Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies

Although a severe economic crisis has rocked Mexico since 1981, neither left-wing political parties nor the organized working class and urban popular movements have managed to mount any serious challenge to Mexico’s political and economic system. A closer look at developments since 1981, however, shows that the responses by the Mexican left cannot be dismissed so simply. The gloominess of the overall picture conceals the development of new tactics, the emergence of major new social actors, and renewed struggle among groups with long-standing traditions of radicalism. These issues, as well as the Mexican left’s general response to the “politics of austerity,” occupied the attention of a workshop held in May 1984 at the Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies, on the campus of the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). A representative group of Mexican socialists from both academic and mass-organization backgrounds attended the workshop to discuss the situation of the Mexican left. Presented here is their written analysis of the left’s response to the economic crisis.

In February, 1981, the Center for US-Mexican Studies hosted a Binational Consultation on US-Mexican Agricultural Relations. The consultation sought to define the nature, causes, and consequences of flows of labor, capital, technology, and agricultural commodities across the US-Mexican border and to identify fruitful areas for additional research. Sections of the consultation were devoted to US-Mexican agricultural trade in an era of oil wealth and “food power”; Mexico’s crisis of production in the small-farm sector; public policy toward agriculture an rural development in Mexico; the Mexican Food System (SAM); Mexican labor in the US; the organization of farm workers in both countries; and the effects of migration on rural Mexican communities. Because of the publicity and controversy surrounding the initiation and performance of SAM, this monograph devotes special attention to the session of the consultation in which SAM was discussed and makes an effort to assess the experience of the SAM in the two years that followed the 1981 meeting.

Based on fieldwork conducted during 1981 in Ventura County, California, this study helps to explain the relationship between the relative abundance of Mexican nationals willing to pick citrus crops and the institutional forms which U.S. unions, employers, and governments have created to deal with Mexicans in California agriculture. The work should be of particular relevance to those interested in the mechanisms through which Mexican nationals enter U.S. jobs and in the impact that immigrants have on the work opportunities available to U.S. nationals.

The authors, a labor economist and an historian, utilized a combination of personal interviews, documentary research, and economic analysis to examine competition by Mexican migrants for jobs in the California citrus industry. Their research revealed that this competition—which has recently undermined attempts to stabilize the harvest labor market—involves virtually no U.S.-born workers. Rather, new waves of young, economically and legally vulnerable Mexican migrants have displaced older, more secure Mexicans who had won higher wages, improved benefits, and increased job security.

The citrus industry in Ventura County combined several factors, unusual in agriculture, that would allow for improved conditions of employment—a long picking season, a predominantly settled labor force, and institutional arrangements aimed at stabilization. The entrance of new subgroups of Mexican migrants with distinct characteristics, however, has resulted in the fragmentation of the labor market into distinct sectors with different working conditions and employee benefits. The authors’ analysis thus reveals that underlying historical forces—especially a persistently abundant supply of labor—have tended to reverse the progress earlier achieved through the creation of institutions to improve the quality of life for harvest workers in the citrus industry.

This study sought to take a close-up look at cross-border Mexican migration by collecting detailed information about one binational migratory village-based community. five major findings have resulted from this investigation: 1. Migrants are generally poor rural or urban dwellers who depend on reciprocity networks of mutual exchange with their friends and relatives and not on public institutions for their survival. 2. Migratory networks undergo a maturation process over time. 3. Job and social mobility within these networks is a function of who you know, not what you know. 4. The skills, money, and goods repatriated to Mexico from the US tend to raise the consumptive not the productive level of the sending areas. 5. The continual introduction of new, immature kin networks and the inability of some older ones to obtain good job contacts in the US accentuates the dualism inherent in the US job market.