Mexican Migration and Food Policy

With Arizona having passed the draconian Senate Bill 1070, sections of which were blocked by US District Judge Susan Bolton last July, it is high time to seriously think about why so many migrants are coming to the US from Mexico and Central America in the first place, which is something most US policymakers don’t want to talk about. And the reasons for them coming, more often than not, are rooted in agricultural policy, both in the US and abroad.

I had the privilege of traveling with the Institute for Food and Development Policy/Food First’s “Along the Immigrant Trail” reality tour in 2007. For eleven days, we traveled a southward “trail” throughout Mexico, from the El Paso-Ciudad Juarez binational metropolitan area, down to villages in Oaxaca (southern Mexico). In El Paso, Texas, we saw the hollowed-out skeletons of former factories; El Paso used to have hundreds of light manufacturing industries (particularly garment factories). When the US, Canadian, and Mexican governments signed the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1994, those industries closed up shop and moved south of the border, where the labor is cheaper. Since 1994, El Paso has become an eerie contradiction of being an economic desert, surrounded by tomato and chili fields which have “jobs” for cheap migrant labor, and where beer is cheaper than water. We met migrant laborers at a non-profit workers’ service center who were waiting in front of the building, hoping someone – anyone – would pick them up for work. The vast majority have been uprooted from their villages back in Mexico; most wouldn’t be coming to the US in the first place if there were economic opportunities in the village and government protection of rural economies.

We took a bus from El Paso across the border, down into the northern state of Chihuahua. A common problem throughout the Mexican countryside has been that since the signing of NAFTA, the United States can dump its cheap government-subsidized maize into Mexico and other maize-growing countries. This virtually eliminates a market for the corn grown by Mexican campesinos (small farmers), and undermines rural economic sustainability. In Chihuahua, we met with campesinos from the Democratic Farmer’s Front (FDC), a movement that advocates for campesino rights in Chihuahua and has representation in the Mexican Congress. On one hand Chihuahua, like so many Mexican states, is an exporter of migrant labor to the US. On the other hand, it absorbs many internal migrants from further south in Mexico, because there is (relatively) more industry up north than there is in southern states like Chiapas and Oaxaca. But when the FDC took us to a town in Chihuahua called Anáhuac, we found something interesting. Anáhuac is home to a supermarket called El Ranchero Solidario, which purchases fresh produce, cheeses, meats, and grains from local farmers (no US-grown maize here!) El Ranchero Solidario is not any old supermarket – it is a cooperative, a collaborative effort between the FDC and local campesinos consisting of fifty-two members, all of whom can join the FDC’s credit savings union, all of whom earn a living wage at the supermarket (where maize prices are based on those of the Chicago Stock Exchange). None of the fifty-two cooperative members or their children have migrated to the US.

Whereas in Chihuahua, a key strength for rural sustainable development was the economic strategizing behind El Ranchero Solidario, further south in Mexico, we saw farmers putting sustainable agroecology into practice. In the village of Vicente Guerrero, in Tlaxcala (which is east of Mexico City, and whose indigenous population prides itself on having never been conquered by the Aztecs), farmers, largely with the help of the Mexican Friends Service Committee since the 1970s, have been building terraces for hillside soil conservation, increasing agro-biodiversity through intercropping and woodlots, and reviving the milpa (an indigenous Mesoamerican system of growing maize, beans, and squash side-by-side). The NGO Grupo Vicente Guerrero engages in political organizing at the state and national levels, so as to protect traditional agriculture and resist the factors – namely, the importation of cheap US corn and the power of agribusiness monopoly – that drive small farmers out of existence. Such political organizing was also evident in the primarily Zapotec village of Guelatao, in Oaxaca.

It was uplifting to see small farmers throughout the length of Mexico trying to do something to prevent the causes of US migration. At the same time, the grim reality couldn’t be ignored: there are countless villages – in Tlaxcala, Oaxaca, and beyond – that are full of women, children, and elders, but whose young men are gone, looking for work “up north.” This puts a strain on communities and families, with women having to be both “mothers” and “fathers” to their children. The fact remains that wages are better in the US, than they are in Mexico. There hasn’t been overall significant economic growth in Mexican villages, aside from a few exceptional cases like El Rancho Solidario in Anáhuac; US remittance money is the lifeblood of so many villages. (Vicente Guerrero couldn’t have built its new health clinic without remittances.) And yet these days, the US is in a major economic recession; when the cash flow from up north slows down, it greatly weakens village economic activity. It means that people in small Mexican towns and villages can barely scrape together enough money to buy some beans and rice.

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