childrearing. These transformations also modify the mother-in-law/daughter-in law relationship, as the structural position of the elder woman is increasingly being displaced from a surveillance role to a caretaker role in Zegache, as she can provide child care when the daughter-in-law is working (the suegra becomes an abuelita, or “grandmother”). In the context of migrant daughters-in-law, the structural position of the mother-in-law is mostly irrelevant to the day-to-day activities due to the almost inexistent ability to police the activities of the daughter-in-law, but it can become relevant, for instance, if the mother-in-law requests special financial help from her son or asks him to return to Zegache. The perceived domesticity of proper femininity is not exclusively enforced by in-laws, but it is present through the care responsibilities that women have within their families, especially as daughters. Women’s mobility has been significantly tied to the possibility of returning home, whether temporarily or permanently, to provide care on relatively short notice while having the option of quickly, and perhaps cheaply, returning to their urban jobs if needed, especially given the availability of female-type jobs that, even if underpaid and undervalued, are constantly in demand (Arizpe 1977; Sassen 2003). For such reasons, families tend to be less opposed to allowing young single women to migrate by themselves to Mexico City (or to other nearby urban centers) even while they would vehemently oppose single women migrating transnationally. Zegache’s migration history shows a diverse set of interlocking relationships that produce differentiated mobilities and immobility. Gender, and the care and kinship responsibilities of women, are central aspects of these interlocking relationships in the context of migration. Women in Zegache have been part of several migratory movements, both as independent and as associational migrants.⁵ Yet, the impact of migration on gender roles, and on women’s lives, is not limited to the whether or not they have migrated.

t he ch a nging tr i a d: migr at ion a nd tr a nsfor m at ions in t he globa l household The changing relationships among mothers-in-law, daughters-inlaw, and sons/husbands are related to sociohistorical contexts that include internal and transnational migrations, changes in transportation infrastruc84

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ture, and an increasing number of women entering the workforce. Because of the prevalent patrilocal residence patterns, the tutelage of the mothers-inlaw continues to reinforce gender roles by policing the femininity of younger women as daughters-in-law. Different forms of migration challenge and reinforce patriarchal definitions of “femininity” and “masculinity.” Although female internal migrants pose the most significant challenges to Zegache’s gender roles, other forms of migration have changed the surveillance of femininity and how the structure of feelings occasionally transforms the effectiveness of the tutelage of the mothers-in-law. Since most men work outside Zegache (in Oaxaca City, in the military, or in the United States), married and coupled women often spend more time with their mothers-in-law than with their own husbands. Numerous women complained about how mothers-in-law report their activities and whereabouts to their husbands. Nevertheless, as more women are able to enter the formal and informal labor forces, Zegache families are now in a predicament. On one hand, not complying with proper femininity can have negative consequences, such as harsh judgments of single women who are internal migrants and spend large periods outside their community, or daughters-in-law who spend their husband’s remittances on themselves instead of on house construction. Such occurrences serve to reinforce patriarchal gender roles and to preserve the tutelage of mothers-in-law. On the other hand, however, financial necessities and job opportunities have motivated young women (married and unmarried) to become economic contributors to the household and to push for a stronger decision-making role in how household resources are allocated. Even if daily commuting to Oaxaca City to work or study does not break the social surveillance that women experience, it does present an opportunity in which emotional relationships can shift the fields of vision of women and men. Aurora Carreón is part of a local women’s baking cooperative; her husband lives in the United States, and she lives with her mother-in-law. As a member of the cooperative, she often has to travel to nearby regional markets in Oaxaca City and Ocotlán to acquire flour and other ingredients needed in the shop. She usually uses the morning (when her two sons are at school) to buy supplies. Aurora told me: “At the beginning I wasn’t too sure I wanted to participate, but some friends told me to attend the co-op’s meetings to see if I liked it. I did like it, so I spoke with my husband [who lives in California], and he told me: ‘Look, if you really want to do it, go for it.’ So I did!” Aurora also told me that her husband had spoken to her about his mother’s calls: “He tells me that his mom calls him saying that I was out, or that I returned late, stuff like that, but he replies: ‘Did she prepare food? Did the kids do their homework? What’s the problem?’ And then 85

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he just changes the subject.” Even though femininity is still tied to activities of care and caring centered on the house, Aurora’s mother-in-law has modified her own reporting activities because of her own son’s differing views on how Aurora should behave. Nevertheless, the quarrels among mothers-in-law, daughters-in-law, and sons/husbands can sometimes result in confrontations that are violent, episodes that end up modifying concepts of femininity and creating spaces out of opposing positions. Such is the case of Jimena Limón, Maura Bermudez (her mother-in-law), and other members of their household. Prior to migrating to the United States, Jimena had been a domestic employee and a nanny in Mexico City, and she returned to Zegache as a single mother. Jimena and her husband, Roberto Vázquez, met in Oregon, and they had a daughter together, Noemi, in Portland. Jimena and Noemi returned to Zegache before Roberto. They lived next to Maura’s (Roberto’s mother) house, and Maura would often be aware of the comings and goings of Jimena. Maura did not live alone; she shared her house with Roberto’s brother, Fabian, and his wife, Lourdes Salazar. Lourdes is not from Zegache but from Querétaro, in central Mexico, and she was not accustomed to the daughter-in-law/mother-inlaw relationship that exists in Zegache. That being said, Jimena was already critical of such a relationship after her own transborder experiences in Mexico City and in the United States. It did not take long for Jimena and Maura to have a strong disagreement that shaped the entire family’s relationships. What happened is still up for debate. According to Maura, it was the lack of caregiving from Jimena to Noemi that triggered the conflict: When Jimena returned [from the United States, before Roberto returned], she would leave the house for long periods, and Noemi would cry and cry, and I didn’t even know where Jimena was. So, I would ask her [Jimena] about it, and she would get upset and ignore me. Around that time, she realized that she had a leak on her roof, so I told her that she could move in with us, but she replied: “No, I won’t be anybody’s maid.” Which I thought . . . was odd since I had another daughter-in-law and we each took care of our respective families.

Jimena agrees with Maura on some points but with a different narrative: “They weren’t very nice to me, and they were always trying to control me. I have never liked that, and I didn’t want to spend all day in the house. They’ve just never liked me, and they even locked me out of my own house when I returned by myself to Zegache [after Jimena returned to Zegache in 2013, after being detained while trying to cross the Mexico-US border].” 86

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Without addressing the question of who is right and who is wrong, it is safe to say that Jimena openly defied the tutelage of the mother-in-law, which eventually caused Roberto to distance himself from his mother and brother. This, however, also set a precedent for Maura’s relationship with her other daughter-in-law, Lourdes, who moved to Zegache from Querétaro, had never been to Oaxaca before, and formerly worked in a factory in her hometown. Perhaps because Lourdes lacked other social relationships in Zegache, she sided with Maura and criticized Jimena’s motherly caregiving. Lourdes said: I remember how Jimena cared more for her two daughters [and not for her son, who was born when she was single; Jimena’s other daughter was born in 2013]. She has three children but only cares about two? I don’t think this sets a good example. She often mistreated her son. She even made him carry a water jug [of twenty liters] when he was ten years old. Can you imagine? I would never do that do a ten-year-old boy. And then, when she left to the United States, she didn’t take him.

This conflict did not reach a concrete resolution, as Roberto and Jimena left Zegache in 2014 without informing Roberto’s family. This example shows how conflicts about femininity, even when unresolved, open spaces where gender roles are challenged in emotionally charged relationships. The quarrel between Maura and Jimena had wider implications, as it also modified how other women and men in the family thought about gender roles. It is true that Lourdes sided with Maura and reinforced the close relationship between motherhood and femininity that situates women near their children. But Lourdes herself also experienced more freedom from Maura, as she continually attended different town meetings (usually associated with political parties). Lourdes’s mobility is also linked to Fabian Vázquez (her husband) and to their relationship. Lourdes and Fabian met in Querétaro, where Lourdes was Fabian’s supervisor, so in part Lourdes’s mobility can be explained by different experiences of gender roles outside Zegache. Moreover, Fabian’s salary working for a nearby logging company situates him and Lourdes in a better position, as they share the same house and some of the same expenses as Maura. Lourdes’s relative freedom, then, is produced in the context of gender relationships and gender experiences of both women and men that are simultaneously strategic and emotional. These last two examples demonstrate the centrality of the relationship among mothers-in-law, daughters-in-law, and sons/husbands. However, it is important not to rush to the conclusion that oppression of daughters-in-law 87

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is tied exclusively to the mothers-in-law. This, Steve Stern (1995, 301) contends, simplifies how women participate in the oppression of other women instead of looking at women’s stances toward gender subordination as “a complex dialectic of practical complicity and practical resistance.” Instead of assuming that change comes only through the migration of men who confront their mothers, we should consider mothers-in-law as complex people who engage in an interplay of assent and struggle within Zegache’s gendered order. Mothers-in-law also engender change within the structures of feeling. In addition, and building on Julia Pauli’s (2008) work, we should consider how daughters-in-law seek new ways to assert independence from mothersin-law and from their husband’s family. In the case of Pueblo Nuevo, presented by Pauli, women are able to do this through home construction, but this is not the case in Zegache. Nevertheless, there are other avenues through which women continue to seek their independence, even if the results are mixed. One of these is daily commuting. Unlike transnational migration, daily commuting between rural and urban Mexico has not been the subject of extensive research. Historically, scholars dealing with the relationship between rural and urban Mexico have concentrated on urban enclaves of Indigenous and rural migrants (e.g., Castellanos 2010; Hirabayashi 1993; Mora Vázquez 1996; VanWey, Tucker, and Diaz McConnell 2005). In recent years, however, social scientists have redefined “mobility” to include daily movements and commuting (e.g., Andrews and Shahrokni 2014; Cohen and Sirkeci 2011; Sheller 2014). These approaches help to situate the ways in which the demand for labor and the construction of roads reconfigure regional dynamics. Before the 1980s, migrant men and women from Zegache would be more acquainted with Mexico City than with Oaxaca City, as their migration routes often took them from Zegache to Oaxaca City’s train station and then directly to Mexico City. Most women older than forty told me they had only a few years of formal education. There was not an escuela secundaria (junior high school) in Zegache, and they had to walk or ride bicycles to Ocotlán or Zimatlán using dirt roads that were challenging to traverse during the rainy season and at night. Back then, commuting to Oaxaca City was not an option, and women who worked in Oaxaca City had to move there permanently. This also meant that most women did not attend school beyond the elementary level, while some men received additional formal education through service in the military. The history of road construction is part of ongoing national, regional, and local phenomena. For purposes of this section, it suffices to say that the road connecting Zegache to the Zimatlán–Oaxaca City highway resulted from a combination of factors, including the restoration of the church by 88

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a well-known Oaxacan painter, increased male participation in the military, and the initiative by local entrepreneurs to begin a local bus service. The construction of the narrow, two-lane road, as well as the opportunity to work and study in Oaxaca City while living in Zegache, solidified regional dynamics; it continued to blur the rural-urban divide. The current ease of travel between Zegache and Oaxaca City has resulted in increasing formal education for both men and women, and many Zegacheñas have obtained bachelor’s degrees from Oaxacan universities. It has also resulted in an increased flow of people who commute for work. This is especially true for women, who are often part of Oaxaca City’s service sector, employed in bakeries, clothing stores, internet cafes, and hotels. The ease of travel has changed daily routines and increased spatial mobility for women, yet this has not necessarily meant a change in gender roles. In fact, the participation of women in the urban workforce and in higher education while remaining in Zegache often implies that they have to continue with gendered obligations at home. For example, Cesarea Velazquez, a dentist, studied in Oaxaca City and works in Zegache. Due to a lack of clients, she learned how to style hair. Cesarea runs a small dental clinic/hair salon, but her main responsibility is to her children, as the family income is provided mostly by her husband’s grocery store. Daily commuting has given women in Zegache the opportunity to develop outside their hometown, to build new social networks, and to acquire technical skills and knowledge to pursue personal and professional interests. Yet, as Cesarea’s case shows, their careers are frequently put on hold because it is the husband who is seen as having the responsibility to provide for the family (even if he has less formal education) and because their work is viewed as something they do in addition to being a wife and a mother. Therefore, in some cases, the construction of roads and the possibility of daily commuting can be interpreted as a “patriarchal accommodation” in the sense that it provides increased mobility for women “within” existing standards of male domination (Andrews and Shahrokni 2014, 150). This becomes even more prevalent because few women can drive themselves, and most rely on public transportation, where they continue to be surveilled by both men and women.

feminine suffer ing a nd ch a nging per ipher a l v ision Men develop a familiarity of work, based on their ease of movement, that allows them to expand beyond their occupations and to include 89

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new technologies in the redefinition of masculinity, but local discourses on femininity appear much more stable and grounded. This is because prevalent concepts of femininity are anchored in specific practices of kinship and care and in the specific ways that gendered social relationships are policed. As with local concepts of masculinity, femininity has always been in flux in Zegache. I have explored how some women migrate internally to Mexico City and engage in social relationships of care and caring that occasionally results in them becoming single mothers and returning to Zegache alone but with a new child. In many cases, women who return as single mothers, or those who do not return, are construed as “negative social remittances” (Levitt and Lamba-Nieves 2011, 19) and are used to reinforce preexisting ideas about proper femininity by setting an example for young women who are thinking about leaving Zegache. Concepts of femininity in Zegache are continually being redefined, and the role of women (especially women who are internal migrants) has contributed to this redefinition. However, the relationship between changing concepts of femininity and migration is not a straightforward process; it is influenced by other factors. Although men and women from Zegache are subject to gender expectations in multiple locations simultaneously, the ways in which these expectations change are different. This difference is based on the contrast between male sacrifice and female suffering, and it originates in how care obligations and activities are oriented. Thus, while women’s activities of care and caring are seen as having to be directed almost exclusively toward the family, men’s activities of care and caring are constructed as broader efforts that go beyond the family and directly benefit the community at large. Suffering, or “the state of undergoing pain, distress, or hardship,” appears as an individual act that does not establish links between the act of suffering and a larger community.⁶ Nevertheless, the definition of sacrifice immediately points to a larger picture, that is, “an act of giving up something valued for the sake of something else regarded as more important or worthy.” In Zegache, the distinction between female suffering and male sacrifice appears in quotidian discourses about family life, community affairs, and migration. For example, women who live in Zegache often claim they suffer when their sons or spouses migrate: “We have to stay here, and we suffer thinking about what they are going through,” said a woman whose husband and son were in the United States. Women’s suffering is not seen as productive or conducive to any benefit regarding their economic situation, but that does not seem to matter, because women are meant to provide stability and not necessarily to be productive. In contrast, the hardships that men undergo as migrants are construed as acts of sacrifice that move their families and 90

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their community forward. Even in cases of domestic violence, women have to cope (aguantarse) with physical abuse for the sake of their children and their families. In a similar vein, Leslie Gill (1997) discusses the different experiences of Aymara women who worked as domestic employees in Bolivian cities versus Aymara men who joined the Bolivian military. She contended that, while “suffering” empowers men and turns Aymara soldiers into “new citizens” upon their return, the “suffering” of Aymara women, as domestic employees, is not seen in the same light because it is not linked to the Bolivian state. In the case of Zegache, male hardships are construed as sacrifice precisely because they are linked to a broader community and not only to the family, as with female suffering. The significance of suffering in the construction of Zegache’s femininity also points to ways in which women experience a double-bind: their suffering is not seen as productive, but not suffering is seen as unfeminine. Thus, when a man migrates and leaves Zegache, women are supposed to suffer as a way to show that they remain committed to that particular relationship and to show that they still care about that particular person, whether a husband or a son. Still, suffering is largely considered unproductive. Yet, as I contend in this chapter and throughout the book, we need to understand changing concepts of femininity and women’s suffering not only through individual experiences but also through a broad set of social interactions that simultaneously enable, constrain, and challenge such concepts. In this sense, it is useful to think about Patricia Zavella’s (2011, 8–10) concept of “peripheral vision” in relation to the construction and transformation of femininity in Zegache. Zavella discusses peripheral vision as becoming “aware of when we see something in the corner of our eye.” Because we maintain a wide field of awareness, “peripheral vision occurs when an event triggers our awareness [e.g., in the corner of our eye] and we gain a new perspective about possible options or meanings.” Peripheral vision also “reflects the experience of feeling at home in more than one geographic location.” Building on the concept of peripheral vision, I propose that, instead of focusing on the subject that is doing the observing (i.e., the vector of the peripheral vision), we look at how people who are being observed are also observing. If multiple peripheral visions interlink, it means that those who are watching are also being watched. Thus, peripheral vision allows people to become aware (through the corner of their eye) of who is watching them and who is policing them and in what social context. In other words, women from Zegache, whether they are migrants or not, become aware, through their peripheral vision, that their behavior is subjected to gender expectations and that they are constantly surveilled. 91

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Gender expectations and the constant surveillance of women surface in social gatherings, in the streets, and in the taxis and buses that men drive and that women ride to Oaxaca City. Women, for example, are criticized if they take jobs and are not able to take care of their children; they can also be criticized if they do not work and their husbands have to work too much. This is not exclusive to Oaxaca and happens in the United States as well. Women are also surveilled through their children’s behaviors, and if a child is not behaving in school, or becomes involved in gang-type activity (although I did not hear reports of major gang activity related to Zegache youth), then the mother is usually to blame. Although it is true that surveillance through peripheral vision affects everyone who is part of Zegache’s multi-sited community, there is a special gender component that influences the lives of women disproportionately because their activities are seen as anchored in the reproduction of family life and because existing notions of femininity are not seen as malleable. Thus, even though women who migrate to the United States learn how to drive and engage in work outside the home, thereby acquiring “more freedom of movement” (Castañeda and Zavella 2003, 137), their activities are still centered on their children and spouses. Most of the women from Zegache who live in the United States use their newfound skills to drive their children to school, go to the grocery store, and occasionally act as designated drivers after social events. Peripheral vision can produce changes and inform negotiations about femininity and gender roles. Staying with the metaphor of peripheral vision, I would like to return to the subject that is at the center of the field of vision. This subject will often move as they “reflect on or act . . . in concert with others” who are part of her peripheral vision. Such movements, as with other transborder experiences, will also displace the field of vision and will change the subject’s perspectives about their possible life options (Stephen 2007). Thus, for example, a woman who migrates to Mexico City changes her position and her field of view, and her actions might directly come into conflict with gender expectations, but this does not necessarily mean structural changes in gender roles. However, it does open a space for gender roles to be questioned more broadly. For example, women who migrate to Mexico City are more vocal about their views on women working outside the home and are more critical about big expenses related to traditional weddings. These examples reinforce the idea that change in the structures of feeling are gradual and linked to concrete events. However, changes in gender roles and gender expectations can be produced through shifts in peripheral vision and how such vision is used to supervise and surveil gender performances. In other words, if we think about 92

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gender surveillance that reinforces gender roles as a combination of multiple peripheral visions that originate from similar positions and that undergo similar sociohistoric experiences, then we can also conceptualize how shifts in these peripheral visions allow for new social relationships to emerge. The changing relations in the mother-in-law, daughter-in-law, and son/husband triad is one clear example of how these changes transform local structures of feeling. These changes are not always clear or linear; rather, they require multiple situations to take place and might seem latent at times. As Raymond Williams suggested, the actions that lead to such changes might not always be fully articulated and occur both gradually and in response to concrete events such as migration.

conclusion Although migration plays an important role in how gender roles and expectations change, thereby transforming individual notions of femininity, migration by itself cannot transform local structures of gender and kinship. Rather, local structures of gender and migration change with the gradual shift in shared perspectives and attitudes. Raymond Williams’s “structure of feeling” concept helps to frame how individual behaviors can change gradually until they produce structural changes. This is especially noticeable intergenerationally. The processes are different for men and women. Women might be less likely to migrate, but that does not mean femininity is not changing. In the case of women, I propose that we employ Patricia Zavella’s “peripheral vision” concept to understand how minor changes in how femininity is policed, by both men and women, can eventually produce structural changes of what is expected from women. Such changes are also influenced by migration, but they occur because of the ways in which people in Zegache engage in negotiations about kinship and gender.

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Conclusion

I

n a t ime w hen tr a nsnat iona l migr at ion is at t he forefront of political debates everywhere, why does thinking about internal migration matter? In this book, I have contended that internal migration matters for a number of reasons. Primarily, it makes salient the stories and experiences of people who are often left out of migration debates because they have never become migrants per se and they do not identify as such because they have not crossed an international border. Yet, internal migrants contribute in significant ways to the social, economic, and political aspects of their communities and, in many cases, have directly helped friends and relatives become transnational migrants. Their experience crossing class, regional, and ethnic boundaries is a transforming one and provokes change in their families and communities. Thinking about the importance of the experiences of internal migrants challenges conceptual frameworks that often rely, even if implicitly, on methodological nationalism. Migration studies that recognize migration exclusively as the crossing of international borders will provide accounts with a stark divide between the pre- and postmigration lives of individuals who were already part of globalization processes that, in many cases, included internal migration. Taking seriously the experiences of internal migrants problematizes this before/after migration dichotomy by showing how numerous communities become mobile long before migrating transnationally. This can reveal how globalization processes work within a nation-state. In the case of Zegache, both men and women became mobile and migrated internally before they engaged in transnational migration. Two examples from the book stand out when discussing the importance of internal migration: women who migrate to Mexico City to work as domestic employees and nannies, and men who join the Mexican military 94

and travel throughout Mexico. The decisions to migrate to Mexico City or to enlist in the military are partly defined by economic interest, but this is not the only consideration. Women migrate to Mexico City because their care obligations to other family members force them to stay close to home in the event they are required to return to provide care. For men, joining the military is often a way to validate masculine identities within the household while simultaneously gaining skills and financial resources that will allow them to migrate to the United States or to find jobs in the private sector more easily. In both of these examples, the experiences of migrating internally change men’s and women’s perspectives and life opportunities. A framework that focuses exclusively on transnational migration would not necessarily include how internal migration influences the transnational experience. As I demonstrate throughout this book, women who migrate internally and then decide to migrate transnationally are different from women who migrate transnationally as part of a couple or within a family structure. Thus, to understand how women migrants in the United States see themselves and relate to the world, it is important to understand how previous migration trajectories have influenced their experiences and perspectives. Looking at the experiences of men, I have reached a different conclusion. The act of joining the military, as a form of internal migration, influences how men experience their time in the United States in relation to their masculinity. Men who joined the military and later migrated to the United States see their experiences crossing the border and working en el otro lado (on the other side) as a continuation of the risk and sacrifice they have experienced in Oaxaca and in the military. Men from Zegache do not necessarily become feminized when they assume subordinate positions. It might be true that men from Zegache embody some form of hegemonic masculinity within their households back in Zegache, but it is more complicated than that because (1) masculinity is constructed and evaluated intergenerationally and (2) Indigenous men from Zegache have extensive experience occupying subordinated positions in relation to the Mexican state and to other non-Indigenous Mexicans. Thus, while in the United States, they redefine their masculine identity in relation, and around, their subordinate positions, just as they did in Mexico. In the United States, this means emphasizing productivity and their connection to technology. This, of course, does not mean that transnational migration is not relevant or qualitatively different from internal migration. Crossing an international border without the required documentation poses special problems and can radically change lives. The people of Zegache know this and deal with it every day. Transnational migration transforms in important ways how families work and how the community conceptualizes kinship 95

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Conclusion

roles. This is especially apparent in the relationship between migrant fathers and their children. Not only do migrant fathers continually redefine what it means to be a father; children absorb and are influenced by the migration trajectories of their fathers. The transformations that occur within families can occasionally seem to be individual, specific, and/or idiosyncratic and thus not necessarily evidence of larger transformations. Yet, using the lens of structures of feeling allows us to see how such changes modify the conversations happening in the community in numerous ways. Focusing on these “unfinished” transformations also helps to challenge migration as simply instrumental or rational. Instead, migrations (internal and transnational) are an ongoing process that has to take into account “family cycles and individual, biographical, and national historic time” (Donato et al. 2006, 6). In this book, I have problematized what counts as migration, especially considering how some forms of mobility might be disregarded as “not migration,” leaving out important perspectives on the ways people experience and discuss different types of mobilities. The experiences and the knowledge that internal migrants bring to their communities and families are often overlooked, particularly because internal migration is difficult to classify and because recent scholarship has focused narrowly on the experience of transnational migrants. However, internal and transnational migrations are intimately connected. Not only do the experiences of internal migrants diverge and overlap on multiple levels with Zegacheños who identify as migrants and those who have crossed the Mexico-US border; in addition, most households and families simultaneously count internal and transnational migrants among their members. I have contended that to better understand migrant communities we need to question narratives about migration and about how some forms of mobility are classified as migration while others are not. Expanding what counts as migration implies a critical dialogue in the field, disentangling local narratives of “migrants” and “nonmigrants.” It also means engaging in theoretical discussions about how we define migration and the extent to which methodological nationalism shapes scholarly accounts of migrations. This does not mean that all forms of mobility have to be analyzed as migration. Rather, it means that by expanding the scope of what can be classified as migration it is possible to include different forms of mobility. This allows an analysis of how different forms of mobility articulate, how such articulations transform how people relate to one another, and how gender and kinship roles are redefined through different forms of mobility.

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Notes

in troduc t ion . The Zapotec language is highly diverse, with important lexical variations even between neighboring communities. Zapotec from Zegache could be considered Central Valleys Zapotec, but it differs significantly from the Zapotec spoken in other towns also located in the Central Valleys. . In the case of Perú, see Leinaweaver (2013) and Paerregaard (2010, 2012) for an analysis of internal and transnational movements. Other scholars have examined the relationship between citizenship and internal migration in India (Abbas 2016), “reverse remittances” in South Korea (Mobrand 2012), the experiences of rural Chinese women who move to urban centers (Jacka 2015), and rural-urban migration as a way to stay “up-to-date” (“modern”) in rural Thailand (Mills 2005). . In the 2010 census, INEGI (Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Geografía, or the National Institute of Statistics and Geography) registered 103,085 transnational migrants (98 percent of whom went to the United States). In terms of internal migration, INEGI reported that Oaxacans migrated primarily to Mexico State, Mexico City, Veracruz, Puebla, and Baja California. Oaxaca was among the ten states with most internal migrants. See INEGI Censo de Población y Vivienda 2010. . Although I favor the term “transborder” for the reasons stated above, there is an extensive historical discussion of “transnationalism.” For example, Faist (1998), Vertovec (2009), and Glick Schiller, Basch, and Blanc-Szanton (1992) emphasize “transnational” migrants as connected to larger globalization processes. There have been debates as well about the distinction between “transnational” and “diasporic” (Paerregaard 2010). Oliver Ruvalcaba and Torres Robles (2012) contend that transnational communities are to be considered as multidimensional subjects because of how different flows occur within transnational populations. See Brenda Nicolas (2021) on transborder comunalidad for more recent approaches to transborder analysis.

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. It is impossible to provide an exhaustive list of the articles and books that have addressed migration. In addition to the authors cited in the book, there are numerous publications that deal with the topic of migrant families (transnational families and mixed-status families): see, e.g., Castañeda (2019), Cook (2020), and Yarris (2017). There is a long tradition of scholars working directly on the process of border crossing and the border itself (e.g., Heyman 2001, 1998; Jusionyte 2018), on the effects of deportation (e.g., Boehm 2016; Hansen 2018), and on the perilous journey of crossing Mexico (Slack 2019; Vogt 2018).

ch a p ter : r e se a rch in z eg ache . A quick note: After the Mexican Revolution officially ended in 1920, the PRI effectively controlled the country until 2000, when the PAN (Partido Acción Nacional) won the presidential elections. The PRI would later return to the presidency in 2012. I should also point out that research for this project was carried out before the incursion of MORENA (the Movimiento de Regeneración Nacional), which would become the main political Mexican force in 2018. . The inscription of local conflicts in an agrarian context was also seen in other parts of Oaxaca with the term agrarista, which is more closely linked to communities that requested land in the form of ejido (e.g., Smith 2013; Stephen 2002b). Since Zegache did not request ejido (ejido does not have a literal translation; ejido lands are communally held by villagers organized as an agrarian community and can be used for life and inherited but cannot be sold individually) but rather tierra comunal (“communal land,” roughly meaning that this land belongs to the community as a whole); the term used in Zegache is comunero and not agrarista (comunero is used to reference those who requested communal land, while agrarista is used for those who requested ejidos). . For a more detailed account of usos y costumbres, see Recondo (1999, 2001), Anaya Muñoz (2005), Valdivia Dounce (2010), and the book edited by HernándezDíaz (2007). . This can be easily contrasted by looking at the high fluctuation of the Mexican peso against the dollar after 1981; the exchange rate went from US$1:MEX$12.50 in 1981 to US$1:MEX$2,289 in 1988. . As argued by Leinaweaver (2008) in the context of Peru, children often create and maintain connections between adults involved in migration.

ch a p ter : l e av ing z eg ach e . I use the phrases “family of orientation” to signify the family where a person was raised (e.g., one’s parents) and “family of procreation” to signify the family that a person forms through parenthood or through shared residency (e.g., one’s romantic partner and children). 98

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. I use quotation marks to indicate that “traditional” gender roles are a social and historical construct and that tradition can be used to legitimate and explain differential treatments based on gender differences. . “Agricultural jobs” as used here encompasses a wide set of agricultural, forestry, and animal husbandry jobs. . Although civil unions (uniónes libres) are a common practice in Zegache, as in other parts of Mexico, I use the term “married” because most of the couples who migrate are, in fact, married through the Catholic Church or describe themselves as such. . This information is even more significant if we consider the growth of metropolitan areas outside the “urban core” (Cox 2011) that have historically become the home of internal migrants, including the people of Zegache whom I have met and interviewed. . Lynn Stephen (2005, 215–216) has also documented how women who had migrated to Mexico City, Tijuana, and Rosarito were also pivotal in creating women’s weaving cooperatives in Teotitlán del Valle, Oaxaca. . Women who migrate transnationally are also able to claim some form of migration experience, but their single border crossings are seen as insignificant compared to the multiple crossings of their male relatives and partners. . This situation is not exclusive of the women of Zegache; the Mexican newspaper La Jornada states women from Mazahua and Nahua communities who migrate to Mexico City are also discriminated against and not considered suitable marriage partners in their communities of origin (Olivares Alonso 2014). . The unusual opportunity to become a single-woman mayordoma was not only a product of Maria’s commitment to the patron saint; it also signaled larger political changes in the community. As the usos y costumbres system was replaced by the political party system—and being a mayordomo is no longer a requirement to serve in the local government—there is less interest in hosting local fiestas, and on some occasions the municipal government has had to cover the costs, as volunteers are sometimes lacking.

ch a p ter : l a bor cor r idor s i . There is extensive work that deals with the analytical category of “peasant” and “peasantry” that spans centuries and includes the works of Alexander Chayanov, Eric Wolf, Michael Kearney, and others. In this chapter and throughout the book, I am using the terms exclusively in emic terms to refer to people engaged in agricultural labor who live in the Mexican countryside. . Comuneros are a pro-PRI faction claiming that Zegache’s agricultural land is communal and thus cannot be sold without the community’s approval. In contrast, propietarios claim that land is, and has been, privately owned, and thus the community does not have any authority over land transactions. Propietarios have historically aligned with the PAN and are currently PRD supporters. The conflict has 99

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Notes to Pages 31–51

reached violent episodes in recent history, but most people contend that the solution should be to maintain two property regimes. . The movement for Indigenous rights in Zegache has been mostly driven by non-Indigenous state intermediaries while political parties simultaneously influenced the local political structures and replaced the usos y costumbres with a political party system. Thus, for example, in 2012 murals depicting the “rights of Indigenous peoples” were painted on walls around the community. One of these murals informed passersby of the importance of communal assemblies in municipalities governed by local customary traditional law (usos y costumbres) even if Zegache is not governed by usos y costumbres. . Although there are not exact numbers for the people who died, people who lived through this period recount how at times they would encounter several bodies lying around the community. In Zegache, there is a saying that people use to evoke this violent period: Antes decían, que si no se moría alguien, no estuvo buena la fiesta (“In the past, if there was a fiesta and people didn’t die they say that the fiesta wasn’t that good”). . The term chingón, from the verb chingar, has produced numerous interpretations that range from psychoanalytical interpretations found in Octavio Paz’s classic work El Laberinto de la Soledad (The Labyrinth of Solitude), in which the Mexican author affirms that chingar is a masculine, active, and cruel verb that conveys violence—more specifically, nonconsensual sexual violence. Chingón, which invokes the act of chingar, can also be interpreted as someone who can exert power (see Castellanos 2010, 150) or someone “who can chingar but who cannot be chingado” (Alonso 1995, 81). . The practice of showcasing one’s military experience through photos or military paraphernalia is common in Zegache, especially through wall décor. Such wall pieces are often clocks or calendars manufactured by the Mexican army, sometimes dedicated to the soldier’s family. In one particular occasion I encountered two framed photos (approximately 8 x 11 inches) hanging as central pieces in a family’s living room. The photos portrayed the “man of the house” next to a poppy field, itself next to a marijuana field. The man appeared in full military attire.

ch a p ter : l a bor cor r idor s ii . Although crossing the border is always framed in terms of risk and danger, men from Zegache are well aware of the historical changes that the Mexico-US border has gone through. Thus, crossing through Tijuana–San Isidro, or through Ciudad Juárez–El Paso, more common in the 1980s and 1990s, is not seen as dangerous as crossing through the Sonoran Desert. . For example, picking strawberries (Holmes 2014). Stephen (2007, 236–237) also describes the Willamette Valley, where many Zegacheños work, as a place that links an increasing number of Mexican immigrants and seasonal commercial agriculture to global capital. 100

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. In fact, the only ones who had not participated in the Christmas tree industry were those migrants who had never lived in Oregon or those who, having lived in Oregon, never stayed during the months of November and December. . According to some estimates, one person can earn between US$2,500 and US$4,000, after Medicare deductions, in one season. . In fact, all the taxi drivers who make trips between Zegache and Oaxaca are men. The treacherous roads, filled with trucks and buses, have resulted in fatal accidents on several occasions. Driving a taxi is also seen as a risky occupation.

ch a p ter : t he m a scu l ine fa mil i a r it y of wor k . As with other names, Baltazar is a pseudonym. However, in this case I will use only the first name to signal that this account and the descriptions that follow have been changed to protect Baltazar’s privacy.

ch a p ter : migr at ion a nd femininit y . I also heard of similar practices directed toward rebellious daughters who showed disdain in learning how to make tortillas. . See Haenn (2020) for a detailed account of how migration has transformed marriage practices and discourses around marriage in Calakmul, Mexico. . Patricia Pessar (2003, 34–25) has also found this type of response among Dominican female migrants in the United States. . OED Online, Oxford University Press, www.oed.com/view/Entry/207851 ?redirectedFrom=tutelage. . I use the terms “independent” and “associational” migrants as they are used conventionally in migration literature. “Independent” migrants often migrate without the company of their nuclear family, even if they migrate accompanied by other relatives. “Associational” migrants migrate accompanied by their nuclear family, even if this means only a spouse. . In this sense, it might be important to point out that female suffering could be seen as part of the abnegación (literally, “abnegation,” meaning the self-denial of goods and pleasure to benefit others around you} analyzed by Rosario Castellanos in her 1971 discourse (see Castellanos 1992).

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Index

Note: Page number in italics refer to figures. abnegación (self-denial to benefit others), 101n6 (chap. 6) Adler Lomnitz, Larissa, 8 affective struggles, 39 agrarian reforms, 18, 49–55 agriculture: Christmas tree industry, 14, 66–69, 101n3 (chap. 4); hops industry, 14, 66–69; industrialized agriculture, 14, 54, 55, 63, 68, 72, 79; jobs in, 31, 65, 99n3; picking cotton, 20, 29, 57; picking fruit and vegetables, 65–66, 100n2; plant nursery workers, 65–66; seasonal work, 20, 62–63, 66–69, 100n2; technological changes in, 59, 69–72, 77. See also subsistence agriculture alcohol consumption: degendering of, 70; masculinity and, 77, 78; religion and, 77 Alonso, Ana María, 50 Álvarez, Raúl, 10, 29 Álvarez García family, 29 Andrews, Abigail, 11, 39 Aquino Moreschi, Alejandra, 54 Ariza, Marina, 8 Arizpe, Lourdes, 8 Armendariz, Elizabeth, 34–38 110

associational migrants, 45, 84, 101n5 (chap. 6)

bait-worm trapping, 67 Baja California, Mexico, 5–6, 97n3 Baja California Sur, Mexico, 5–6 baking cooperative, 85–86 Basch, Linda, 8, 97n4 beans (crop), 22, 30 Bermudez, Maura, 26, 28, 86–87 Besserer, Federico, 8, 11–12, 39, 40 Blanc-Szanton, Cristina, 8, 97n4 bocado (festive gathering in which godparents are celebrated), 58 bolear (earth-balling in plant nurseries), 65–66 Bolivia, 91 Bonilla, Cecilia, 38 border crossing: detainment and, 30, 86; documentation and, 33, 57, 71, 73, 76, 95–96; military enlistment and, 6–7; multiple crossings, 63, 99n7; risks and sacrifices of, 30, 49, 63–69, 71–72, 74– 75, 86, 95–96; scholarship on, 98n5 (intro.); in transborder framework, 7; by women, 99n7

borders, types of, 14, 15, 19 Bracero program, 6, 19, 32–33 breadwinning, 48, 59–60, 64, 75

Calderón Hinojosa, Felipe, 21 California: consolidation of social migrant networks in, 22; Jackson County, 56; male transnational migration to, 5, 43, 56, 73; Oaxacan communities in, 4; occupations available to migrants in, 32–33, 56; Zegacheño couples living in, 33, 43 campesino (peasant) identity, 51–55, 58– 60, 62, 65, 69, 72, 82 care relations, 27, 33, 35, 37, 84, 86–87; returning female migrants and, 13–14, 29, 35, 37, 38, 39; violence and, 34–36, 37. See also kinship Carrasco, Carolina, 10, 29, 34–35 Carrasco, Catalina, 29 Carrasco, Raquel, 43–44 Carrasco Ramos family, 10, 29 Carreón, Aurora, 85–86 Carsten, Janet, 13 Castellanos, Bianet, 8, 9, 11–12 Castellanos, Rosario, 101n6 Catholicism: marriage, 99n4; masculinity and, 77; saints, 18 cerros (hills), 1 Chiapas, Mexico: internal migration to, 5–6, 19, 20, 21, 29, 57; military presence in, 20, 21 Chihuahua, Mexico, 20, 50, 57 Christmas tree industry, 14, 66–69, 101n3 (chap. 4) civil unions, 43, 99n4 Cohen, Jeffrey, 6 Cold War, 21 community of sentiment, 8, 11–12 commuting, daily, 2, 6, 10, 43, 71, 81, 85, 88–89 comuneros (villagers who favor communal 111

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land ownership), 1, 18, 23, 51–52, 98n2, 99–100n2 confinement, 45, 47 cooking: as gendered activity, 14, 48, 76– 80; gender roles and, 12, 81–82, 83; industrial and nondomestic cooking, 74; kinship roles and, 81–82, 83; in the military, 12, 14, 57, 73–76; in the restaurant industry, 63, 74 corn (crop), 2, 22, 70 cotton industry, 20, 29, 57 coyotes (guides or smugglers), 22, 64 Cuban Revolution, 21

Danigui, Beatriz, 44–45 Danigui, Camilo, 57, 58 Danigui, Cesar, 43 Danigui, Natalia, 29, 58 Danigui, Ramiro, 57, 58 Danigui, Teodoro, 20, 29, 56–57, 69, 71 Danigui Meléndez family, 29 daughters-in-law. See tutelaje de las suegras (tutelage of the mother-in-law) deportation and detainment, 30, 86, 98n5 (intro.) domestic sphere, 14, 73, 74, 81–84 domestic work and workers, 5, 20, 30, 32, 35–36, 40, 43, 86, 91, 94–95 Dominguez, Rosa, 40–42 Dominguez, Ruth, 43 driving: as gendered activity, 69–72; masculinity and, 69–72; oxen-pulled ploughs replaced with tractors, 59, 69–72, 77 Durante, Arnulfo, 63–64, 74 Durante, Pedro, 61

earth-balling, 65–66 Ecuadorian male migrants, 70 education: formal, increase in, 69, 89; of girls and women, 88; in the military,

education (continued) 14, 21, 49, 55–56, 62–63, 88; of youth, 69, 71 el jape (harvesting of hops), 14, 66–69 emergent trends, 11, 28, 81 época de los valientes (time of the brave men), 50, 54–55 Erasmo, Marcia, 41–42 ethnography, multi-sited, 11–12, 17 extortion, 27

Faist, Thomas, 97n4 “family of orientation,” 33, 98n1 “family of procreation,” 31, 33, 45, 98n1 (chap. 2) farming. See agriculture femininity: concepts of, redefining, 73, 79, 80–84, 88, 90–93; conflicts about, 81–87; domestic sphere and, 81–84; suffering and, 89–93; surveillance of, 81–82, 84–85, 89, 90, 91–93 feminization, 95; of agriculture, 54; of cooking, 75; of not migrating, 31

García, Alejandra, 31, 33 García, María, 29 gender: driving as gendered activity, 69– 72; gendered experience of returning migrants, 41, 42, 54; gendered kinship roles, 39, 44, 82, 83, 88; gendered peasant identity, 51; gendered social relationships, 15, 90; gendering of internal migration, 3; technological labor and, 68–69. See also femininity; gender identities; gender roles; masculinity; men; women gender identities, 7; negotiating and defining, 79, 80; political conflicts and, 18, 51; of rural and Indigenous peasants, 51 gender roles: ease of travel and, 89; independence, female migration, and, 38– 112

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41; internal migration and, 5, 9, 14, 37–46; peripheral vision and, 92–93; “sentimental order” of, 42; social remittances and, 39; “traditional,” 31, 37–41, 43, 45, 99n2; tutelaje de las suegras and, 85–87; violence and, 42; women who return to Zegache and, 5, 42 Gill, Leslie, 91 Glick Schiller, Nina, 8, 97n4 globalization, 3, 7–9, 19, 94, 97n4 globalization studies, 8 Global North, 3 Global South, 3 Goldring, Luin, 83 Gonzalez, Mireya, 25 Guerra, Rubén, 65 Gutmann, Matthew, 48, 60, 70

Hernandez, Laura, 25 hops industry, 14, 66–69

Immigration Reform and Control Act (US, 1986), 32 independent migrants, 40–41, 84, 101n5 (chap. 6) Indigenous government system, 78, 99n9, 100n3 Indigenous identity, 50–52 Indigenous masculinities, 69–70 Indigenous rights movement, 51, 100n3 industrialization, 20, 34, 46, 54–56, 63, 65, 68, 79 industrialized agriculture, 14, 54, 55, 63, 68, 72, 79 Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), 18, 98n1, 99–100n2 internal migration: to Chiapas, 5–6, 19, 20, 21, 29, 57; of female migrants to Mexico City, 10, 13–14, 19–20, 34– 38, 40–44, 45–46; gendering and gender roles in, 3, 5, 9, 14, 37–46; of male

migration to Mexico City, 20–22; scholarship on relationship between transnational migration and, 8–9; to Sonora, 5–6; statistics on, 4. See also returning female transnational migrants

Kearney, Michael, 8, 99n1 kinship, 1, 5, 9; gendered kinship roles, 39, 82, 83, 88; mobility and, 81–84, 87–89. See also care relations; tutelaje de las suegras (tutelage of the mother-in-law)

labor corridors, 14; continuities of, 61– 64, 67–68, 72; definition of, 14, 47; masculinity and, 61–72; military service and, 49, 51–59; mobility of men who cook, 73–80; peasants and, 49– 50; piece-rate masculinity and, 64– 66, 68, 74; transnational migration and, 60–72 la emergencia india (Indigenous rights movement), 51, 100n3 land ownership, 18, 52 land tenure, 2, 16, 18 Leinaweaver, Jessaca, 97n2, 98n5 (chap. 1) Levitt, Peggy, 39 Limón, Jimena, 26, 28–29; detained at border, 86; marriage to Roberto Vázquez, 5, 28–29; migration from Zegache to Mexico City, 41; migration to Mexico City, 1, 5; migration to Oregon, 5; migration to United States, 30–31, 41; return to Zegache, 30, 43; strawberry picking, 65; tutelage of the mother-in-law and, 86–87 Lucerna, María, 33–34, 36, 38, 44, 99n9

maíces criollos (local varieties of corn landraces), 2 113

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Index

María Sánchez Hill, x, 52 Martinez, Cruz, 44–45 Martinez, Manuel, 54–55 masculinity: authority and, 82, 83; breadwinning and, 48, 59–60, 64, 75; composite forms of, 48, 78; crossing the border and, 51, 57, 59–60, 63–64, 66– 67, 72; education and, 71; época de los valientes and, 50, 52–55, 57, 100n4; generational differences with respect to, 71; Indigenous identity and, 50– 52; joining the military as masculine tradition, 55–59; peasant identity and, 50–55, 58–60, 62, 65, 69, 72, 82; peasants and, 49–55; piece-rate masculinity, 64–66, 68, 74. See also risks and sacrifices masculinizing of occupations, 48, 62, 73–80 Matos, Benancio, 54 mayordoma, 44, 99n9 Meléndez, María, 20, 29, 56 men: return from military, 14, 62–63; returning transnational migrants, 4, 10, 29, 38, 43, 44, 53–54, 61, 62–63, 71, 73, 83, 84, 91. See also under masculinity; military, Mexican Mendez, Lorenza, 38 Mexican Farm Labor Agreement, 6 Mexican Miracle, 8, 20–21, 34–35 Mexican National Population Council (CONAPO), 4 Mexican Revolution: effect on divisions in Zegache, 18; effect on national and gender identities, 51–52, 69; postrevolutionary agrarian reforms, 18, 49–55; postrevolutionary political power, 98n1 (chap. 1); reception of, in Central Valleys, 49–50 Mexico City, Mexico: boroughs, 27, 36; demand for rural labor in, 34–35; distance between Zegache and, xi, 5; ethnographical research in, 17, 23, 24, 27–28; female migration to, 10, 13–14,

Mexico City, Mexico (continued) 19–20, 34–38, 40–44, 45–46; history of migration to, 4–6, 19; male migration to, 20–22; population growth, 34 Mexico-US border: documentation and, 33, 57, 71, 73, 76, 95–96; militarization of, 32, 66–67; risks and sacrifices of crossing, 49, 63–67, 86, 95–96. See also border crossing “migrant,” use of term in academic writing, 3 migration, internal. See internal migration migration, transnational. See transnational migration migration studies, 3, 9, 15, 94 military, Mexican: cooking in the, 12, 14, 57, 73–76; expansion of, 21; as form of migration, 6–7, 95; gendered identities of enlistees, 7; generational differences in experience of, 55–58; globalization and, 7; main actions of, 21; masculinity and, 55–59; as means of education, 14, 21, 49, 55–56, 62–63, 88; neoliberalism and, 21; returning from service, 14, 62–63, 73, 91; searches for poppy and marijuana plantations by, 56, 57, 74; showcasing military experience, 56, 100n6; social networks and, 58 milpa agriculture (system involving combination of crops), 2 mobility: classifications of, 96; confinement and, 45, 47; constraints on, 37, 41, 71, 81, 82; female social networks and, 38; femininity and, 81–84; kinship roles and, 81–84, 87–89; of men traversing labor corridors, 14, 49, 50, 53, 55, 62, 63, 70, 73, 79; migrating couples and gender configurations, 33; military service and, 49, 50, 53, 55 mothers-in-law. See tutelaje de las suegras (tutelage of the mother-in-law) 114

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Index

neoliberalism: effect on Indigenous communities, 6; effect on transnational migration, 6, 21; military expansion and, 21 Nicolas, Brenda, 97n4 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), 19, 32, 63 nueras (daughters-in-law), 80, 83. See also tutelaje de las suegras (tutelage of the mother-in-law) Nugent, Daniel, 50

Oaxaca City: migration to, 29, 47, 57, 83, 88–89; transportation to Zegache, 1–2, 6, 21–22, 71, 85, 88–89, 92 Ocotlán, Jalisco, 2, 6, 85, 88 Oliva, Germán, 58–59 Ong, Aihwa, 47 Oregon: agricultural jobs in, 14, 31, 32– 33, 43, 66–69; consolidation of social migrant networks in, 22; ethnographic research in Willamette Valley, 1, 3, 13, 16, 17, 23, 24, 27–28; female transnational migration to, 5, 31–34, 43; male transnational migration to, 5, 10, 22, 54, 62, 65, 66–68; occupations available to migrants in, 32–33, 67; Salem, 23, 31, 67; seasonal migration to, 66–69; social networks in, 27, 67; Woodburn, 23, 26, 65, 67; work commutes in, 27; Zegacheño couples living in, 31–33

Padilla, Tanalis, 51 Paerregaard, Karsten, 97n2 Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), 18, 98n1, 99–100n2 partidos armados (armed parties), 52 Pauli, Julia, 15, 80, 81, 83, 88 peasant identity, 51–55, 58–60, 62, 65, 69, 72, 82 “peripheral vision,” 91–93

Perú, 97n2, 98n5 Pessar, Patricia, 101n3 (chap. 6) picking cotton, 20, 29, 57 picking fruit and vegetables, 65–66, 100n2 plant nursery workers, 65–66, 68 PRD (Partido de la Revolución Democrática/Democractic Revolution Party), 18, 99–100n2 PRI (Partido Revolucionario Institucional/Institutional Revolutionary Party), 18, 98n1, 99–100n2 Pribilsky, Jason, 70 production, chains of, 19, 31 propietarios (villagers who claim to be private proprietors), 18, 23, 50, 99– 100 public sphere, 81

quinceañera (celebration of girl’s fifteenth birthday), 10, 11

Ramos, Teresa, 3, 12, 29 reforestation, 1 relatedness, 7, 12–13, 15, 17, 27–30; definition of, 12–13 religion: civil-religious cargo system, 18; civil-religious positions of community members, 44; masculinity and, 77, 79. See also Catholicism remittances, 2, 4, 22, 40, 56, 58, 69, 85; reverse, 97n2; social, 39, 90 Rentería, Sofía, 30, 41 returning female internal migrants: caregiving as motive for, 13–14, 29, 35, 37, 38, 39; claiming of migrant experience by, 40–41; criticism and stigmatization of, 5, 10, 39, 40–41, 42–44, 90; new and critical perspectives of, 38, 40–41, 42–44, 90; single mothers as, 5, 10, 13–14, 29, 30–31, 41, 43, 86, 90 115

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returning female transnational migrants, 83, 84, 86–87 returning from military service, 14, 62– 63, 73, 91 returning male transnational migrants, 61; compared with returning female transnational migrants, 83, 84; daughter’s quinceañera as motive, 10, 11; marriage and, 43; military enlistment of, 29, 71; risk and sacrifice of, 53–54 risks and sacrifices: in Christmas tree industry, 66–69; in hops industry, 66– 69; of joining the military, 55, 57–59; masculine identity and, 14, 48, 59– 60, 62, 68, 74–75, 77, 79, 95; of peasant identity, 14, 48–49, 50, 52–55; redefinitions of, 68–71; of returning male transnational migrants, 53–54; of transnational migration, 49, 63–69, 71–72, 74–75; of work, 14, 62, 68, 74– 75, 77, 79 Robles, Torres, 97n4 Rodriguez family, 70–71 Rojas, Rebeca, 33 Rouse, Roger, 8 rural-urban migration, 8, 97n2. See also internal migration Ruvalcaba, Oliver, 97n4

Salazar, Lourdes, 26, 28, 86–87 Salem, Oregon, 23, 31, 67. See also Oregon Salvador, Silvio, 31, 33 Sánchez, Ramona, 33 Santana, Eusebio, 53 Santiago Apóstol, Oaxaca, 22, 67 seasonal work and migration, 19; Bracero program and, 6, 19, 32–33; Christmas tree industry, 14, 66–69, 101n3; cotton picking, 20, 29, 57; hops industry, 14, 66–69; internal migration to Chiapas, 20; transnational migration, 62–63, 66–69

sentimental regimes, 8, 11, 40, 80 September 11, 2001, 66 Shahrokni, Nazanin, 11 Sinaloa, Mexico, 5–6 single motherhood, 5, 10, 26, 29, 30–31, 41–43, 86, 90 social legitimation, 31, 37, 38–39, 45, 55, 57, 75 social networks: female social networks, 20, 36–40, 42, 44–45; gender roles and, 31; labor access and, 32 social remittances, 39, 90 Sonora, Mexico, 29, 56, 58; internal migration to, 5–6 Sonora Desert, 63–64, 100n1 squash (crop), 2 Stephen, Lynn, 7, 31, 62, 76, 92, 99n6 Stern, Steve, 88 strawberry picking, 65, 100n2 structure of feeling, 7, 10–13, 15, 28, 49, 80, 81, 85, 93 subsistence agriculture: effect of NAFTA on, 19, 63; masculine identity and, 55, 64–65; risks and violence of, 50, 52; tools and assets of, 50, 52; workers in, 56, 61, 63; in Zegache, 2–3 suegras (mothers-in-law), 80, 83. See also tutelaje de las suegras (tutelage of the mother-in-law) suffering, 89–91

39–41, 43; female social networks and, 37–38; masculinity and, 62–63 transnational migration: agricultural work and technology as factors in, 64–66; driving motorized vehicles and, 69–72; migration experience claimed by women, 99n7; odd jobs, 66–69; returning female transnational migrants, 83, 84, 86–87; risk, sacrifice, and masculinity in, 62–64; statistics on, 97n2; of women, 31–34. See also returning male transnational migrants transportation infrastructure, 21, 84–85, 88–89; public transportation in Zegache, 22; transportation between Zegache and Oaxaca City, 1–2, 6, 21–22, 71, 85, 88–89, 92 tutelaje de las suegras (tutelage of the mother-in-law), 33, 80–87; making tortillas, 80, 83, 101n1; sentimental regimes, 80; technological changes and, 83

technology: continuity of labor corridors and, 49, 62–63, 64–66, 68–69, 72; femininity and, 89–90, 95; in hops industry, 66; masculinity and, 49, 64– 66, 68–69, 72, 95; military education in, 55–56, 62–63; tutelaje de las suegras and, 83 tortillas, making, 80, 83, 101n1 transborder framework, 7, 9, 12, 13, 15, 31, 97n4; challenging of gender roles and,

Vázquez, Alberto, 71 Vázquez, Fabian, 86, 87 Vázquez, Joel, 65 Vázquez, Roberto, 1, 26, 28–29, 30, 64, 86; Mexican military service, 5; migration to United States, 5 Vázquez, Rogelio, 26, 28 Vázquez Bermudez family, 28 Vázquez Limón, Noemi (daughter of Roberto and Jimena), 1, 29, 86

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Universidad de las Américas–Puebla, 2 University of Oregon, 2–3 urbanization, 20, 34, 46 usos y costumbres (customary system of Indigenous government system), 78, 99n9, 100n3

Vázquez Limón family, 28–29 Velazquez, Cesarea, 89 Veracruz, Mexico, 5–6, 97n3 Vertovec, Steven, 97n4 violence: armed violence, 50; boundary disputes and, 52; care relations and, 34–36, 37; chingones/chingón, 53, 100n5; domestic violence, 34–36, 37, 40–42, 86, 91; época de los valientes, 50, 52–55, 57, 100n4; femininity and, 86; gender roles and, 40–41; generational differences in experience of, 55–58; independent female migration and, 35–37, 40–42; kinship and, 34– 36, 37; masculinity and, 48–49, 50– 55, 57, 58–59, 100n5; postrevolutionary violence, 48–49, 50, 52–55, 57; sexual violence, 30, 34–35, 40–42, 100n5; stigma of gender violence, 40–42; tutelaje de las suegras and, 86

“war on drugs,” 21 Washington (state): male transnational migration to, 5, 61, 63, 74; Oaxacan communities in, 4; occupations available to migrants in, 32–33, 67; Seattle, 61, 63, 74 Wentzell, Emily, 48 wheat (crops), 22 Willamette Valley, Oregon. See Oregon Williams, Raymond, 7, 10–13, 93 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 74 women: “double day” work, 34; female social networks, 20, 36–40, 42, 44– 45; internal migration to Mexico City, 10, 13–14, 19–20, 34–38, 40–44, 45– 46; labeled as “bad examples” when they return, 39; nonmigrants, 30, 41– 42; returning internal migrants, 3, 5, 10, 13–14, 29, 35, 37, 38, 39, 40–41, 42–

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44, 90, 95; returning female transnational migrants, 30, 39, 43, 83, 84, 86– 87; returning transnational migrants, 30, 39, 43, 83, 84, 86–87; social legitimation and, 38–39; transnational migration of, 31–34, 45–46. See also femininity; returning female internal migrants; returning female transnational migrants; tutelaje de las suegras (tutelage of the mother-in-law) Woodburn, Oregon, 23, 26, 65, 67. See also Oregon

Yalalag, Oaxaca, 54

Zapotec language, 1–2, 77, 97n1 Zavella, Patricia, 66, 91, 92, 93 Zegache, Oaxaca: boundary disputes with neighboring towns, 50, 52; cash economy of, 21–22; church bell tower, x; as divided community, 16, 18, 23, 50; ethnographical research in, 17, 23– 27; female internal migrants returning to, 3, 5, 13–14, 29, 30, 32, 37, 38– 40, 42–44; history of migration in, 19–23; local assembly at municipal government offices, x; local authority conflicts, 18; map of distance between Mexico City and, xi; map of distance between Oregon and, xi; meaning of “Zegache,” 1–2; multiscalar perspective of, 16, 19; seven landmarks surrounding, 1–2; transportation to Oaxaca City, 1–2, 6, 21–22, 71, 85, 88–89, 92; women who never leave Zegache, 40–42 Zepeda, Miguel, 29, 56–58, 64, 69–71, 73–76 zoning technologies, 47