Understanding Transnational Processes: Modeling ... - Semantic Scholar

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10.1177/1525822X03257391 FIELD Cohen METHODS et al. / UNDERSTANDING TRANSNATIONAL PROCESSES

Understanding Transnational Processes: Modeling Migration Outcomes in the Central Valleys of Oaxaca, Mexico JEFFREY H. COHEN Pennsylvania State University

ALICIA SYLVIA GIJÓN-CRUZ Universidad Autónoma “Benito Júarez” de Oaxaca

RAFAEL G. REYES-MORALES Instituto Tecnológico de Oaxaca

GARRY CHICK Pennsylvania State University This article reviews a systematic approach to the study of transnational migration in the central valleys of Oaxaca, Mexico. The authors argue that the investigation of transnational migration should be more than an exercise in labeling outcomes. They show that it is possible to model and score transnational outcomes for individual migrants and migrant households and understand variations in sending practices of local communities. They illustrate this point using data from the investigation of eleven communities in Oaxaca. Keywords:

transnationalism; migration; households; Mexico

Over the past several years, we have investigated migration and the use of remittances in rural communities of the central valleys of Oaxaca, Mexico. Our team of investigators from Pennsylvania State University and the Instituto Tecnológico de Oaxaca had three goals: (1) to understand the history and development of migration in the central valleys, (2) to define the An earlier version of this article was presented at the Invited Session “Globalizing Methodologies: Research Issues” (AAA Executive Program Committee) at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association, San Francisco, Saturday 18 November 2000. Support for this project came from the National Science Foundation grant no. 9875539, the Department of Anthropology at Pennsylvania State University, the Pennsylvania State University’s Population Research Institute, and the Instituto Tecnológico de Oaxaca. We thank our many fieldworkers and the towns that were gracious enough to allow us to complete our work. Thanks also to Patricia Johnson, Paul Durrenburger, Russ Bernard, and the reviewers selected for this piece. Any errors remain the sole responsibility of the authors. Field Methods, Vol. 15, No. 4, November 2003 366–385 DOI: 10.1177/1525822X03257391 © 2003 Sage Publications

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variables that contribute to a household member’s decision to migrate, and (3) to understand the effects of migration at the household and the community level. The movement of Mexicans back and forth across the border with the United States is part of a global phenomenon called transnationalism. While the phenomenon is well known (and applies conceptually to population movements in many parts of the world; see Basch, Schiller, and Blanc 1994; Massey et al. 1998), it has so far been used only heuristically rather than as a variable with known properties and relationships to other variables. The work we report here is a first step in developing a method for measuring transnationalism at the individual and household levels and for understanding patterns of variation at the community level.

TRANSNATIONALISM AND TRANSNATIONAL MIGRATION Transnationalism is rooted in Hannerz’s (1996:7) concept of the “global ecumene,” or the “interactions, exchanges, and related developments, affecting not least the organization of culture.” Hannerz argued that an emerging global ecumene connects local populations and local cultures to global systems in increasingly intimate ways. The results are complex pluralities that cross landscapes and boundaries via media, migrants, and commerce as well as by the interactions of parents and children (Hannerz 1998). Kearney (1996:112) developed the idea of “freeways” to describe the flow of people, goods, and services in transnational space. He contrasted the emergence of transnational freeways in the late twentieth century with roads. Whereas the former is a “multidirectional means of communication” across space and implicated in “the process of complex differentiation,” the latter is a unidirectional path with definite beginnings and ends, lacking linkages to anything beyond the local system. Unlike roads, freeways integrate social actors and their households and communities with a nearly infinite number of networks and potential points of access. Transnational migrants follow these freeways and are able to articulate or integrate with receiving communities while still participating in the social and cultural life of their sending villages (Kearney 2000). The linkages these migrants develop supersede and sometimes even undermine the state and its authority structures (see the discussions in Rivera-Salgado [1999] and Rouse [1995]). The examples of the ways in which migrants create new opportunities and engage the state while remaining embedded in local cultural processes are critical to understanding how migration has changed for rural Mexicans over

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the past two decades. Nevertheless, there is little discussion of how one might study or approach the analysis of transnational migration. Portes, Guarnizo, and Haller (2002:279) correctly described the situation and noted, “Qualitative case studies consistently sample on the dependent variable, that is, they document in detail the characteristics of immigrants involved in transnational activities, but say little about those who are not [transnational movers].” In other words, we know a good bit about what a transnational migrant is and what he or she looks like once arrived in the United States. What we do not understand as well are the motivations for transnational migration and what transnationalism means for the households and sending communities that are left behind. Our objective is to discover patterns in transnational migration as manifest in the decisions made by individual migrants and in their sending households and communities. After reviewing our survey design and data collection, we ask, How can we measure transnational migration outcomes for individuals in rural Oaxacan households? In response, we develop a measure that allows us to score outcomes based on a series of variables that define patterns of association between migrants and their sending households. In the next part of the article, we explore ways in which we can measure, predict, and evaluate the transnational status of migrant households. We note rates of movement and the circularity of that movement, remittance practices, and the continued participation of migrants in home life. We also explore the role that migrant and nonmigrant households play in their communities through the analysis of traditional reciprocal practices and participation in local government. In the case of rural Oaxacan households, these include a household’s participation in tequio (communal labor), cooperación (the payment of funds to support community programs and events), and the cargo system (a civil and religious hierarchy that manages community affairs; see Cohen [1999] for a detailed introduction to these areas). The third part of our discussion focuses on the variations in migration that were manifest among the eleven communities surveyed for this study. Here we use a correspondence analysis to plot both communities and outcomes as defined by four possible migration decisions, the decision not to migrate, to follow a local commute or circuit to Oaxaca City, to move nationally and within Mexico’s boundaries, and to move to the United States. To move from heuristic models to explanatory frameworks, we make a few basic assumptions concerning migration and transnationalism. First, we frame the decision to migrate as economic. Rural Oaxacans migrate to jobs in the United States, attracted by the promise of high wages, particularly in relation to what is available locally. Second, if there is transnational migration, then we assume that migrants should not sever kin ties to their natal house-

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holds and social ties to their communities, and we should not find a decline in a migrant households’ community participation. Rather, transnational migrants should build on household social networks and traditional patterns of association, and the outcome should be the continued integration of the sending households in their communities (Itzigsohn and Saucedo 2002; Kearney 2000). Finally, we propose that we can measure transnational outcomes by the presence and relative value of familial, friend, and community networks in decisions concerning destinations and remittance rates by the rate of community participation among migrant households (and in relation to nonmigrant households) and by the relative importance of transnational migration in relation to other kinds of moves.

SURVEY DESIGN Rural Oaxacan migration is a largely understudied area. With far fewer migrants leaving Oaxaca than Mexico’s traditional sending regions (see, for example, Durand, Massey, and Charvet 2000), work in the state has focused largely on community studies rather than on regional analysis of outcomes (Grimes 1998; Hulshof 1991). Furthermore, much of the work on transnational Oaxacans has focused on the U.S. end of the migrant cycle rather than on sending communities (see Rivera-Salgado 1999). In an effort to correct for these gaps in our knowledge, we systematically investigated migration outcomes and remittance use in the central valley. We began our investigations by collecting general information on each community through interviews with local leaders and work in state archives (including INEGI, the National Institute for Statistics, Geography, and Information) to collect background data. In the next step, we created an inventory that documents local resources including the presence and prevalence of infrastructural features, including utilities (electricity and water), roads that provide access to Oaxaca City and to schools, various forms of transportation, and ongoing and completed community development projects. We also documented the features of the local economy, including the numbers and types of businesses. We combined this material with household surveys in rural communities to define patterns of work, migration, consumption, and community participation in local populations. We focused on the household because it is the base from which develop the key social networks, relationships, and cultural beliefs that define and limit the resources available to individual actors (see, for example, Wiest 1973; Netting, Wilk, and Arnould 1984; Wilk 1989,1991; Pennartz and Niehof 1999). Additionally, the actions of any indi-

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vidual (whether rooted in the well-being of the household and community or in escaping a family’s clutches) have ramifications for the maintenance and reproduction of the domestic group and community (see Conway and Cohen 1998). We randomly selected 11 municipios, or counties, in Oaxaca’s central valleys from a list of the 112 municipios located in the five central valley districts of the state (Etla, Tlacolula, Ocotlan, Centro, Zimatlan).1 We had to replace 1 municipio where investigators were pursuing a detailed study of migration, 2 that lacked bus service and roads to Oaxaca City, and 1 that had become a suburb of the city. The 4 replacement municipios were selected randomly from the remainder of the list. In each community, we surveyed 15% of the households, also randomly selected. The survey was a controlled, semistructured questionnaire that fieldworkers administered directly to informants once we had their oral consent. Across the 11 municipios, we obtained survey and ethnographic data on 590 households. 2 The first sections of the survey focused on household membership and organization (part 1), work (part 2), and migration experience (part 3). For each member of the household, we obtained data on age, gender, civil status, place of birth, current residence, languages spoken, and education. We recorded work histories for all members involved in household maintenance, paying attention to the nonwage and informal activities (particularly among women) that are typically crucial to the domestic group’s survival. We asked people to recount as many labor activities as they could remember and to identify how they combined various activities (farming and wage labor for example) to meet the needs of their domestic group. We identified migrants as we created inventories of a household’s members and their activities in parts 1 and 2. Part 3 of the survey focused specifically on international and transnational (that is, back-and-forth) migration. In this section, we tried to get a clear count of the number of migrants in a household as well as the number of trips each member made. This was typically where we identified individuals who had left and who no longer actively participated as members of a household. Migrants described their experiences. We asked them to list where they go, whom they travel with, how they organize money to cover the expenses of border crossing, their work in the United States, whom they stay with once they have settled, and the history of their remittances. In parts 4, 5, and 6, we asked about agriculture, household expenses, and housing. We created an inventory that included animals, goods and appliances, construction materials, and access to water and utilities (parts 4 and 5). We asked about weekly expenses for food, utilities, transportation, education, entertainment and healthcare, and how members cover those expenses

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(part 6). The last part of the survey focused on household members’ participation in the social life of their village (part 7). We noted members’ political service; their participation and sponsorship of local rituals; the reciprocal relationships they hold with other families; and their investment of time, money, and effort in village projects and programs. We elicited detailed responses on local social life, migration, and the structure of community with open-ended questions. After completing the surveys, we conducted follow-up interviews with community leaders and key informants (selected because they had responded enthusiastically to our surveys) to further document experiences. We also collected oral histories in each community. We asked older members of each village to recount their childhoods and their histories of movement and work. A second survey conducted in 2002 asked informants to respond to a series of Likert-type scale questions, paired comparisons, and triads. Questions covered motivations for migration, the use of remittances, and who was a typical migrant given a destination in Mexico or the United States. Paired comparisons and triads asked informants to select the best possible response to a series of work and migration outcomes as well as the impacts of migration and work decisions on family structure. The questions we asked were taken from a range of responses we had received in the original survey. We administered this questionnaire to thirty individuals who had responded to our original survey in three communities.

MIGRATION IN THE CENTRAL VALLEYS AND INDIVIDUAL MOTIVATIONS Oaxacans do not use terms like “transmigrant” to describe themselves when they migrate. Nor do they refer to their sojourns to the United States as “transnational.” Instead, they talk about migration, whether the destination is Mexico City (the most likely destination for an internal migrant) or Los Angeles (the destination mentioned most by migrants to the United States), using the same vocabulary and citing similar motivations. Informants throughout the central valleys chose the support of their household or the search for work as the most critical motivations for migration, regardless of destination. In other words, the decision to migrate is economic. While the responses of native Oaxacans captured the reasons they chose to migrate (and see Massey 1990:13), it did little to help us understand transnational outcomes and patterns. Thus, our first challenge was to define a model through which we might differentiate transnational migrants from

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those migrants who chose to leave natal households, remove themselves from social networks, and reject community participation. To determine the transnational quality of migration outcomes for U.S.bound Oaxacans, we needed to look beyond statements concerning the motivations for migration and develop a tool to measure and score outcomes. We assumed transnational migrants would rely on kin and community ties to succeed in their moves and that they would maintain strong ties to their sending households over time through their remittance practices. Itzigsohn and Saucedo (2002:771) called these “linear transnational” variables and argued that they measure the strength of the attachment between migrants and their sending households and communities. However, where Itzigsohn and Saucedo focused on outcomes at the time of migration, we also sought to understand the cumulative quality of these outcomes following Massey (1990:12), who argued migration is a self-sustaining process over time. Thus, we defined five variables that measure the strength of attachment between sending households and their migrating members who were traveling to the United States over time: 1. Migfrien noted the presence or absence of a relationships between the migrants and family or friends who had already experienced migration and was scored 1 or 0 for the presence or absence of these relationships. 2. Uscosts scored a 1 or 0 for the way in which migrants organized funds to cover their sojourns. A 1 was for those migrants who covered the costs of migration with funds from family, friends, or self, and a 0 was for migrants who turned to an employer or for any other possible outcomes. 3. Usstay scored 1 or 0 for whom migrants lived with once at their destination. A 1 was for migrants who settled with family, friends, or covillagers; and a 0 was for migrants who lived alone, with employers, or in some other situation. 4. Remtot is the total number of years during which migrants remitted funds home. 5. Totus is the total number of migrants the household had sent to the United States over time.

Rather than using each of these variables individually, we summed migfrien and uscosts (per migrant), usstay (per migrant), and remtot divided by totus to create transtot, a single transnational score for each individual migrant: Transtot = migfrien + uscost + usstay + remtot/totus.

Transtot scores for migrants ranged from 0 to 25 (see Table 1, which includes scores for both migrants and their households). Null scores were for those migrants (25% of the total) for whom we had no data beyond knowing

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TABLE 1 Transnational Scores

Mean Standard error of mean Median Mode Standard deviation Variance Minimum Maximum

Individuals (n = 323)

Households (n = 196)

2.999 0.251 2.000 0.000 3.509 12.314 0.000 25.000

4.026 0.394 2.000 0.000 5.511 30.374 0.000 36.000

NOTE: The total number of individuals (n = 323) includes all migrants from the 196 households that reported moving to the United States.

they were in the United States. These migrants may be important resources in sending communities, and certainly some of them open their homes to new migrants as they leave for sojourns in the United States; nevertheless, individuals who score 0 are not remitting and do not participate in the social reproduction of their sending households. The highest score, 25, referenced a migrant who followed a cousin to the United States (migfrien = 1). He paid for his sojourn with funds from his family (uscost = 1), and once in the United States, he lived with a cousin in Los Angeles (usstay = 1). Over twenty-two years of migration, he continued to remit funds to his sending household (remtot = 22). Scores for all rural Oaxacans averaged just less than 3 (2.999), and 75% of all migrants scored 4 or less. The scores reflect that most migrants follow family or friends to the United States and cover the costs of migration with family resources and/or stay with family once they settled in the United States. The scores also tell us that migrants are remitting (remtot/totus) for most of their stays, or 1.25 years of remitting for just less than 2 years of migration. These scores suggest that Oaxacans are transnational movers, but the phenomenon is relatively new for the region. To further test for the relationship of migration outcomes and times spent in the United States, we ran a bivariate correlation for transtotscores and indyearsus (total years spent in the United States per migrant). We obtained an estimate of the total years each migrant spent in the United States by dividing the total years of migration by the total number of migrants (indyearsus = totyearsus/totus). Transtot and indyearsus correlated (.4646, p = .000), so we can argue that Oaxacans who migrated are transnational movers; however, the question of whether transnational practices will continue over time and

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reinforce themselves cannot yet be fully answered by looking at individual migrants.

TRANSNATIONAL OUTCOMES AND HOUSEHOLDS Rural Oaxacans do not describe their households in transnational terms. Rather, they describe their households as homes that may include migrants. The number of migrants a household sends to the United States and the actions of those migrants once they are there has an effect on the structure, organization, and relative status of a household. To score migration outcomes for households, we again used Itzigsohn and Saucedo’s (2002) linear variables and measured the associations between sending households and the total number of their migrant members (transcore). We assumed that transnational households would know settled migrants (migfrien), would be more likely to cover the costs of migrations through savings and gifts from friends or family (uscost), and would send members to live with relatives in destination communities (usstay). Furthermore, we assumed that transnational households would depend on remittances from those migrants over time (remtot). Finally, whereas in defining outcomes for individuals, we divided the total score by the number of migrants in a household, in this case, we totaled all migrants in the household, giving us the following equation: Transcore = migfrien + remtot + totus (uscost + usstay).

The average overall score for households was 4.026 (see Table 1). However, the median score for households remained the same as for individual migrants, 2.00. Nevertheless, households were “more” transnational, and 25% of the households recorded scores of 5 or better. Thus, while migration outcomes for households did not differ a great deal from those for individuals, households showed longer periods of remitting (6.1 versus 1.25 years, although the mode remained 1 year). These findings further support our assumption that transnational movement is relatively new in the region and that migration to the United States has not yet matured as it has in central and northern Mexico (and see Durand, Massey, and Charvet 2000). To predict migration outcomes for households, we used a logistical regression. Because we believe migration decisions are inherently economic, we chose economic variables from the 259 independent variables available in our data set. We ran bivariate correlations to determine those

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TABLE 2 Logit Regression Predicting the Likelihood of Migration for Rural Oaxacans β Members Migfrien Goodssc Intercept

SE

.083 –2.268 .097 –.775

.057 .331 .036 .655

2

χ = 100.674 –2 log likelihood = 111.882 2 Cox and Snell R = .269 2 Nagelkereke R = .359 n = 321 p < .05. Predicted Are Migrants in the Households?

Percentage Correct

1

0

Observed Step 1: Are migrants in the households? Overall percentage

0 1

153 29 54 105

82.1 66.0 74.1

variables that were associated with migration and that would not build multicolinearity into our model. The result was a list of 13 variables, of which 3 were significant predictors of migration outcomes: the total members in the household (members), ties to individuals with migration experience (migfrien), and the goods and appliances owned by a family (goodssc). Goodssc tabulated the total number of key consumer goods and appliances present in the household. The variable included water heater, washing machine, shower, gas/electric stove, refrigerator, television, radio, vehicle, computer, iron, and sewing machine in its count and served as a proxy for the outcomes of remittance practices and a household’s disposable income. We measured outcomes using the dichotomous variable migpres (are migrants present in the household, where 1 = yes, 0 = no), as the dependent variable in a logistical regression. With the three independent variables described above, we were able to correctly predict outcomes in 74% of our cases, a significant improvement over the 50% to be expected by chance alone (see Table 2).

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To evaluate the impact of transnational migration for villages, we looked at the rate of migrant and nonmigrant household participation in community affairs (cptot). Cptot scored community service as follows, a 1 or 0 for the presence or absence of a household’s participation in tequio, a 1 or 0 for the presence or absence of a household’s participation in cooperación, and a score for the total number of cargos held by members of the household (totcargo). Scores for cargo participation ranged from 0 (no service) to 16 (holding sixteen positions in the cargo system over a household’s lifetime).3 We expected to find higher community participation scores for nonmigrant households and that nonmigrant households held more cargos over time, regardless of the destination. To test this assumption, we used twotailed t-tests to compare the variables cptot and totcargo for migrant and nonmigrant households. We found that for cptot, t = –1.45, df = 588, p = .147; while for totcargo, t = –0.32, df = 384, p = .746. In other words, there was no significant difference in scores for community service or the total number of cargos held for migrant and nonmigrant households. This further supports the idea that Oaxacans who migrate are transmigrants. Thus, even as they migrate to the United States, they continue to participate in the social reproduction of their communities as well as their households.

TRANSNATIONAL OUTCOMES AND COMMUNITY VARIATION Understanding community variation in patterns of movement and migration patterns was quite difficult. In addition to staying at home, rural Oaxacans talked about three kinds of moves they potentially make as they search for wage labor. About 40% of all rural Oaxacan households chose not to migrate and remained in their sending communities. Movers organized their travels around commutes to the state’s capital, Oaxaca City, and to other regional centers for work and education (13%), to internal destinations (13%) within Mexico (predominantly Mexico City), and finally, to the United States, where 35% of all migrants travel. While a majority of rural Oaxacans were involved in local commutes and internal or international migration (61%), there was much variation in the patterns of movement as defined by community (see Table 3). For example, migration to the United States ranged from a low of 15% of the households in San Pablo Huitzo to a high of 53% of Santa Ines Yatzeche’s households. To understand community-level variations in commuting and migration patterns we used a correspondence analysis.4 Figure 1 plots nonmigrant, commuter, internal migrant, and U.S.-bound migrant household outcomes

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TABLE 3 Moves and Migrations for Eleven Oaxacan Communities (N = 590) Internal U.S. Commuter Migrant Migrant Households Households Households

Households Surveyed

Nonmigrant Households

66 30 28 66 87 47 56 58 41 50 61

24 12 11 17 23 26 35 26 18 14 31

12 1 5 14 10 1 4 2 14 10 5

12 1 7 11 10 2 8 5 3 8 9

27 16 5 24 44 18 9 25 6 18 16

590

237

78

76

199

Guadalupe Etla Santa Ines Yatzeche Santa María Guelace San Juan del Estado San Juan Guelavia San Juan del Río San Lorenzo Albarradas San Martín Tilcajete San Pablo Huitzo San Pedro Ixtlahuaca Villa Díaz Ordaz Total

FIGURE 1 Correspondence Analysis, Migration Outcomes for Eleven Sending Communities 0.5 Internal migrants

0.3 Santa Maria Guelace Guadalupe Etla

San Pedro Ixtlahuaca

San Juan Guelavia

Communities

0.1

-0.5

Household types

San Juan del Estado

San Pablo Huitzo

Non-migrants -0.3

San Lorenzo Albarradas

-0.1 Diaz Ordaz

0.1

0.3 U.S. migrants

0.5

-0.1 Commuters

San Martin Tilcajete

-0.3

San Juan del Rio

Santa Ines Yatzeche

-0.5

and the relative location of each community surveyed in relation to those outcomes. First, each quadrant appears to represent a particular outcome. Nonmigrant households plot in the upper left, commuters in the lower left. Internally bound migrants (those moving within national borders) plot in the

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upper-right quadrant, while international migrants (those bound for the United States) plot in the lower-right quadrant. Moving along the x-axis, from left to right, we note an increase in overall number of migrations and the distance of the destination from a sending community. Nonmigrant households plot farthest left, followed by commuter households, leading to internal movers on the right and, finally, international movers on the far right. Second, those communities that plot closer to the center of the chart, San Juan del Estado, for example, show a more generalized migration pattern. In other words, those communities closer to the intersection of the four outcomes show more diversity in the moves made by member households. The sixty-six households surveyed in San Juan del Estado included 26% nonmigrants, 21% commuters, 17% internal migrants, and 36% U.S.-bound migrants. Communities that plot farther from the center show less variation in migration outcomes for member households. For example, in Santa Ines Yatzeche, 53% of the community’s households are involved in migration to the United States, while only 3% of households send migrants to internal destinations or on local commutes. Thus, the community plots low on the y-axis and is relatively farther from the reference points for nonmigrants, local commuters, and internal migrants. Third, a community’s relative placement in relation to household outcomes (nonmigrant, commuter, internal migrant, U.S. bound) can be read as one indication of how important migration (or a type of migration) is for a community’s households and can capture the diversity of movement within each village. Thus, San Juan Albarradas, a community where 63% of households do not participate in migration, plots to the left of the nonmigrant point. On the other hand, San Juan Guelavia, a community where 63% of households are involved in internal or international migration, plots to the far right on the x-axis and near the reference point for U.S.-bound migration. Finally, San Martín Tilcajete, a community with nearly identical populations of nonmigrant (45%) and U.S.-bound migrant households (43%), plots between the reference points for commuters and U.S.-bound migrant households.

DISCUSSION In this article, we have developed measures that allow us to talk about transnational outcomes for individual migrants, their households, and their communities. We scored outcomes for individuals based on linear variables (as defined by Itzigsohn and Saucedo 2002:771) and found that while the majority of decisions are motivated by economic needs, the majority of Oaxacans are acting in a transnational manner—but just barely.

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Oaxacans typically migrate following a relative or close friend, and they generally rely on family for the funds necessary to cover their sojourn. Once in the United States, they settle with family or friends. We found that 65% of all U.S.-bound migrants knew or were related to an individual who had previously migrated, and 96% of all migrants depended on the funds of their family to meet the costs of border crossing. Additionally, more than 80% of all rural Oaxacan migrants lived with a family member or close friend in their destination. Finally, remitting from the United States to a household in rural Oaxaca was a common practice for the 81% of migrants settled in the United States. However, transtot scores were low (averaging 3.0) and reflected the presence of linkages to settled or experienced migrants and the importance of family to the costs of migration and living arrangements in receiving communities but a lack of temporal depth to outcomes. We call this a “nominal” transnationalism. Migrants traveled only once to the United States, stayed in the United States for between one and three years, and remitted usually only for about half of their time in the United States. Thus, we did not encounter the kind of long-term, frequent, and repeated trips between Mexico and the United States found in other regions. Furthermore, we cannot predict the long-term implications of transnational actions by Oaxacan migrants because most of them move over short periods and return to their sending households even as they follow kin networks. The pattern we found among individual migrants was also present as we shifted our focus to households. Average scores increased to 4, reflecting the fact that most households sent only one migrant to the United States at a time, even though he or she followed friends and family in their sojourns and relied on kin- and community-based networks to cross the border. The decisions of migrants are not only personal; they reflect decisions made by the household as a unit. And although household scores reflected the fact that about 25% of all households are not in contact with the migrant members, 60% are linked to migrants through remittances and their use of family networks. Finally, the remaining migrants, about 15%, are involved in long-term, transnational moves (with scores above 6—that is, they remitted for more than three years). Durrand, Massey, and Zenteno (2001) recently argued that Mexican migration to the United States had shifted in structure and content very little over the past two decades. The majority of migrants to the United States came from Mexico’s central states, and the southern states of Oaxaca and Chiapas contributed little to the overall flow. Our results suggest that while Oaxacan migration rates are increasing, it is at a slow rate. The majority of

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Oaxacan migrants move because of the needs of their households, and although they may behave in a transnational fashion, they are not involved in the long-term, cyclical migrations that create profound new social and cultural institutions that Durrand, Massey, and Zenteno have found in more traditional sending regions (see also Marcelli and Cornelius 2001). We used a correspondence analysis to model variations in outcomes as they pertain to central valley communities. Our findings suggest that migration patterns vary by destination and, perhaps more important, by the patterns of flows. (Are migrants moving in several different ways, as in San Juan del Estado, or are they concentrated, as in Santa Ines Yatzeche on migration to the United States?) While our samples of communities and of communitylevel variables are too small to permit quantitative analyses, the factors that appear to determine these different patterns are (1) the overall history of migration and when and to where migrants originally left, (2) the location of a community in relation to Oaxaca City and transportation services, (3) the presence or absence of indigenous cultures and languages, (4) the structure of the internal (village) economy, and (5) the local environment. San Juan del Estado has a rich history of migration that dates to the 1940s and has always included migrants moving to local, internal, and international destinations. The location of the community near the Pan-American Highway and with easy access to Oaxaca City further supports movement. Additionally, San Juan del Estado is a mestizo community, so its citizens are more able to find work locally as they lack the social stigmas that mark indigenous Oaxacans who encounter much bigotry as they move to Oaxaca City and other internal destinations in Mexico. Finally, the community has served as a central market site for surrounding villages, is home to several small industries (stone quarries and timber harvesting), and holds much irrigated land that supports multicropping throughout the year. The example of San Juan del Estado contrasts with Santa Ines Yatzeche, a community with a much shallower history of movement. The community also lacks the easy linkages to Oaxaca City. Bus service connects the village with the state’s capital, but only indirectly, and few of the community’s citizens make the two-hour journey to Oaxaca City. Additionally, Santa Ines is a Zapotec community, and most of its citizens are bilingual, nonnative Spanish speakers; their native identity stigmatizes them when they seek work or education in Oaxaca City. Finally, the village is marginal in an economic sense: It lacks infrastructure, it has no industry to speak of, and its agricultural heritage is under pressure as pollution from Oaxaca City travels down the Atoyac River to contaminate Santa Ines Yatzeche’s water supply.

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CONCLUSIONS The approach we have outlined is a start. The key to success is continued research on other cases in Mexico and elsewhere in support of comparative investigation of migration patterns. We have demonstrated that we can measure, predict, and evaluate transnational outcomes for individuals and households and that we can explain variations in community-sending patterns. A second implication of our work is theoretical. We often give theoretical constructions methodological significance in the social sciences. We believe that such an error has occurred in transnational studies. An overly aggressive focus on transnational flows, linkages, and outcomes makes it difficult to understand fundamental local processes that constitute the transnational—or from which the transnational emerges. We have organized a methodology that allows us to identify transnational processes and outcomes as parts of larger systems. Our approach moves the concept of transnational toward the concrete. By focusing on how migrants and their households use their connections with settled migrants, how they cover the costs of migration, and where they live once they have settled, we can quantify outcomes. When we add the length of time migrants move and remit, we bring a temporal dimension to our discussion. Given the scores for Oaxacan migrants and households and the relative placement of villages in the correspondence analysis and plot, we can argue with confidence that although the communities are embedded in flows of transnational capital and global markets, the variables involved in the creation of transnational space in the central valleys are largely defined through local connections and economic needs. Transnationalism is rooted in kin and community networks, not linkages to far-away cultural processes. Portes, Guarnizo, and Landolt (1999:218) argued, “In the case of transnationalism, it is not enough to invoke anecdotes of some immigrants investing in businesses back home or some governments giving their expatriates the right to vote in national elections to justify a new field of study.” We would add that transnationalism is tangible and to be discovered in the lives of individuals as members of households and communities. Our approach combines surveys, interviews, and background work to make the global tangible and to clearly define some of the ways in which transnational processes play out between communities and within households. Using basic statistical tools, we can effectively model transnational outcomes for individuals, their households, and their communities, and we can begin a cross-cultural discussion of outcomes.

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NOTES 1. We selected communities from a randomized list that Dr. Martha Rees (Agnes Scott College) created for the central valley region. 2. If a household head refused to participate, we moved to an alternate household in the same block. Typically, this was the first household clockwise from the originally targeted household. The fieldworker moved to a randomly selected block where we planned no surveys if no households in a block volunteered to complete the survey (or if all houses were empty in the block). 3. The cargo system refers to the system of civil and religious committees that make up the local political system of most rural communities in Oaxaca. Individuals, as representatives of households, must serve voluntarily in these committees. Committee or cargo service confirms status on the server and the household in relation to the position held, which range from vocal (voting member) to presidente (president or committee chair). Cargos and committees are ranked according to their social status and difficulty. Low-ranking committees include those that take up little time and have few decisions to make. Often these committees maintain a community’s services, roads, and schools. High-ranking cargos may require up to three years of service and demand a great deal of time. High-ranking cargos include the comite del pueblo (literally, the town’s committee and the equivalent of a county commission), bienes comunales (community resources), and religious cargos that care for a village’s church. Service is usually met by men, but a growing number of women hold positions today, in part in reaction to migration. Households typically send members to serve in committees every two to three years (and see Cohen 1999). 4. Correspondence analysis is a relatively new technique that permits the perceptual mapping (as in multidimensional scaling) of contingency tables. Specifically, it allows the representation of both the rows and the columns of an n × m matrix in the same multidimensional space. In our case, we use correspondence analysis to represent the rows (communities) and the columns (migration outcomes) of Table 3 in a common multidimensional space. Hence, the association or “correspondence” between communities and outcomes is shown in Figure 1. More similar communities are closer to each other in the two-dimensional space, while more similar outcomes are closer as well. In addition, communities that exhibit particular outcomes more frequently than others are closer to those outcomes in the space (see Weller and Romney [1990] and Greenacre [1984] for introductions to correspondence analysis).

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Durand, J., D. S. Massey, and R. M. Zenteno. 2001. Mexican immigration to the United States: Continuities and changes. Latin American Research Review 36 (1): 107–27. Greenacre, M. J. 1984. Theory and applications of correspondence analysis. London: Academic Press. Grimes, K. M. 1998. Crossing borders: Changing social identities in southern Mexico. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Hannerz, U. 1996. Transnational connections. New York: Routledge. . 1998. Transnational research. In Handbook of methods in cultural anthropology, edited by H. R. Bernard, 235–56. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira. Hulshof, M. 1991. Zapotec moves: Networks and remittances of U.S. bound migrants from Oaxaca, Mexico. Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam Press. Itzigsohn, J., and S. G. Saucedo. 2002. Immigration incorporation and sociocultural transnationalism. International Migration Review 36 (3): 766–98. Kearney, M. 1996. Reconceptualizing the peasantry: Anthropology in global perspective. Boulder, CO: Westview. . 2000. Transnational Oaxacan indigenous identity: The case of Mixtecs and Zapotecs. Identities 7 (2): 173–95. Marcelli, E. A., and W. A. Cornelius. 2001. The changing profile of Mexican migrants to the United States: New evidence from California and Mexico. Latin American Research Review 36 (3): 105–31. Massey, D. S. 1987. 1990. Social structure, household strategies, and the cumulative causation of migration. Population Index 56 (1): 3–26. Massey, D. S., J. Arango, G. Hugo, A. Kouaouci, A. Pellegrino, and J. E. Taylor. 1998. Worlds in motion: Understanding international migration at the end of the millennium. New York: Oxford University Press. Netting, R. M., R. Wilk, and E. Arnould, eds. 1984. Households: Comparative and historical studies of the domestic group. Berkeley: University of California Press. Pennartz, P. J., and A. Niehof. 1999. The domestic domain: Chances, choices and strategies of family households. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate. Portes, A., L. E. Guarnizo, and W. J. Haller. 2002. Transnational entrepreneurs: An alternative form of immigrant economic adaptation. American Sociological Review 67:278–98. Portes, A., L. E. Guarnizo, and P. Landolt. 1999. The study of transnationalism: Pitfalls and promise of an emergent research field. Ethnic and Racial Studies 22 (2): 217–37. Rivera-Salgado, G. 1999. Mixtec activism in Oaxacalifornia. American Behavioral Scientist 42 (9): 1439–58. Rouse, R. 1995. Questions of identity: Personhood and collectivity in transnational migration to the United States. Critique of Anthropology 15 (4): 351–80. Weller, S. C., and A. K. Romney. 1990. Metric scaling: Correspondence analysis. Sage University Paper on Quantitative Approaches in the Social Sciences, 07–075. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Wiest, R. E. 1973. Wage-labor migration and the household in a Mexican town. Journal of Anthropological Research 29 (3): 180–209. Wilk, R. R. 1989. Decision making and resource flows within the household: Beyond the black box. In The household economy, edited by R. R. Wilk, 23–54. Boulder, CO: Westview. . 1991. Household ecology: Economic change and domestic life among the Kekchi Maya in Belize. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.

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JEFFREY H. COHEN (Ph.D. anthropology, Indiana University, 1994) is an assistant professor in Penn State’s Department of Anthropology and Program in Demography. His work focuses on the outcomes of migration for rural sending communities in Oaxaca, Mexico. He is a fellow of the Society for Applied Anthropology and a board member of the Society for Economic Anthropology. His article “Transnational Migration in Rural Oaxaca, Mexico: Dependency, Development and the Household” (American Anthropologist 2001) was awarded the Buck Prize by Penn State’s College of the Liberal Arts in 2001. The University of Texas Press will publish his ethnography The Culture of Migration in Southern Mexico in 2004. This is his second article for Field Methods. ALICIA SYLVIA GIJÓN-CRUZ holds a B.Sc. degree in chemical engineering and a master’s degree in regional development planning from the Instituto Tecnológico de Oaxaca, where she has been attached since January 2000 as researcher through grants of the MacArthur Foundation and the Ford Foundation. She is currently working toward her doctorate in anthropology and regional development planning and will complete her dissertation on migration in the community of San Lucas Quiavini, Tlacolula Oaxaca with the support of a grant from the National Council of Science and Technology (CONACyT). Her publications have appeared in Ciudades among other journals and also she has published various book chapters; she has presented research at meetings of the Latin American Studies Association, the Society for Economic Anthropology, the Mexican Association of Rural Studies, the National Network of Urban Research, and the Mexican Association of Regional Development Studies. In addition to working on this project, she has collaborated on research with UCLA, UC Davis, Portland State University, the Pennsylvania State University, LAMP (the Latin American Migration Project), and El Colegio de Mexico. RAFAEL G. REYES-MORALES is a professor in the program in regional development and urban planning that is housed in the department of Industrial Engineering at the Instituto Tecnológico de Oaxaca, where he directs many student projects. His work focuses on the impacts of migration on rural development in Oaxaca and the economic implications of regional development for rural populations. His work has appeared in Ciudades and Alteridades among other journals, and also he has published various book chapters. He has presented his research at meetings of the Latin American Studies Association, the Society for Economic Anthropology, the Mexican Association of Rural Studies, the National Network of Urban Research, and the Mexican Association of Regional Development Studies. He is a founding member of the International Network of Migration and Development. His collaborative work with UCLA, UC Davis, Portland State University, LAMP (Latin American Migration Project), the Pennsylvania State University, and El Colegio de Mexico has been funded by CONACyT, UC-Mexus, the Ford Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, and the National Science Foundation. GARRY CHICK (Ph.D. anthropology, University of Pittsburgh, 1980) joined Penn State in 1999, after eighteen years in the Department of Leisure Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He is a professor of hotel, restaurant, and recreation management and professor-in-charge of the graduate program in leisure studies. He is past editor of Leisure Sciences and Play & Culture and a coeditor of The Encyclopedia of Leisure and Recreation in America, which will be published in 2004 by Scribner’s. He is a

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past president of the Association for the Anthropological Study of Play and of the Society for Cross-Cultural Research and is a fellow of the American Anthropological Association, the Society for Applied Anthropology, and the Academy of Leisure Sciences. Recent publications include “Cultural Consonance in a Mexican Festival System” (Field Methods 2002); “The Social Nature of Leisure Involvement,” with Gerard T. Kyle (Journal of Leisure Research 2002); and “What Is Play For? Sexual Selection and the Evolution of Play” (Play and Culture Studies 2001).