Dans cet article, on analyse le remplacement des travailleurs antillais par des Mexicains dans le Programme des travailleurs agricoles saisonniers du gouvernement du Canada, en mettant l'accent sur le rôle des interprétations racialisées dans la mise en œuvre de ce genre de programme. On y soutient qu'un mécanisme de racialisation étaie les discours des agriculteurs ontariens à la recherche de la main‐d œuvre la plus laborieuse, fiable et flexible. Parfois même, les discours des agriculteurs affichent un racisme grossier, dépeignant les honimes antillais comme des Noirs hypersexués qui présentent un risque pour les Canadiennes, alors que, d'autres fois, ces préjugés raciaux sont formulées en termes de prédispositions physiques ou psychologiques à travailler à certaines récoltes. This paper analyses the replacement of Caribbean workers by Mexicans in Canada's Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program, highlighting the role of racialized understandings in implementing foreign worker programs. It argues that a process of racialization underpins the discourses employed by Ontario growers in search of the most hardworking, reliable and flexible labour force. Sometimes grower discourses manifest a crude racism, casting Caribbean men as hypersexualized Black subjects who pose a risk to Canadian women, while other times these racialized assumptions are framed in terms of physical and/or psychic dispositions to the production of certain crops.

This article examines two heuristically defined positions regarding the relationship between international migration and rural economic development in Mexico: the `structuralist' or `historical structuralist' position of the 1970s and early 1980s that argued that remittances do not lead to rural economic development; and the `functionalist' position of the 1990s that argued the opposite. The author critiques systematically the functionalist position, then situates it politically in the context of failed neoliberal economic policies. He argues for the need to study international migration as a total social process, that takes into account the comparative impact of migrant labor on the US and Mexican economies. Despite its subordination of social actors to determining social structures, the structural approach offers a better starting point for a reformulated approach to the social and economic consequences of international migration in the contemporary world.

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From March 1981, when a radical local administration took office, the municipality of Juchitán, Oaxaca, located in the Southern Isthmus of Tehuantepec, has been in the national (and more recently the international) spotlight. The newly elected officials were from the COCEI, the Coalición de Obreros, Campesinos y Estudiantes del Istmo (Coalition of Workers, Peasants and Students of the Isthmus), a radical local political group which had, for tactical reasons, formed an electoral alliance with the Mexican Communist Party (since August 1981 the leading component of the PSUM or Unified Socialist Party of Mexico, organized to contest the 5982 presidential election). Land reform was one of the major issues — along with municipal corruption and the paucity of educational, health and other services — mobilized substantial proportions of a largely agricultural-based population to support the COCEI against the PRI, the Revolutionary Institutional Party which has ruled Mexico without serious challenge since 1929.