The Culture of Migration in Southern Mexico (review)

This book is a serious effort to fill a gap in the Mexico-U.S. migration literature concerning how various local contextual factors (e.g., family expectations and structure, community obligations and development) and several migration outcomes (e.g., whether and where to migrate, remittance behavior and impacts) affect one another. Drawing on data collected from 590 households in twelve ethnically diverse and indigenous migrant-sending communities located in Oaxaca's central valleys from the mid-1990s to the early 2000s, the author and his collaborators amass an impressive amount of detailed information from random household surveys, interviews with community leaders, and oral histories with key informants. In short, this study skillfully integrates anthropological and demographic methods in a way which offers a deeper understanding of how migration effects and is affected by familial and community context than is typically found in the immigration literature. It should be read especially by those scholars whose work concentrates mainly on Mexican immigrants residing in the United States.

The conceptual foundation of the book is a three-pronged cultural model of migration that is contrasted with migration as individual psychological addiction (or dependency) and with migration as aggregate economic growth (or development) at the regional or national level. Specifically, and as outlined in the book's introduction, the decision to migrate is rooted in the household and it is the household rather than the individual migrant that is the center of analytical attention. It is also the household rather than the individual that has broader communal obligations and expectations, thus both the household and community directly influence and are influenced by whether an individual migrates, a migrant's geographic destination, and a migrant's remitting behavior. Such a household-based approach conforms nicely to developments in the demographic and sociological literatures on immigration to the United States since Massey and colleagues' pioneering theoretical and empirical studies (Massey et al. 1993, 1994).

However, neither the act of migrating nor of remitting is the main variable under investigation here. Or is it? The reader, or at least this one, is unsure. The author spends a considerable amount of space stressing the point that to focus on the individual as decision-maker "misrepresents the ways in which households and communities inform how migrants define their social world" (p.23). Thus, it is reported that fewer than 10% of migrant households indicated having had a missing or uninvolved migrant when interviewed (p. 32), and "rather than focusing on why a migrant leaves … [the] focus here [is] on the organization of the migrant household" (p. 34). Infact, the focus is on why a migrant leaves (as is eventually stated on page 100) and it is on how differences between migrant (chapter 4) and non-migrant (chapter 5) households may influence this. In any event, the uncertainty of what is really being investigated is compounded by conflicting statements such as "decisions to migrate and to use remittances are made by households, but outcomes are still determined by the actions of individuals" (p. 34); "households are able to migrate, seek wage labor in Oaxaca City, and use their earnings to pursue their own and their household's desires" (p. 48); and "nevertheless, a migrant - that is, an individual - makes the final decision" to stay or leave (p. 48). In short, it is unclear whether the author ultimately seeks to understand what explains migrant and remitting behavior or how these impact households (or families) of local central valley communities in Oaxaca.

Despite this analytical distraction and several citation (Marcelli and Cornelius 2001) and referencing errors (Massey et al. 1987) in the first two chapters (Introduction and Chapter 1), there is much to recommend their reading. First, the ceremonial claim that traditional push-pull models are insufficient for understanding migration outcomes is explained rather than simply asserted. Both geography and tradition are necessary non-essentialist components of any model attempting to explain variation in where migrants choose to go and...