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20  Zapotec migration into the United States is not a new phenomenon. It started in the first half of the twentieth century and continues until now. In Los Angeles , the Zapotec community is composed of various Zapotec immigrant village communities from the Central Valleys and the Sierra Norte and the Sierra Sur of the state of Oaxaca. This migration includes the earliest immigrants and their U.S.-born children, in addition to recent immigrants with native-born or foreign-born descendants. Yalálag Zapotec migration in California is part of this migratory population movement and reflects its own history and patterns of migration and settlement in Los Angeles.1 In the early 1940s, the Yalaltecos began to migrate to northern California and then gradually settled in southern California over the past four decades. Currently, the majority of the Yalaltec immigrants live in Los Angeles and, along with their children, they may number more than those living in their village community in Yalálag. To understand five decades of Yalaltec migration and settlement in the United States,it is important to consider the following facts.Better job opportunities and more attractive wages elsewhere, coupled with Yalálag’s high levels of unemployment , poverty, scarce social services and education programs, and inadequate medical services have encouraged Yalaltecos to immigrate within Mexico and to the United States. This migration movement cannot be described as a one-way, direct, and homogeneous process. Some Yalaltecos came to Los Angeles from Yalálag, others from Oaxaca City, while others hailed from Mexico City. This migration comprises a mix of three generations—the bracero generation, the children of the bracero immigrants, and the braceros’ grandchildren. This chapter uses an ethnographic approach to examine the history of Yalaltec migration into the United States. By using life-history narratives throughout five decades of international migration, I describe when, how, and why Yalaltec men and women have come to California. Individual and family experiences of Yalaltecos who started the first and subsequent waves of migration into Los Angeles reveal a c h a p t e r 1 THE YALÁLAG ZAPOTECS a town of immigrants The Yalálag Zapotecs 21 distinctive trajectory of migration, permanent settlement, and community formation in the United States.2 The Pioneers: From Seasonal Migration to Permanent Settlement in Los Angeles Yalaltec migration into the United States began in the mid-1940s, when a group of American contractors were recruiting impoverished male peasants in Oaxaca City to work in the Bracero Program as farm laborers on short-term contracts in northern California (de la Fuente 1949, 35).3 The program continued until the mid-1960s, and today, a few Yalaltec men in their late seventies and eighties remember their teens, twenties, and thirties as the time when they left Yalálag to work in the California fields as braceros. Some of these braceros remember that they were employed in Oaxaca City when they were teenagers as domestic workers when they learned about the opportunity to go work in the United States. Others recall being young adults who worked in their corn and coffee fields in Yalálag when their bi gwlash (countrymen) who returned from Oaxaca City to Yalálag invited them to go to work in California. Some Yalaltec men and women who are now in their late forties and fifties have memories of their fathers and grandfathers working as braceros in California. Segismundo Molina, who went to northern California to work as a bracero, remembers that Yalaltec migration started in the fields of northern California in 1945 with Benito Mecinas, Antonio Fabian, Rubén Fabian, and Pedro Ríos. Cándido Primo, an eighty-one-year-old man who now lives in Yalálag recalls that in the early 1960s, he went to Stockton and Trinidad, California, with two friends to work legally (see fig. 1.1). In those years, Cándido was married and had one daughter. His plans were to go to the United States to make money to build his house and buy his own land and cattle. As he explains: C: In 1960, when I was selling coffee and clothes in the Mixe region, I heard that a group of American contractors was in Oaxaca City again, hiring peasants to work in California. When I returned to Yalálag, I asked my friends Jovillo and Juventino Maldonado if they wanted to go to California. We were a little bit scared of leaving Yalálag because we heard things...

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