The Xaripu Community Across Borders: Labor Migration, Community, and Family (review)

The recent wave of U.S. immigration from Latin American includes numerous migrant populations with Pre-Columbian origins. Among these new immigrants are Quechua-speaking migrants from the Andes, Maya from Guatemala and indigenous populations from Mexico. A growing literature describes the migration experiences of these and other indigenous groups. Manuel Barajas's The Xaripu Community Across Borders adds to this collection. One question that migration from Latin America to the United States raises for this reviewer is whether it differs significantly for the indigenous vs. non-indigenous.

Barajas offers several insights to address this question in his study of Xaripu labor migration from the Mexican state of Michoacán to California. After reviewing various structural perspectives, Barajas settles mainly on colonization and transnational migration, with special attention to gender issues, to analyze Xaripu migration to the United States, which began in the early 20^th century. The research method of his study includes interviews with 56 Xaripu migrants (former and recent) and non-migrants born in the United States, which are categorized according to generational experiences. Barajas's ethnographic data base, however, is much wider, because he also draws from his lifelong participation in Xaripu family and community events.

For Barajas, colonialism is the overarching structural framework of Xaripu migration to the United States. The Xaripu today have been much affected by historical colonization and they migrate across and within "colonial hierarchies"(7) of capitalism formed through ethnic and racial social structures. According to Barajas, "[m]igration flows to the core regions [e.g., the United States] are stimulated by neocolonialism,"(48) and he cites the recent immigrant sources of Mexico, the Philippines, China/Taiwan, South Korea and Vietnam to illustrate his point. But what Barajas is citing is mainly the most recent wave of immigration, which of course does not include the earlier, larger waves of immigration from Great Britain and northern and western Europe — regions not colonized by the United States (although many Irish immigrants came from a British colonial experience). This comparison across migration waves suggests something about present-day indigenous migration from Latin America to the United States, that by the 20^th century, especially the late 20^th century, the bonds of colonialism were loose enough for indigenous populations to seek international, socio-spatial strategies of economic survival, if not actual social mobility. In Guatemala, for example, it was not until the 1940s that participation in forced labor ended for landless Mayan peasants.

Indigenous peoples and mestizos (Latin Americans of mixed Spanish and indigenous descent) may share the same migrant trails on the journey north, but different socio-historical forces, which for the indigenous are more closely related to their ethnicity and race, propel their northward trek. In other words, indigenous peoples and mestizos from Latin America migrate to the United States due to fairly similar causes (economic need) but for different reasons. (This is better explained in Spanish as the difference between motivo and razón.)

A second part to the question is whether indigenous migrants posses special cultural materials that enable them or organize their migration (and settlement) differently from mestizos, admittedly within the constraints of unauthorized migration that severely limit the possibilities of different social strategies. Barajas offers insights into this question with the concept of convivencia. Although not exclusively a Xaripu term, convivencia, characterized by Barajas as "on-going social interaction, shared culture and affection in the making of community,"(154) seems to draw out social and cultural elements to facilitate a sense of cohesion in the Xaripu migrant community, and to do so in a way that extends beyond the concept of social capital much-used in migration studies. Although seldom explained, social capital is first a dependent variable, i.e., the accumulation of favors due to someone (hence the term capital), before it becomes an independent variable; however, convivencia among the Xaripu originates as an ascribed condition of being born Xaripu, and especially in the...