Mexican mass labor migration in a not-so changing political economy

Abstract

This article places Mexican migration in the context of the longue durée of Mexican-U.S. political and economic relations. We argue that 21st-century migration not only has its roots in the 19th century, but very much resembles its early predecessor. The latest wave of migration is just the most recent iteration of a process of hegemonic dominance over Mexico, a process that has been for the most part ongoing since the late 1800s. It continues to be rooted in labor migration caused by unequal economic policy between the two countries. The paper builds upon the empire theory of migration literature in lieu of the neutral-seeming ''natural'' ''push-pull'' of markets and living conditions or social capital theories, and provides a more power-driven analysis stressing hegemony and domination in which the United States exerts control over Mexico for the purposes of exploiting cheap labor and raw materials.

Policing the Anticommunity: Race, Deterritorialization, and Labor Market Reorganization in South Los Angeles

“…South LA's black residents, interpreted as unsuitable for a restructured service economy predicated on subpoverty wages and informal employment, are an anticommunity removed to make room for a vulnerable Latino proletariat. Deterritorialization is consistent with anti‐black racism, while Ibarra and Carlos () remind us that the exploitation of Latino labor made desperate by U.S. trade and investment policy is an old story. Put another way, governmental rhetoric on community is made necessary by structural adjustment, but made possible by degrading urban black populations as the ultimate anticommunity.…”

“…Although the role of community in state governance is an expanding subfield (Edwards and Hughes ; Herbert ; Rose ), it is important not to read these trends as entirely novel, but rather as a historical iteration of exploiting Latin American migrants and erasing black community self‐determination (Ibarra and Carlos ; Muhammad ; Wilderson ). The focus on LA's economy here should not be taken as a challenge to more culturalist analyses of race, but rather as a supplement to them.…”

“…These demographic shifts are also linked to the vast urban restructuring that LA has undergone since the 1970s (Soja ; Soja, Morales, and Wolff ). The rise of LA's bifurcated service and information economy in place of its postwar manufacturing dominance has provided the area with limited job growth, swelling the Latino population of South LA by pulling immigrants from Mexico and Central America (Ibarra and Carlos ; Valle and Torres ). Such a post‐Fordist arrangement allows for both investment in high status, high income technology and entertainment industries on the one hand and a supportive economy of workers carrying out low‐status, labor‐intensive tasks on the other.…”

It Starts by Asking the Right Questions - Meeting the Needs of the Hispanic Community in Public Libraries

“…One can argue that, for most immigrants, one of the top reasons to come to the US is to look for a better way to provide for their families. For example, Ibarra and Carlos (2015) explain that Mexicans (more specifically, Mexican men) are coming to the U.S. in the hope of finding work that enables them to send money back to family members. They situate this reason for migration within the context of the unequal economic arrangements between the U.S. and Mexico, explaining that large-scale migration "is the direct byproduct of political economic arrangements stemming from a hegemonic conquest of a country's economic and political structures through forced economic arrangements coupled with propaganda to justify these arrangements" (215).…”