UC Berkeley

This community-based participatory study examines how campesinos (small rural landholders) understand and act upon their understandings regarding their food pattern change in the context of a transnational family life and fiscal remittances. It examines food pattern negotiation using in-depth interviews, focus groups, filmic ethnography, participant observation and Food Pattern Analysis with rural small landholders from two communities in northern Guanajuato, México. Rural food pattern shift between pre-migration and current times are explained according to the broader economic frame of rural livelihoods, the local social context, as well as through the particularities of individual's consumption. As of the 1980's newer fluid income-based livelihoods including remittances, formal employment and cash transfers coincide with campesino's increasing access to and interaction with the commercial food system. In terms of change particularities between pre-migration and current times, it is evidenced by consumption frequency changes of key foods, the manner in which dishes are served and eaten, the freshness of the staple ingredient/s used, and the resulting food pattern diversity. Food shifts are shown to ebb and flow through time and are not linear and rigid. In regard to the question of how campesinos negotiate their food patterns in rural spaces, campesino's explanations of their consumption commonly refer to three motivating factors; these include taste preference, social returns motivation, and newer notions of time and convenience. These mechanisms taken together inform the notion that fluid income through remittances, implies not only benefits among the rural sector but costs as well. For example, while remittances enhance women's and children's agency related to their food activities and negotiation of social relations, they also support enhanced access to commercial foods, and often to highly processed foods that are high in sugar, salt and fat; they also reduce rural family production capacity as a result from displaced labor. Taken together, remittances may imply an exposed risk to nutrition-related disease and potential food insecurity. Furthermore, remittances are known to foster a sense to attain an elevated standard of living which supports an "need" to consume status foods, while also encouraging the avoidance of stigmatized regional foods. However, there is no evidence to suggest that campesinos intend to permanently sever their food production capacity; a majority of respondents still produce food.