The purpose of my summer research in Puebla, Mexico was to obtain an impression of attitudes and perceptions in sending communities regarding the transnational activities of migrants who have relocated to suburban New Jersey. My research questions, at their broadest, had to do with the way transnational linkages are altered through migration to suburban areas. Does migration to a suburban space decrease immigrants’ ability to maintain transnational connections? If so, what specific factors (race, economics, previous immigrant population) discourage transnationalism, and what would an alternative to previously studied urban transnationality (such as that seen in Robert Smith’s Mexican New York [2006]) look like? Does the suburb, a place coded for white, private, middle-class life, provide the same resources for transnational community building as the more immigrant-rich city? And finally, how does migration of family members to suburban areas affect perceptions of transnational migration in the sending region?
One major acquisition from my trip to Puebla was the opportunity to collaborate with Mexican scholars and graduate students at the Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla (B.U.A.P.), where several researchers have developed a literature on migration from Puebla to the New York metropolitan area and its most salient sociological impacts. Through my contacts at the B.U.A.P., I was able to access a body of literature unavailable in the United States that deals specifically with the geographical population that forms the focus of my study. This literature includes works that focus on the effects of protracted migration on sending communities, as well as on those who migrate. Works by Binford (2004), Cordero Díaz (2007), and D’Aubeterre (2000) provide a more Marxist approach to the migration patterns than generally appears in the American literature on this topic, while another set of works by Marroni (2000) and De la Tejera (2003) focus on the effects of migration on rural women and on kinship networks. Having access to Mexican scholarship otherwise unavailable in the United States contributes to my ability to interpret suburban migration as part of a transnational migration process.
Besides gaining insights via this literature, my fieldwork also confirmed and denied some of my hypotheses and contributed to my understanding of the state of transnational ties between suburban migrants and their relatives in Mexico. Having established during fieldwork in New Jersey during May and June that a large number of migrants originated in the city of Atlixco and its surrounding rural pueblos, and given my previous acquaintance with that area and several informants there, I focused my interviews in and around Atlixco (approximately 25 kilometers from the state capital, Puebla). Principally, I focused interviews in the town of Santa Ana Acozautla, and informants brought me to another town, Santo Domingo Atoyatempan for additional interviews. Atlixco is a regional commercial center with a population of about 85,000; the aforementioned pueblos are small, rural towns within the greater municipios of Atlixco and San Isabel Cholula.
Several patterns that emerged from my interviews reflect some interesting points about the state of everyday transnational activity (or human collectivity-based transnationalism, based on daily life or “bottom-up” informal activities in Atlixco. The first has to do with communication with relatives in New Jersey. Participants reported the frequency of communication with relatives as varying from multiple times a week to approximately once every month. Communication consisted exclusively of telephone calls (no participant reported using the internet or other form of communication, except for letters, which had fallen out of favor with the advent of better phone communication). A combination of home phones, cell phones, and public phones were used by informants to maintain connections with their relatives in the United States. One indicator of a high level of transnational organization is the involvement of migrants abroad in local politics, as seen in studies by numerous scholars of transnational migration (Glick Schiller 1994; Smith 2006; Levitt 2001; Goldring 2002). As such, I asked participants if their telephone conversations with relatives in New Jersey included such subjects. The answers were almost universally to the negative; as one participant whose four brothers and sisters and father live in Red Bank, New Jersey put it, “Pues nadamás [nos hablan] de sus familias…de sus hijos, de sus maridos.” The members of these communities, seem to communicate little in their weekly phone calls about matters outside of the limits of the family.
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Patron saint festivals funded with dollars from migrant relatives were one of the few instances in which transnational participation outside of the family was observed.
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Another aspect in which transnational activities seemed largely restricted to the family were remittances. Participants noted that remittances came with varying regularity, depending on the economic situation of their relatives in New Jersey. There was a great deal of evidence that remittance money went towards home construction, with large-scale construction projects visible throughout both towns that formed the focus of my study. Participants indicated that the pace of construction was almost entirely contingent on the consistent arrival of money from the United States. As other studies, such as Robert Smith’s in Mexican New York, have pointed out, part of formalized transnational connections involve the putting to use of remittance money in local projects. This seems not to be the case in Santa Ana and Santo Domingo, with the key exception of moneys sent for the purposes of patron saint festivals, for which migrants earmarked specific moneys to be applied to festivities.
Another observation that came from my fieldwork has to do with the degree of disconnect in terms of interpersonal interactions and the transference of knowledge about the place of reception through migrant networks. First, none of the participants I interviewed during this brief fieldwork cited a close relationship with other community members who had family members living in the same communities in the United States. This, I believe, suggests a lower level of transnational organization on the Mexican side than in other studies, such as Smith’s, that focus on communities in the Mixteca region of southern Puebla. Another interesting observation has to do with the type of information passed along migrant networks regarding the receiving area in suburban New Jersey. I asked participants what their relatives had told them about where they were living in the United States—how it differed from their hometown, what sort of place it was, and who their neighbors were. The following response was typical: “Pues nos dicen que hay partes que parecen que es campo, pero no van en mucho detalle.” Only vague impressions of the receiving city seemed to reach Mexico through telephone communication.
One final observation that I deduced from interviews had to do with the effect of family members who had migrated marrying, having children, or generally starting a family in the United States on maintaining a connection with family in Mexico. Participants indicated that these actions tended to reduce the frequency of family members returning to Mexico for visits, communicating via telephone, and sending remittances.
These observations are only initial interpretations of my research experience this summer. I have much more analysis to do in order to corroborate whether or not family members’ moving to a suburban area affects in some way their maintenance of transnational connections with home communities. What I was able to corroborate was the low level of formal transnational activity (hometown associations, returning for community events, and involvement in local politics, for example) in the Atlixco-New Jersey migrant network. I was also able to correct some misperceptions from an earlier research trip in 2006, where I had inaccurately perceived people in small towns around Atlixco to be much more isolated from the urban activities of that city than they in fact are. This research experience provided me with important insights that will allow me to more accurately portray the life migrants in suburban New Jersey leave behind in my thesis.
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