UC Riverside

For most of the century before the 1970s, the Tzotzil-Mayas of highland Chiapas, Mexico, depended for their livelihoods on seasonal migratory labor in the commercial agriculture of Chiapas's lowlands. Whether picking coffee on the plantations of Chiapas's southern coast and mountains or in its northern lowlands, growing corn and beans as sharecroppers and day laborers on the cattle and grain estates of the central, Grijalva Basin, or cutting cane in that same basin, indigenous men from the highlands spent an average of six months a year working outside of their communities to make Chiapas's commercial agriculture among the most prosperous in Mexico. In return, the income they took home made life possible for their households in the densely populated, less fertile "traditional" communities of the highlands.

And then beginning in the 1970s, as a result of stagnating commodity prices, rising expenses, and credit and foreign exchange difficulties, Chiapas's plantations began to fail. Over the next two decades, while Chiapas's indigenous population was doubling, the demand for seasonal agricultural laborers actually declined. The result was growing stress on households, communities and the state as a whole. Based on participant observation, demographic and economic surveys, and life histories, this dissertation traces the effects of this stress as it worked its way through Chamula, one of the signal Tzotzil municipios of the Central Highlands. It is divided into three sections. The first characterizes the macroeconomic change in Chiapas from the 1970s through the 1990s and the economic adjustments by households as men and women found new ways of making money to replace what was lost with the decline of agricultural labor. The second traces political change as dissidents in the municipio first combatted the authoritarian, cacique-ruled local government from the eve of the crisis in the 1960s through the 1970s, and then were increasingly drawn into extra-communal economic and political organizations by their new economic activities in the 1980s and 1990s. Finally, the third section describes the extension of migratory labor to the United States beginning in 2000, and urbanization of the Chamulas and other highland indigenous people from the mid-1970s through 2009.