Women’s Migration Networks in Mexico and Beyond (review)

GeoMexico  November 17, 2012

As long ago as 1885, Ernst Georg Ravenstein, a German-English cartographer, proposed seven “laws of migration” that arose from his studies of migration in the U.K.

The original seven laws, as expressed by Ravenstein, were:

1) Most migrants only proceed a short distance, and toward centers of absorption.
2) As migrants move toward absorption centers, they leave “gaps” that are filled up by migrants from more remote districts, creating migration flows that reach to “the most remote corner of the kingdom.”
3) The process of dispersion is inverse to that of absorption.
4) Each main current of migration produces a compensating counter-current.
5) Migrants proceeding long distances generally go by preference to one of the great centers of commerce or industry.
6) The natives of towns are less migratory than those of the rural parts of the country.
7) Females are more migratory than males.

These laws, though certainly not accepted uncritically, have provided a basic framework for many later studies of migration. Surprisingly, despite the wording of law 7, there has been remarkably little focus on female migration in the literature, with far more attention being paid in most studies to the migration of men.


Recognizing this, anthropologist Tamar Wilson provides a detailed account of several important aspects of female migration in her Women’s Migration Networks in Mexico and Beyond (University of New Mexico Press, 2009).

Wilson’s book focuses on the experiences and thoughts of doña Consuelo [all names are pseudonyms], a woman she met while researching in Colonia Popular, a Mexicali squatter settlement, in 1988, and her daughters Anamaria and Irma.  Read more. 

Navarrette: Mexico's own immigration debate

By Ruben Navarrette Posted November 17
Ventura Country Star 

MEXICO CITY — If you think the debate over immigration from Mexico into the United States is complicated, just take a trip south of the border and look at it from that side.

Complicated isn't the half of it. The immigration debate is also dishonest and hypocritical and filled with people who would rather pursue their own interests than solve the problem. And it all revolves around a broken system that stays broken because important and powerful interests want it that way.

This is true in both countries. Mexico is just as reluctant as the United States to confront the larger issue of migration — both of its own people north to the United States and along its own southern border, where Central and South Americans want to get into a country that many natives are desperate to flee.

Nor does the Mexican elite want to swallow its pride and admit that the real engine behind the Mexican economy isn't people like them but Mexicans who don't even live in Mexico anymore — immigrant workers in the United States.

In Mexico City, politicians, journalists and intellectuals are eager to avoid the issue altogether. They point out that migration to the United States from Mexico has slowed to a trickle. With a U.S. economy that is sluggish and a Mexican one that is bouncing back, many would-be migrants find that going north isn't worth the trouble. Read more. 

Violence in Mexico has triggered the voluntary repatriation of Central American migrants

Desinformémosnos

Americas Program Original Translation

The return of migrants from Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala and Nicaragua to their countries of origin is not only due to an increase in operations by the National Migration Institute (INM) but also to the nightmare that the journey across Mexico to the United States has become.

Marcela Salas Cassini

Mexico. The incessant increase of violence exerted in Mexico—by delinquent groups as well as state and federal authorities—against Central American migrants is the principal cause of the repatriation of Hondurans, Salvadorans, Guatemalans, and Nicaraguans who pass through the country in search of the more-distant-than-ever American dream.

“The route has become something much more complex than what it was before, which is why many migrants give up and voluntarily ask to be repatriated,” explained human rights defender, Martha Sánchez, from the Mesoamerican Migrant Movement in an interview with Desinformémosnos.

“There are things that have always happened,” continued the activist, “but that now have blown up and exist on a grand scale: the Central Americans go without a cent and they have to pay organized criminal gangs the right to stand and wait for the train as well as pay the brakeman to get on the train. The presence of criminals has increased tremendously in Mexico State and the Bajío (low-lying region) corridor. All of this has caused there to be more voluntary requests for repatriation from the shelters; many of the migrants change their minds halfway through the journey upon seeing how difficult the situation is.”

The New Face of Forced Displacement in Latin America

InSight Crime: Written by Sibylla Brodzinsky

Forced displacement has a long history in Latin America. For decades - and even centuries in some countries - entire villages, families and individuals have sought refuge in the nearest town or neighboring country, fleeing the crossfire between two groups and threats to their lives.

Today, millions of Latin Americans are facing a new challenge that is leading to a familiar scenario. Organized crime -- which takes the form of large narco-trafficking cartels, street gangs, local drug dealing groups, leftist guerrillas, and private armies -- is displacing thousands of people in the region.

“Violence perpetrated for criminal rather than ideological ends remained a primary cause of displacement,” notes the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre, which recorded 5.6 million Latin Americans living in displacement in 2011, mainly in Colombia, Mexico, Guatemala and Peru.

The reasons are many. Organized crime removes people who interfere with their business. They take over key territories for smuggling drugs, people, weapons or other merchandise. People also flee when criminal groups forcibly recruit their children, their neighbors. Sometimes these criminals simply want to flex their muscles, forcing people to leave to prove their point.

Since organized crime in Latin America knows no borders, neither should journalistic coverage of its effects on citizens. To investigate how criminal organizations affect fundamental rights, an alliance of digital media in the region -- under the coordination of InSight Crime and with the support of the Internews non-governmental organization in Washington DC -- explored the new face of displacement in Latin America. Read more.