An Impossible Living in a Transborder World: Culture, Confianza, and Economy of Mexican-Origin Populations

6. Conclusions

6 Conclusions From a transborder and transnational perspective, previous chapters have discussed the widespread use of rotating savings and credit associations (ROSCAs) by Mexican-origin populations. As I have indicated, this practice has expanded throughout many social sectors in the United States and Mexico. Its distribution across classes, occupations, and residential areas and its commercialization all speak to the expansion of the Mexican population throughout the Southwest North American Region and throughout rural areas, hamlets, suburban villages, towns, cities, and megacities in both countries. Changes in local, regional, national, and transnational economies, simultaneously facilitated by rapid communication and transportation, fueled this expansion. It is among the most important and largest demographic explosions in North America itself since the European migration of the nineteenth century to the eastern shores of the United States and the great shift of people moving from rural to urban Mexico in the late 1960s and early 1970s. This development, as I have suggested, resulted in the creation of asymmetrical, but increasingly transborder, integrated economies. Here, postindustrial capitalism seeks untouched but available markets, and it transforms traditional agricultural, construction, mining, transportation , and assembly sectors. This transformation and the search for available new markets are the causal bases for the migration of Mexicanorigin populations within and across political borders. Conversely, they are also the sources of Mexico’s national dependence on remittances, which are crucial for local development in Mexico. As I have shown and hypothesized, the Southwest North American Region is becoming a “central place” from and through which billions of dollars pass and millions of people traverse and settle, and settle and traverse . This region has a demographic dynamic that radiates east to New York, northwest to Alaska, south to Mississippi, and to Kansas, Indiana, and Iowa in the Midwest. Some parts of the region have seen the development of “Regions of Refuge,” made up of thousands of people living Conclusions 183 in colonias on both sides of the border. In many cases, illegal settlers simply “invaded” the land, or they bought empty lots without getting legal title to them. No codes or regulations guided the development of these settlements, and many of them lack infrastructure, including potable water. These refuges offer the last desperate hope for possessing hearth and home (Vélez-Ibáñez 1996; 2004a). Figure 4.1 illustrated the movement of the Mexican economy to its northern border. The ROSCA is but one transborder economic and cultural practice that constitutes part of the social and economic practices and relationships of the developing center. Coupled with the hundreds of transborder rituals, relationships, religious ideologies, child-rearing practices, businesses at multiple levels, and types of economy and social organization that radiate from and across the border region, ROSCAs provide an additional cultural platform for the emergence and reproduction of transborder culture. As has been described, ROSCAs form from the networks of exchange that, at times, cross class divisions and cultural boundaries. Women participants , especially, reinforce the deutero-learned ability to save and to invest in social relations as part and parcel of the necessary mechanisms under which ROSCAs operate. Indeed, these networks and their accompanying ROSCAs are slantwise practices, as I have explained. In other words, these are innovations that utilize available social capital, relatively stable contexts (such as institutions, workplaces, neighborhoods, and now, Internet networks), and that skirt formal economic institutions in places where none exist or where social and economic obstacles make them closed to certain participants. Rotating savings and credit associations are the most handy, culturally congruent forms that “fit” the material—and certainly the social—needs of participating populations . These persons are positioned between the “interstices” of formal legal, economic, political, and social structures, and their participation in ROSCAs (prominently, the participation of women) crosscuts hierarchies of class, gender, and culture. Equally importantly, however, ROSCAs contribute to the development of a transborder regional identity, which—when combined with all of the other constant reminders of the presence of the border—reinforces a multidimensional cultural approach and practice that inevitably transcends a single unitary format of national “citizenship.” Daily, Mexican-origin populations practice both Mexican and American civic duties and obligations and lead civil lives on both sides of the border, 184 Chapter 6 but this is only one part of a plethora of cultural views, relationships, and practices that are uncoded and thus not within expected civic and citizenship cues, scripts, and behaviors based only on nationality. To illustrate...