Response Post on Migration syp

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In 2004 the citizens in Partida held a meeting. Gathering all day at the village hall, they lamented the apathy and “egotism” of their counterparts in Los Angeles. Many argued that emigrants were abandoning the com- mune, while those at home were “killing themselves” to sustain the pue- blo. They questioned migrants’ “Americanized” notions of dismantling community-service requirements or giving women the right to vote. They decided it was time to formalize their stance. Over the next few years, they codifi ed their communal structure and made demands of those who had left. In the resulting statute, they proclaimed,

The community of Partida agrees to continue enjoying its lands and natural resources in a communal manner, that being the closest to our way of life and form of community organization . . . [including] the participation of all community members [as well as migrants] to maintain the core institutions of the community, including tequio [communal labor], the cargo system [civic posts], cooperaciones [monetary contributions], the fi estas, the assembly, the way of life, and the heritage of the community.

The hometown highlighted that emigrants were comuneros (members). If migrants did not contribute their time and money, villagers would reclaim

5 Pathways to Hometown Change

Andrews, A. L. (2018). Undocumented politics : Place, gender, and the pathways of mexican migrants. ProQuest Ebook Central <a onclick=window.open('http://ebookcentral.proquest.com','_blank') href='http://ebookcentral.proquest.com' target='_blank' style='cursor: pointer;'>http://ebookcentral.proquest.com</a> Created from fiu on 2021-03-17 12:10:03.

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the land and houses they still had in the village, dump their belongings just outside of town, and throw the migrants in jail should they try to return.

Partida’s statute was not just an internecine quarrel between migrants and those “left behind.” It was also a shield against state attacks on com- munal landholding and political participation. Starting in the 1990s the Mexican federal and Oaxacan state government started pressing indige- nous villages to dismantle Usos y Costumbres, open up to political parties (which were banned under the indigenous system), and turn over com- mon resources to individual property and corporate control. State agents also argued that indigenous self-government should be dismantled, to give women equal rights. In Partida, however, many people dismissed women’s participation in politics as an external intervention. They used their community statute to defy these outside demands, legally and sym- bolically. By codifying their collective, male-run structure, villagers posi- tioned themselves against the individualistic ideas of “modernization” promoted by both migrants and the homeland government.

Residents of Retorno also faced radical changes driven by both migrants and the Mexican state, but they responded diff erently. Instead of rejecting political parties, they aligned themselves with the left-wing PRD. They also collaborated with their long-distance counterparts, particularly through the Frente Indígena Oaxaqueño Binacional (FIOB; Oaxacan Indigenous Binational Front). With the help of these allies, villagers chal- lenged the longtime corruption of the local- and state-level PRI. They demanded resources, insisting that Oaxaca’s government deliver roads, irrigation, health services, and productive projects. They also took advan- tage of the emerging mandate for “women’s empowerment” to garner more state support. In the process women in Retorno began to vote and take on political posts for the fi rst time in history. Thus, they staked their claim to resources and representation.

Why did people in Partida shore up their communal structure and reject state intervention, while those in Retorno demanded inclusion in local and state democracy? This chapter traces how each hometown’s experiences of emigration shaped its approach to Mexican politics. Rather than focus on migrants’ long-distance impacts, as many scholars have done, I look at how those on the sending side reacted to their own or oth- ers’ histories of migration.

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h o w h o m e t o w n s f a c e m i g r a n t g l o b a l i z a t i o n

For those in Mexico, emigration was a political spark plug: a catalyst for change. In the 1990s and the fi rst decade of the 2000s, people of Partida and Retorno faced both “illegality” in the United States and vast political shifts on the Mexican side. For one, Mexico began to democratize. Though the PRI had ruled the country for seventy years, opposition parties includ- ing the Partido de la Revolución Democrática (PRD; Party of the Democratic Revolution) and the Partido Acción Nacional (PAN; National Action Party) began to challenge its clientelistic control. Along with advo- cacy organizations of various stripes, these parties put pressure on the PRI and exposed its corruption. During this period, Mexico also privatized state resources and rolled back welfare support. The federal government then reformed the constitution to enable the sale of communal lands. Finally, Mexico decentralized, shifting responsibility for “development” to the municipal level.

Though indigenous villages were historically isolated from Mexican politics, democratization and decentralization made them battlegrounds for political control. In 1995 Oaxaca’s PRI legalized the long-standing indigenous system of Usos y Costumbres, granting 418 of the state’s 570 municipalities the right to self-govern.1 Nevertheless, the state also began pressuring indigenous people to dismantle their traditions of public serv- ice and independent self-government. In the late 1990s, for instance, the state began paying stipends for cargos, undermining the tradition of unpaid public service. At the same time, the PRI also created new funds for sanitation, reforestation, agriculture, education, household infrastruc- ture, and training in entrepreneurship, in hopes of holding the rural vote.2 To get such funds villagers needed the signature of the municipal presi- dent. Thus, village authorities came to control both new salaries and state development funds. If migrants and their allies took over a village, they would gain access to these funds and put wind in the sails of the PRD opposition. Despite the ostensible political independence of indigenous pueblos, many faced clashes over local control. Municipal governments were now a strategic arena in which to challenge the PRI.

In the 1980s Mexico also started integrating women into state-led development.3 By the 1990s women’s empowerment was a central axis in

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rural state programs. In particular, the Oportunidades program, started in 1998 under the name Progresa, granted cash transfers to women across Mexico, on the condition that they participate in health workshops and send their children to school.4 Since indigenous villages often excluded women, “women’s rights” also gave the state an excuse to dismantle indig- enous control. Together these changes laid the terrain on which home- towns remade their Mexican citizenship, in dialogue with the criminaliza- tion of their counterparts in the United States.

But how did migration play into these shifts? Traditionally, scholars argued that migration was a political “safety valve,” allowing people who might otherwise protest to leave the homeland instead. Emigration thus freed the sending state from accountability to migrant-sending villages, consigning them to political irrelevance.5 Indeed, some scholars show that migrant-sending villages tend to see less political participation than non- migrant towns.6 Others argue that as people leave and get exposed to indi- vidualism and class stratifi cation, cohesive communities disintegrate.7 In such formulations communal governance fi gures as an inadequate and antiquated form of resistance, eroded by capitalist globalization.8

Increasingly, social scientists have grown interested in how migrants’ remittances and “voice after exit” might have the opposite eff ect, fueling hometown growth or democratization.9 These scholars argue that migrants send back not only remittances and cultural habits (“social remittances”) but also “political remittances”: attitudes and alliances that can either help democratize their hometowns or exacerbate instability.10 Yet it remains unclear why migrant involvement encourages democracy, development, and gender equity in some hometowns, while making oth- ers less secure.11 Many scholars conclude that emigration helps sending communities if migrants (1) make money in the United States, (2) are exposed to “egalitarian” U.S. norms, and (3) remit the “right” productive investments, democratic ideals, and social practices (like gender equity).12 Such frameworks imply that economic development, democratic partici- pation, and women’s empowerment “trickle down” from Global North to Global South. They also make such prospects appear to rely on migrants’ economic and cultural integration, depoliticizing the interplay between sending and receiving sides. In turn, more recent studies have highlighted the mediating eff ect of homeland contexts, revealing that successful

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cooperation between migrants and hometowns also hinges on sending state programs, homeland democracy, and interstate relationships.13 Still, studies of migration and development remain largely divorced from the realities of U.S. exclusion.

This chapter shows how people in the homeland adapt their political strategies in relation to their perceptions of migration, including negative images of the United States. As Mexico evolved, it suggests, Partida and Retorno each forged new forms of citizenship on the sending side. Yet they did so quite diff erently. Each community’s political pathway—including its historical power dynamics, the mode of control its migrants faced in California, and the character of its migrants’ transnationalism—provoked distinct reactions in Mexico.

For people in Partida both migration and state interventions threat- ened communal autonomy. Those in the hometown responded with what I refer to as antiglobalization backlash.14 Most people remaining in the village had never been to the United States. They denounced emigrants for being selfi sh and abandoning the common good. They dug in their heels to protect collective governance and insist that migrants help out. They also rejected eff orts at modernization by the Mexican state. Instead, they remade indigenous “tradition” as a political tool. Framing land priva- tization, corporate intervention, and party politics as threats to equity, they shored up their long-standing autonomy. Collectively, they blocked state “development” programs and refused to convert traditional cargos into paid public posts.

For people in Retorno, however, outreach by migrants and Mexican political parties presented an opportunity to transcend the village’s long history of exclusion, fueling a fi ght for alternative globalization. Due to family separation and historical patterns of circulation, many people in Retorno had been migrants themselves or had family members in California. They shared migrants’ disillusionment with the United States. Under the mantle of the FIOB, therefore, they sought a greater voice in Retorno and the state of Oaxaca. Locally, they continued their ongoing fi ght against the village and state-level PRI. They dismantled traditions that had forced indigenous people to do unpaid labor and blocked them from local leadership. They won migrants and women political rights. Inspired by migrants, they also joined other hometowns and the PRD to

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pressure the state for support. Thus, they used their indigenous identity to build solidarity with other villages. By exercising political voice, they claimed new rights to belong on the Mexican side.

Women’s empowerment weighed critically on both pueblos’ politics, representing the peril or promise of outside ties. In Partida antiglobaliza- tion backlash was also patriarchal: men spurned women’s rights as a form of outside meddling. They argued that Western notions of gender equality clashed with indigenous traditions of complementarity (in which women and men played reciprocal, mutually supportive roles).15 Ultimately, how- ever, Partida relied on migrant women’s support, so it had to make accom- modations. In Retorno, meanwhile, women became important leaders in the battle for democratization. Due to family separation, women were the majority in the village, so organizers realized they needed women to stage successful marches—as well as to garner resources targeted at women’s empowerment. Thus, the people of Retorno embraced what I call gen- dered jujitsu (a martial art where a small adversary uses an opponent’s force to set the opponent off balance), using state funds to expand their own movement.

The contrast reveals that just as transnationalism is political, home- town politics are transnational. Not only do migrants impact their villages from afar, but the people in migrant hometowns also react to migration, reconstructing the meanings of indigeneity, gender, and Mexican citizen- ship. Ethnicity is central to this process, but it plays out in diff erent ways. Usos y Costumbres, for instance, is not a stable indigenous tradition but instead a dynamic political tool that changes depending on hometowns’ goals. For Partida, indigeneity represented autonomy; for Retorno, ethnic connection. In Retorno, democracy also required abandoning the old, cor- rupted version of Usos y Costumbres altogether. Thus, politics were proc- essual, altering long-standing structures as villagers navigated both U.S. exclusion and evolving homeland dynamics.

r e s i s t i n g g l o b a l i z a t i o n i n p a r t i d a

The fi rst time I visited Partida, landslides tore at the mountains of Oaxaca’s Sierra Norte, spilling over the road and stripping the skin off the dense

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forest slopes. By the time I tumbled out in front of Partida’s bright- blue town hall, public loudspeakers were calling the comuneros out to slosh mud and rocks off the street (see fi gure 5). Men emerged one by one from their homes to do tequio, a duty they still traded for membership in the village and access to its communal land. When I met with the village leaders, they were also suspicious of me. Though migrants from Partida had been going to California for decades, they stiff ened when I mentioned the United States. They asked whether, like those who had left, I would push them to change their values. Migration had incited Partida to defend its communal ways. Villagers used their long-standing participatory structure to restrict the meddling of migrants, political par- ties, corporations, and even wayward graduate students from the United States.

Figure 5. Villagers doing communal labor on the main street of Partida. Photo by the author.

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Defending the Commune

Leonel Vega and his wife, Nadia Parra, illustrated the local penchant for self-protection. One long, cold evening I sat with the couple, eating yellow mole over their fl owered, plastic tablecloth. Leonel had worked in Los Angeles before coming back to Partida to marry Nadia in 2001. These days, however, he was breaking his back to manage Partida’s water infra- structure and its system of public labor—one of the pueblo’s more rigor- ous civic jobs. Migrants did not appreciate this hard work, he complained. Across from Leonel’s small cement home, his brother-in-law Bernardo Cruz, who lived in Los Angeles, had built a gleaming, three-story house. Migrants like Bernardo—those with papers anyway—would come back to Partida to relax or even rent out their homes for pay. Looking across at the empty dwelling, Leonel was angry:

I’m working so that they can have running water, so that the roads are well maintained, and they’re profi ting from that. . . . [In the communal system] we have obligations, and we have rights. . . . When you do tequios, you see all the work that needs to be done. Being the person who manages the tequios, for instance, is a huge amount of work, because you’re responsible for the water system, and if that breaks you have to go in the middle of the night and fi x it . . . or right now that we have to [do tequios to] plant all these trees . . . and when you’re there [in the United States], you don’t even know what’s going on.

As more people left, cargos from road maintenance to village secretary fell heavily on those who remained. People who stayed in Partida, Leonel felt, had been saddled with unfair burdens.

Just the day before Leonel and several dozen men had marched out to the home of a migrant who failed to pay his “tax.” In the late 1980s, as described in chapter 4, villagers decided that if emigrants wanted land or rights in Partida, they would have to contribute a hundred dollars per year and participate in the community’s HTA in Los Angeles. Though this man kept his (usufruct) land in Partida, he never remitted the requisite hun- dred dollars. The pueblo decided it was time. Machetes in hand, they fenced off his property for return to the collective holding. Other times, the comuneros cut off electricity, water, or sewage to the homes of

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“reluctant” migrants (those who failed to contribute to the village), even if family members still lived in the house. If migrants tried to visit without having paid, they locked them in cells below the town hall. They explained to the wayward, “Only the people who have worked and contributed have rights, but you don’t contribute. You don’t help, and you [migrants] just come to help yourselves to what’s already here.” If migrants did not sup- port the community, the village revoked their membership.

Residents like Leonel endorsed such sanctions because they resented their migrant counterparts. Only 35 percent of men and 3 percent of women in Partida had ever been to the United States. I heard of just one married couple separated across borders. So instead of feeling tied to migrants, most people felt betrayed—including returnees like Leonel. Parents would sob into the phone, begging their children not to leave or accusing them, “Why did you abandon me?” Some even cursed their migrant sons and daughters, refusing to hear their names. The resent- ment was palpable in families like Ernesto Galindo’s. Ernesto grew up on a three-thousand-square-foot plot, where he now lived with his wife and seven children in a one-room adobe hut, with two large beds and an open fi re. Just feet away his brother who lived in Los Angeles had built a three- story home, sealed with a padlock. Every time Ernesto looked at the lock, his eyes fi lled with rage. Though some migrants sent money to Partida through their HTA, those at home felt they never quite did enough.

Tomás Ríos, one of Partida’s senior statesmen, explained why they felt so mad. Once a teacher, Tomás had worked in Los Angeles in the mid- 1990s, but he returned disillusioned with the individualism and isolation of U.S. life. Now in his midfi fties, Tomás lived with his wife and their teen- age children and ran an embroidery shop at the top of Partida’s hill. In his spare time Tomás played guitar at local parties and tried to document and bring back the Zapotec language. He was skeptical of me when I fi rst arrived, wondering why on earth I was asking so many questions. He would look at me pensively from under his thick eyebrows, as his foot click-clacked on a sewing machine. Gazing through his window over the clouds, he told me, “Those of us who are always here have the idea that the more we help one another the more we can advance. But when someone comes back from the city they think diff erently. . . . People sometimes get very apathetic when they migrate. They forget. They leave and they don’t

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send money; they don’t participate. . . . It pains us that they don’t want to contribute.” Not only had migrants shirked their responsibilities, Tomás felt, but when they did turn back it had been to “fi x” Partida. The people at home, he added, were fi ghting for a counterweight to these impositions. They valued the feeling of community that came from serving the com- mon good. Doing public service gave them strength, he added, teaching them to care about the village as a whole.

Such resentment was both material and moral. While one might expect migrants’ economic success to appeal to other villagers, emigrants threat- ened Partida’s values of service and equity. Tomás’s views were widely shared. Almost daily, while I hung out at the taco stand in Partida’s town square, I heard villagers lament the “egotism” of migrants. As Naila Marcos, a fi ery young health promoter in her midthirties, complained,

[Migrants] get used to those comforts, and they don’t want to come back here anymore. They start to think they come from Los Angeles, and they come to show off and to say how pretty Los Angeles is. . . . Instead of think- ing about the common good, about our children, people start to think about why that guy has money and not me. Then they lose the ideology and the habit of mutual aid. . . . Those people start thinking they can have every- thing easy, and they come back with very hard hearts.

Like Naila, many villagers disliked migrants’ individualism. In particular, returned men like Tomás were often especially adamant, having given up the United States and come back to the village in search of a collective alternative.

Partida’s rules had key implications for those who returned. If a migrant was deported or chose to come back for good, he had to petition the pue- blo to start at the bottom of the local public-service ladder. For instance, Mario Vargas lived in Los Angeles for almost twenty years. In 2009 he was deported for drug use. He had nowhere to go but Partida. When he returned, he described, “I had to start from the bottom. To go to the village leaders and say, ‘This is what happened.’ I had to promise to stop drinking and using drugs. And I had to do lots of cargos. I have already been a guard at the town hall, and now I have to be a guard at the church— lots of cargos.” For Mario the obligations actually fostered self-esteem. Staffi ng his new hot-dog stand in Partida, he told me, “Take a picture of

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me! I want my boys [in Los Angeles] to see that I’m working. I’m not like I was there.”

The village also used community service to reindoctrinate returned migrants to communal life. Abel Espinoza, a former village president, described one memorable incident. In 1999 and 2000 a set of deportees returned to Partida and began drinking, beating people up, and vandal- izing village property, “throwing stones at an old man or any person who might be passing by.” In a neighboring town the village leaders put these cholos (gangsters) in jail, throwing them out on the earliest bus in the morning. In Partida, Abel boasted, the assembly assigned community service and jail:

There was a time when there were a lot of drunk young men [back from the United States], and the pueblo had to put them in jail. We said, “If you don’t have work to do we have some for you here,” and we gave them a few days of tequio as punishment. And fi nes too. From tequio to jail, then back to tequio. Tequio is a way to straighten the young people out [enderezarlos] when they are loitering around.

Later, these returnees complained to the state government that Partida was abusing their human rights. In answer, the village leaders told the police, “Here, we don’t live by your laws. We are a village of Usos y Costumbres, and here we make our own laws.” By asserting collective practices, the people of Partida disciplined wayward returnees. They also asserted their independence.

Autonomy from the State

Insisting that migrants support the commune gave Partida tools to rein- force its autonomy from Mexican government and political party interfer- ence. Initially, Partida developed its community statute to manage emi- grants. But the law also helped the village, for instance, to protect its communal land. Partida’s communal land included resources—such as wood—that were attractive to corporations. In the 1970s and 1980s sev- eral nearby villages lost their communal land because paper companies, and in particular a corporation named Maderas de Oaxaca (Oaxacan Wood), bought out individual landholders, promising to “help” the sellers earn money.16

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Mexico’s federal and state governments greased the wheels of such cor- porate takeovers by pressing villages to privatize land. Starting in 1992 Mexican president Carlos Salinas de Gortari revised article 27 of the Constitution to create loopholes that enabled communal land like Partida’s to be converted to private holdings.17 Salinas also created a program called the Program to Certify Communal Lands, which sent bureaucrats to rural villages several times a month to induce people to convert their land into smallholdings. While villagers were not legally required to privatize, rep- resentatives from the procuraduría agraria (attorney general of agricul- ture) visited villagers and invited them to meetings. These agents also mapped and measured villagers’ parcels, off ered them “certifi cates of rights,” talked about smallholdings, and provided fencing to mark off indi- vidual territory.18 They also off ered incentives and spoke as if land were already private. Often, such agents told villagers that the state’s free pro- gram to measure and certify land was about to end. If the pueblo changed their minds later, the visitors threatened, they would no longer get money for reforestation, and they might have to pay for titles to land. Ignacio Baca, a lawyer for an indigenous-advocacy organization based in Oaxaca City, became involved with people in Partida as they confronted their issues with migrants. As he did, he also helped them fi ght back against such actions by the state. He refl ected, “It’s a daily pressure, every week, every two weeks, there is the bureaucrat telling them to join the [privati- zation program].”

By putting their communal status in writing, the people of Partida resisted this pressure. The village statute reinforced their traditional val- ues: not only would everyone, including migrants, participate, but resources would also continue to be held collectively. After passing the statute, villagers defi ed privatization by actively demarcating communal land. Ignacio told me, “Now even the young people are really, really enthused. They have gone around the village on foot, marking off all the old land demarcation points, interviewing the elders . . . and they made their own map of all the [communal] lands.” Once again, migrant return- ees who had grown disillusioned with U.S. unfairness, such as Juan Serrano and Alejandro Campos, were especially enthusiastic. Such eff orts helped protect Partida’s valuable forests. Pablo Velasco, a village council- man, noted,

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There is wood [in Partida]. They [corporations] have not exploited the wood, and we have worked hard to conserve it. . . . No company has touched it. They have wanted to, but the pueblo is very bullheaded and they say no. Now, on the contrary, the young people want to reforest more. There are places where their grandparents planted corn in the mountains, and they want to put more trees there.

In the fi rst decade of the 2000s Partida also banned felling trees and began to require members to help reforest whenever the government cut them down. So when the state cut trees to widen the road, the village lead- ers called for teqiuo (communal work) to plant new ones. Residents took pride that they had some of Oaxaca’s only virgin forests, untouched by corporations.

Linking outside meddling to the degradation of communal life, people in Partida also rejected political parties and the state’s “productive projects.” Though political parties were technically illegal in Usos y Costumbres communities, they often became involved in local elections, especially as the PRI and the PRD vied for control. This competition frac- tured many rural communities, leading the state to cut off their funding until confl icts had been resolved. To avoid such a fate, Partida’s assembly blocked political parties. When a state senate candidate for the PAN came to the village in 2010, for instance, residents heckled her and threw stones, yelling, “Who is this woman to come and tell us what to do in our pueblo?” When I asked why, Juan explained, “Because political parties come in— you’re red [PRI], I’m yellow [PRD], and it’s divide and conquer.” Tomás extended his criticism of migrants to parties as well, telling me, “Political parties . . . are purely destructive criticism, not constructive. We should have politics but constructive, to unify people not to separate them. But we came to the conclusion [that parties] divide.” In Tomás’s reckoning indigenous pueblos’ hopes lay in their own, grassroots control. Thus, people in Partida rejected affi liations like Retorno’s alliances with the FIOB and the PRD.

Partida’s protectionism also extended to the traditional system of car- gos. Migrants had long insisted that instead of requiring people to serve, cargos ought to be paid. Then the state of Oaxaca also started off ering such salaries. People in Partida, however, feared that if cargos were paid (instead of unpaid, as they had been), they would lose the moral value of

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reinforcing people’s mutual obligations to the community. Refusing migrants’ and the state’s vision of modernization, hometown citizens voted to pool the money intended for stipends and use it for public works. To insist that public posts served the people, they also held civil servants accountable for every peso that came in from the state. One village presi- dent carped that in Partida, “They check your accounts; they check every- thing, and if something comes up they put the evidence before the group and charge you a fi ne, and if they’re angry, then to jail.”

Because people in Partida were so wary of outside infl uence, they rarely solicited resources beyond the standard municipal funds. While Retorno had dozens of state programs during my fi eldwork, Partida had only one in 2010, for chicken coops, and none in 2011. Though microfi nance insti- tutions and small NGOs were ubiquitous in rural Oaxaca, respondents had never heard of such an organization entering Partida. Terrifi ed of cul- tural degradation, the few funds they accepted tended to reinforce indig- enous culture, such as a community museum, a village radio station, and a program to revive the Zapotec language. When funds were tied to out- side impositions, the village refused.

Patriarchal Backlash

Men in Partida also rejected women’s rights as part of the outside attack on communal traditions. Historically, indigenous men and women had practiced gender complementarity, playing reciprocal roles. Men took responsibility for public service, voting on behalf of their wives and daugh- ters, while women attended to the family and home. Men argued that pro- tecting women from the burden of village governance was a form of respect. Everardo Segura, a former village president, explained, “If us men don’t want to participate [in civic posts], the women want to less. It’s a burden. We can’t name women to posts because they’re our mothers. I would go [serve] on behalf of my daughters but not to take their rights from them.”

Perhaps surprisingly to a Western eye, most women in Partida accepted this distribution of work. In surveys 55 percent said they preferred not to attend village assemblies. These all-day meetings were onerous: tiresome, boring, and a “lot of work,” the women explained, on top of the chores they

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already had to do in the female domain. Tomás’s wife, Victoria Maldonado, explained, “I don’t go [to the assembly], because my husband goes [for our family]. No, we [women] don’t go. That’s the custom: the woman doesn’t go. If she doesn’t go, it’s because it’s our way that men go, not women. Us women participate only in women’s things.” Those who did attend assemblies were largely single mothers, who were required to join and would be fi ned if they failed to appear. As mentioned in prior chap- ters, women otherwise viewed cargos as an insult. Even when Partida nominated a woman as town president in 2012, as I describe later, the nominee started to cry, recognizing how much she would have to give up in order to run the village.19

When Partida was writing its community statute in 2004, Ignacio, the nonprofi t lawyer, encouraged villagers to formally include women in their assembly, where all local voting took place. Yet women themselves refused. Ignacio recalled,

There was a debate that lasted all day about whether or not women would participate in the assembly. Because if we were going to defi ne cargos, the women should be there to defi ne their cargos. So people talked and talked, and at the end [men] said, “Okay, let women join.” . . . But the women said it was not the moment, that there was too much to do, and they couldn’t have the whole family in the assembly. . . . Having gone through the whole morning, after lunch the women said, “No, we’d rather not return. We don’t want this to be an obligation or a right to come to the assemblies, because coming the whole day—no, we’d prefer not to. Let it be optional.”

The men eventually reasoned, “We have to respect women too; we have to give them their space.” Thus, the pueblo decided that women would be exempt from public service. While men in Partida told me they allowed women to join assemblies, I never saw a woman attend. Given that many women (and men) left the village to escape male abuse in the household, migration may also have helped to sort people born in Partida, leading the most rebellious women to leave.

Whether or not women wanted to engage in local politics, their absence left them with little leverage to stop gendered violence. From the day I arrived in Partida, doctors, teachers, and other urban workers described the village as rife with domestic abuse. In the fi rst few hours I spent in

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town, a teacher from the city professed in hushed tones that the gender situation there was “brutal” (canijo) and that men of Partida were some of the most abusive in the state. Despite her resentment of migrants, Naila, too, angrily shook the ruffl ed sleeves of her black shirt as she explained, “Maybe there’s not as much abuse as before, but, still, if a man hits a woman, people will say it’s the woman’s fault. Or women themselves denounce her. . . . [Even] women say that if I have husband, I can’t go out. . . . They say that if I’m walking around in the street I’m just a cualqui- era [slut]. Está canijo aquí [It’s rough here].” Others told gruesome sto- ries, such as one woman’s tale of her sister beaten to death by sillazos (chair hits) or another’s description of a sixteen-year-old girl “enslaved to her in-laws.” Men, meanwhile, were known to gather at a local cantina called Nacho’s Bar to swap stories of hitting their wives with the end of a hose. They joked, as one confessed to me privately, “You’re not from La Partida unless you go to Nacho’s Bar, and you beat your wife.”

When women did push for greater political infl uence, men threatened, teased, or silenced them. Claudia Vega, the fi erce mother who sent her seven daughters away from Partida to school, had been demanding a say in assemblies since the 1960s. She attended the meetings, often as the only woman present. Puttering in her courtyard one day, she railed, “Here they [women] are used to the idea that women don’t have the right to go [to assemblies]. ‘No!’ I tell them. ‘You have to see that the women go to the meeting, to participate, to know. Not from other people’s mouths, who don’t even talk or know anything.’ ” Yet when women like Claudia did go to meetings, men mocked and muffl ed them. Several women were afraid of the village assembly. It was embarrassing, they said. Noemí Torres, for instance, told me, “If we go to meetings, men are the ones who speak, and women are still afraid to speak. If a woman speaks up, they make fun of her.” Lorena Padilla, a single mother, added, “I went to the assembly once, but they don’t let you speak; they say what we say is worthless. We don’t talk—because what’s the point of talking?” In short, as Claudia put it, “We [women] have neither voice nor vote.”

Women’s infl uence in the Los Angeles HTA threatened men in Partida. Women questioned the pueblo’s traditions of gender complementarity, and they denounced its widespread domestic abuse. As they raised money for the village, migrant women also worked to remit some of their

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own “liberation,” demonstrating their power to men back home. Those men resisted. They called migrant women “streetwalkers” (mujeres de la calle), “bitches” (perras), or “loose” (andalonas) and said that when women migrated, they lost their honor and respect. Others added, “Over there [in the United States] men are no longer men.” Otilio Santos—a former presi- dent of Partida—suggested that the women’s takeover of the HTA left men in the pueblo especially vexed: “The men are afraid of women, afraid that at some point one of the women is going to take charge here [in the vil- lage]. . . . The men of Partida are really defeated, because they got a woman [as HTA president]. They say, ‘How can it be that this damn old lady is telling us what to do?’ They’re waiting for her to make mistakes so they can take her down.”

At the same time, the Oaxacan state had started using women’s rights to subvert indigenous self-governance. Even though women won suff rage in Mexico in 1947, many indigenous villages, including Partida, continued to exclude them from voting and village posts. Generally, this practice was accepted as part of indigenous peoples’ right to set their own electoral rules. In the late 1990s, however, the federal government and the state of Oaxaca began insisting on women’s rights to political participation, prop- erty, and law enforcement. The state also used women’s individual rights to question the legality of collective self-governance.20 In 2007, when a Zapotec village near Partida blocked a woman named Eufrosina Cruz from running for community president, she appealed to the PRI and later to the president of Mexico, leading Mexico to impose a constitutional restraint on indigenous communities’ rights to self-govern. In 2009 the Oaxacan electoral institute then mandated that indigenous women be allowed to vote in local elections and considered for municipal councils.21 But men like Everardo, who had been president of Partida in 2008, argued that these outsiders were trying to square indigenous practices “with urban eyes.” When the mandate for women’s participation arrived in Partida, the village assembly ignored it.

State-led women’s empowerment programs also proved sticking points between outside advocates and men in Partida. One of Oaxaca’s key state services in the fi rst decade of the 2000s (indeed, its third-largest source of income) was the conditional-cash-transfer program Oportunidades. Even though the program off ered villagers cash, Partida refused it for years, due

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to its focus on women. The local doctor—a young woman from Oaxaca City sent to Partida for her internship—was especially incensed. One evening I sat with her in the clinic after close, chatting about how stubborn the men had been. She explained, “I have asked for permission to come speak to men in the assembly, to talk to them about domestic violence here, but they won’t give it to me. The problem is they’re very machistas; they’re afraid of a woman who speaks up.” The more the doctor encouraged women to resist domestic violence, she added, the more the men refused to listen or help her—even to help themselves. When the doctor went out of her way to get supplies for the village, such as dozens of much-needed wheelchairs, the men retaliated as well, refusing to approve her proposals and costing them critical support. To men in Partida, gender equality was a symbol of outside values, incongruent with collective life.

Coda: The Contradictions of Defying the “Outside”

Sometimes villagers’ bullheadedness deprived them of important resources. Partida relied on migrants and the state for money. At certain moments, its leaders were so focused on refusing outside impositions that they put this support in jeopardy.

In particular, if the hometown was too stubborn, it risked alienating its migrants. Partida’s HTA in Los Angeles played a key role in funneling money to the pueblo, by monitoring migrants’ participation and collecting the “migrant tax.” During my fi eldwork in Los Angeles, I often saw HTA members knocking on doors and checking whether migrants had purchased their allotted tickets to upcoming fund-raisers. OIP leaders like Blanca held thirty years’ worth of event tickets, meeting invitations, and other proof of contributions to the organization. If a wayward migrant returned to Partida, the local authorities phoned these HTA leaders to verify whether the person had lent them a hand. Guillermo Reyna, who lived in Los Angeles, argued that by punishing “reluctant” migrants and appropriating their property, “they [the hometown leaders] are exposing themselves. . . . They need things from us, the people who are outside.” Santiago Morales added that while the villagers had eff ectively manipulated the meaning of comunero to demand migrants’ participation, migrants also had tools of their own, including access to government grants like the 3x1 Program. In

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his mind, migrants were “the most important [economic] motor of Partida.” The more money migrants sent, the more they had leverage to change things back home. Villagers faced a catch-22: while they wanted to “recom- munalize” migrants, they also depended on those in Los Angeles.

To keep migrants happy, the people of Partida had to adapt. Thus, the pueblo acquiesced to migrants’ demands to reform the system of cargos. In the fi rst decade of the 2000s, they reduced the total number of cargos by half and the number of years someone worked in each cargo from three to one. They also monetized these positions, eventually agreeing to use state funds to pay civic stipends. While villagers initially insisted that migrants return to serve, they later accepted the HTA’s proposal to pay substitutes instead. Ultimately, they began allowing community members to hire other people to do the cargos and tequios they had been assigned, at the rate of about US$3,000 to $5,000 per year for civil-service posi- tions and US$15 per day for communal labor.

Monetizing Usos y Costumbres transformed Partida’s communal gov- ernment. While the pueblo had historically assigned leadership positions to the most prosperous villagers to equalize income disparities, these posts now fell on people who could not aff ord to hire substitutes or who needed the money they’d earn from serving on others’ behalf. As a result, cargos no longer rotated among citizens. Instead, they became stratifi ed toward the poor. The shift to a paid system also put migrants in the position of literally funding the functioning of the hometown government. It was unclear how long such an arrangement could last.

In what Nazanin Shahrokni and I (2014) call “patriarchal accommoda- tions,” Partida adapted its gender order as well. Since the 1990s women migrants had been some of the most active participants and fundraisers in Partida’s HTA. Therefore, even as village leaders kept women out of assemblies at home, they encouraged women migrants to stand up to men in Los Angeles, to convince them to contribute. When Blanca Martínez was president of the HTA in the early 1990s, for instance, she reached out to the hometown government to complain about migrant men. She told the village president,

It’s hard for us women that the men rebel against us and protest. Us women are contributing more than the men. It’s as if it’s harder for [migrant] men

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to submit to us women. . . . They say that we have no authority to make them contribute, and it’s hard to fi ght with people who are like that and don’t want to help. I don’t know what’s in their heads. They think they’re going to stay here their whole lives, and they won’t need any help from the pueblo. What can we do with them? If you want support, then help us make them do their part.

Perhaps surprisingly, the leaders replied, “You women should rule, because you wear the pants more than us men. Just take a hard rod and make them do it.” Because the village needed support, men there not only accepted women in the HTA; they also encouraged them to take a heavy hand with male migrants who failed to help out.

In 2010–11 Carmen, Concha, and Renata’s leadership also inspired some of the men in Partida to push for women’s inclusion. Esteban Báez, who was hometown treasurer during my fi eldwork, was one. He refl ected,

What really gets my attention is that when there were men [leading the HTA], they never took advantage of the program [3x1], and now that three women head the group, they’re doing it. . . . [Men in Partida] think that women are still not capable of being town leaders, and I tell them that’s not true. The clearest example is what Renata and her compañeras [female companions] did [in Los Angeles], that women can do it as well as us—or better.

Esteban was so inspired that when Partida nominated him to serve as town president the following year, he said he would do it only if they appointed women to serve alongside him. While the pueblo declined, such eff orts eventually built momentum to give village women the vote.

In 2012, led by men like Esteban, along with returnees like Alejandro Campos and Juan Serrano, Partida agreed to shift from voting publicly in assemblies to voting by secret ballot. They also began requiring women to vote, just like men. Then, after centuries of all-male politics, the pueblo elected a woman as president. In a rather literary twist, Isabel Vega—the president-elect—was the seventh daughter of long-time, outspoken femi- nist Claudia Vega. The last time I visited Claudia, she bounded around her small cement patio, clutching her gingham apron and telling me, “It’s high time that women ruled! How we have fought for this!” Leonel refl ected more stolidly, “We have made history here in Partida, Abigail.” Ultimately

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the shift echoed decade-old changes at work in nearby Retorno. The con- texts, however, were dramatically diff erent.

a l t e r n a t i v e g l o b a l i z a t i o n i n r e t o r n o

The day I arrived in Retorno, its roads buzzed with women hawking homemade tamales and tattooed men in baggy black jeans (see fi gure 6 for an image of Retorno’s main road). Unlike in Partida, people talked often of California. The following week, on a bright July morning, the vil- lage held its secondary-school graduation. Mothers fi lled folding chairs fi rst, bedecked in traditional Mixtec rebozos (scarves). Then came a sec- ond group: young men with shaved heads and jeans, who looked like they had just landed from California. The contrast between the two groups was striking. Yet all of their faces shared signs of strength and strain. Both stayed quiet, arms crossed over their chests. As the ceremony concluded, the principal gave a speech. He implored the eighth-grade graduates to

continue with your studies. Get college degrees, because in this country of Mexico we need more professionals. We need anthropologists, psycholo- gists, biologists, lawyers, and teachers. We have had enough with migrating to serve as cheap labor in the north [the United States]. Ya basta [enough already]. Let us stop being slaves to the gringos!22 We need graduates and no more braceros [manual workers]!23

As he spoke, three girls glanced at me, stifl ing giggles. The speech hinted at how Retorno’s migration pathway had compelled the pueblo to fi ght for a future in Mexico. Goaded by cross-border ties, villagers joined migrants, the FIOB, the PRD, and other indigenous communities to demand repre- sentation and resources from the shifting Mexican state.

Throwing Out the Caciques

For Retorno’s poorer villagers, aligning with migrants, the Mexican oppo- sition, and other indigenous villages off ered new leverage at home. Once migrants organized in California, they inspired their allies to help expel the PRI caciques in the pueblo.

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For one, migrants’ long-distance advocacy helped link them to a small, educated, and politically mobilized group of teachers in Retorno who bol- stered their fi ght. In the late 1970s teachers in Oaxaca had begun to rebel against the national teachers’ union, which was associated with the ruling PRI.24 They waged marches and sit-ins to democratize union leadership and educational practices and to seek change in Mexico as a whole. Many of the rebel teachers came from rural areas, including Retorno. In the

Figure 6. Women walking down the main street of Retorno. Photo by the author.

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1980s they aligned with the Mexican Socialist Party, the same group that migrants met in the fi elds of Sinaloa. Like the party, they emphasized social struggle and solidarity with the vulnerable. Blockading roads and occupying Oaxaca City, the teachers became the core of popular mobiliza- tion in Oaxaca in the 1980s and continue to lead its biggest social move- ments today.25 In the mid-1990s teachers also started to grow increasingly involved in rural communities. Their class consciousness linked them to workers and peasants, echoing migrants’ own goals.26

Other villagers were sympathetic to migrants as well. In Retorno 88 percent of men and 57 percent of women had once worked as migrants—63 percent and 20 percent, respectively, in the United States. In addition, two-thirds of couples had separated across borders, and a third of young people had at least one parent living elsewhere. Returnees’ and family members’ stories had a ripple eff ect, convincing villagers that instead of going north, they should focus on making Retorno a place to feel “free.” Even those who had never been to the United States would say things like, “Why would I go to the United States? Only to suff er.” Their experiences as internal migrants made them receptive to negative accounts of life in North County San Diego.

In the mid-1990s, such villagers began to rally with migrants to democ- ratize Retorno. Luis Pérez, a short, eloquent teacher with heavily gelled hair, became a leader of the opposition—and later of Oaxaca’s branch of the FIOB. Luis was the youngest child of a family of fi ve. All of his siblings migrated, and he hoped to avoid the same fate. To make that possible, how- ever, he had to advocate for government programs and public support. So he joined the teachers’ movement—and the village rebellion. He explained,

My goal was, above all, the possibility of having a pueblo that was diff erent— a developed pueblo, a pueblo that could count on educational institutions that would raise the level of development, a pueblo that might have access to public programs from the state government. But we couldn’t imagine Retorno getting access to these things if we didn’t organize ourselves [to demand support]. Therefore, the fundamental step—in order to infl uence things and have a diff erent town—was in the organizing.

Together, migrants and teachers recruited much of the village to challenge Retorno’s inequity. By the late 1990s nearly 90 percent of adults in Retorno

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aligned themselves with the FIOB branch in the village and, with it, the PRD.

In 1995 local FIOB sympathizers revived the fi ght to overthrow the local PRI and democratize village control. They physically ousted the sit- ting PRI president and installed a teacher named Martín Alvarado in his place, putting FIOB allies into all the village leadership posts. Martín’s government dismantled the “customs” the caciques had used to exploit the poor. First, they ended the requirement that villagers do unpaid labor, insisting that all government jobs be paid. Second, they reduced the number of cargos in Retorno to ten per year, welcoming state stipends for those who served. Third, they abandoned public voting in favor of secret ballots. With the new system, it was harder for elites to suppress indige- nous voices or deliver votes on the poor’s behalf.

The FIOB-affi liated leaders also enabled migrants, indigenous people, women, and the poor to vote and hold civic posts. They eliminated all but one of Retorno’s twelve religious festivals, so villagers would not have to give so much money to the church. They also ended the requirement that civic leaders sponsor a village fi esta, which tacitly tied positions of power to wealth. For the remaining yearly festival, they replaced onerous sponsorship requirements (cofradías) with a small annual contribution from everyone in the village. Basilio Ramos, who prodded these shifts from afar, refl ected,

One of the great satisfactions—something that FIOB has given us and that was in our plans from the beginning, one of the great dreams—was to end the cofradías in the pueblo. Many people thought that the cofradías were a detriment to the community, but there was also a lot of resistance to change. . . . Still, after six or seven years [without them], people were really happy, because now families don’t sacrifi ce themselves [economically]. Many families from Retorno had to leave, and many couldn’t return because they were so in debt.

Dismantling tradition alleviated the kinds of debts that had driven migrants to leave. Ironically, it was only by doing away with Usos y Costumbres—the very customs that protected participation and redistribution in Partida— that the new government made Retorno more democratic.

Martín Alvarado and his colleagues also held a series of consultations with migrants in North County San Diego and Baja California, in which

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migrants participated in hometown politics and made suggestions to restructure the village. The caciques had once barred former migrants from holding political offi ce. By 2010, however, returnees held ten of eleven village leadership posts. In that year’s municipal election, ten of twenty-two proposed representatives had worked in the United States in the past three years and another ten at some point in their lives. As I dis- cuss later, the new leaders also decided to require women to attend assem- blies and serve on public committees alongside the men.

Finally, the FIOB-allied government redistributed resources. Not only did the FIOB obtain new funding from foundations, nongovernmental organizations, and the state of Oaxaca, but its allies also spread those resources more evenly among the people of Retorno. Javier Ortíz, a long- time FIOB advocate and twice president of the organization’s branch in the village, explained, “Around that time [the late 1990s] a lot of money was coming in from the government, from SAGARPA [Secretaría de Agricultura, Ganadería, Desarrollo Rural, Pesca, y Alimentación; Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock, Rural Development, Fisheries, and Food], and so on. But Martín also distributed a lot of resources, or at least they started to be distributed more evenly.” Rather than siphoning state funds into their cronies’ pockets, Martín’s government used the money for infrastruc- ture, paved roads, and projects that benefi ted the village as a whole.

Nunca Más un México sin Nosotros (Never again a Mexico without Us)

In 1994 the FIOB opened an offi ce in the Mixteca and established branches in many migrant hometowns, to fi ght for greater inclusion of indigenous pueblos in Mexico. Galvanized by strikes in North County San Diego, the fl edgling organization unifi ed migrants who came from across the region, and it hoped to animate similar dissent among those on the sending side. In individual villages, including Retorno, the organization also backed allies’ bids for control. When they were successful, FIOB allies gained new leverage over municipal funds. By the late 1990s the organization had also begun promoting the PRD agenda.

In addition to pursuing municipal seats, the FIOB mobilized pueblos across the region to fi ght for more state support. Indigenous political

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autonomy, they insisted, did not mean the government could abdicate its responsibility for community development. In a 1996 communiqué to the state and federal governments, for instance, the FIOB demanded immedi- ate assistance in Retorno to install potable and irrigation water and to pave roads. To promote similar demands across the Mixteca, the organiza- tion mobilized marches, road blockades, and sit-ins in Oaxaca City.27 In August that same year, it announced an “indefi nite takeover” of the main highway near Retorno: the protest that brought Alma Sandoval into poli- tics. It demanded that the government of Oaxaca provide piped water, roads, services, solutions to communal-land disputes, productive and cul- tural projects for indigenous communities, and a halt to the militarization of the Mixteca and the harassment of FIOB members. By the early 2000s, the FIOB and its allies in Oaxaca had secured funds from more than ten diff erent state offi ces as well as direct grants to FIOB leaders and the municipalities they represented.28

These funds supported irrigation, paved roads, bridges, roofs, cement fl oors, agricultural projects, and credit and loan groups. They also pro- vided training in human rights and women’s empowerment. In addition, the FIOB secured collective taxi licenses (the main mode of public trans- portation in the area), enabling villagers to earn almost three times as much driving taxis as they did in day labor. By 2000 the FIOB had more than twenty thousand members in seventy Oaxacan towns, and its assem- blies in Mexico drew more participants than its meetings in the United States.29 By positioning itself as a new interlocutor with the state, the FIOB gave indigenous people access to resources they had never had before. These resources also helped the FIOB mobilize votes for the PRD.

Where people in Partida avoided political parties, those in Retorno got more involved. Not only did the FIOB help solicit funding for migrants’ hometowns; it also promoted the leftist ideals of the PRD. Its movement in Oaxaca built on demands made by the Zapatistas, in nearby Chiapas, for inclusion and fair treatment of indigenous people and an end to neo- liberal globalization. Emphasizing inclusion, the FIOB took up the Zapatistas’ slogan, Nunca más un México sin nosotros (Never again a Mexico without us). FIOB leaders, particularly those from Retorno, denounced Mexico’s disregard for its indigenous people. In a communi- qué to state and federal authorities, for instance, they wrote, “We are

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interested in expressing our opinions in the National Consultation about indigenous rights and participation, hoping that this is not one more con- sultation that turns to smoke and leaves our communities forgotten. . . . We do not permit nor will we permit more discrimination based on the fact of having deep indigenous roots.”30 They added that they would not allow the PRI to divide them. Thus, even as Retorno dismantled some of the customs associated with Usos y Costumbres, it reconstituted indigene- ity as a tool to unify neighboring villages and oppose state neglect.

The FIOB also backed PRD eff orts to challenge the federal- and state- level PRI. When the FIOB emerged in Oaxaca, the PRI had held power at both levels for almost seventy years. The FIOB and the PRD rallied Retorno and other nearby hometowns to contest its control. In 1998 they launched Luis Pérez, the teacher from Retorno, as a left-wing PRD candi- date for Oaxaca’s state senate. Throughout the region FIOB members knocked on doors, helping the PRD wage a massive campaign to support him. In 1999 Luis was elected as the fi rst-ever indigenous representative to Oaxaca’s state congress. The campaign tied the FIOB so closely to the PRD that the FIOB started describing itself as the FIOB-PRD. A decade later villagers still had trouble distinguishing between them. Drawing on the alliances and critical politics that migrants developed in northern Mexico and the United States, the FIOB helped indigenous people claim greater voice back at home.

Cross-border connections also helped the FIOB-PRD weather counter- attacks by the PRI. As I describe at the end of this chapter, in 2002 the state-level PRI retaliated against the FIOB, slandering Luis Pérez and throwing him in jail. The FIOB fought back by launching a binational campaign to defend him. In Europe, Canada, South America, Mexico, and the United States, human-rights organizations supported their cause. Thanks to their eff orts, Luis was released after seven days. As the PRI assaulted the FIOB, its members in the United States also mobilized to protect their allies in Mexico, waging hunger strikes and demonstrations at Mexican consulates in California. Given the PRI’s long-standing domi- nance in Retorno, villagers could not avoid political party competition. But their cross-border ties gave them strength to push for the parties that spoke to them best.

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Gendered Jujitsu

In what I call gendered jujitsu, the FIOB also used women’s rights pro- grams to broaden its movement. Before the FIOB entered Oaxaca in 1995, women could hardly approach Retorno’s town hall, let alone vote in village assemblies. By 2010 they were 62 percent of Retorno’s voters and ran most of its school committees, health councils, and government social programs. The FIOB promoted this shift, and women, in turn, gave the movement momentum.

Before the FIOB took off , women had already begun to do civic work in Retorno when men were absent. From the 1980s on, women had been the majority in Retorno, the nexus of divided families, and some of the fi rst returnees. From 1970 to 1990, as more men left for California, the propor- tion of local men who were working age fell from 60 to 38 percent.31 Several women did public service in their husbands’ stead. Dora López, the fi rst to serve on a town committee in the mid-1980s, explained, “Women had to be on the committees because all the husbands went to the United States, and there were just women alone, so the only ones who went to the meetings were mothers.” When the FIOB began to organize in Retorno, therefore, it realized it needed women to serve as its eyes and ears on the ground.

In the coming years, as the FIOB organized in Retorno, Alma, Adelina, and a few other female leaders did the bulk of the mobilization, walking from house to house and inviting other women to meet and march. If a PRI representative came to the village, the women would grab him and demand that the government bring them programs. Whether or not they longed for infl uence as women, most described their early political work as a burden. Often, villagers shamed them as sluts and streetwalkers. Yet the women soldiered on, determined to avoid the abuses they’d faced as migrants in Mexico and the United States. As Alma put it, “We women made that [FIOB] government.”

Women got involved in this movement because they cared about the “right not to migrate.” In 1996 Martín Alvarado’s government announced, “[Women] have a right to participate in the elections too, to have a voice and vote.” Alma Sandoval, Adelina Juárez, and four other women answered

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the call. All had been migrants themselves. When Alma arrived at that fi rst assembly, she recalled, she felt “such a shame! We [women] would have preferred to cover our heads and faces with our shawls, and we didn’t say anything.” At the time, FIOB sympathizers had identifi ed a program that would replace their thatched roofs with tiles, but it required a woman to be at the helm.32 They named Alma president of the program. Alma could hardly speak out of shame, and she never said if she would accept. Nevertheless, she took the post for the good of the village, thinking, “I care about my pueblo . . . because I want to live here.” Without the participa- tion of women like her, Alma worried, Retorno would lose the resources the FIOB had promised—and with them, her chance to stay home. From that moment on, Alma added, “We [women] were in.”

Other women mobilized to avoid displacement as well. As a young woman, for instance, Adelina had worked for nearly a decade in Culiacán, going on strike at age sixteen and watching her fi rstborn baby die in the fi elds. Like Alma, Adelina avoided assemblies at fi rst. Yet she eventually realized, “It’s for a just and noble cause that we [women] are going, because it’s not acceptable for just a few people to control us and put whomever they want in as president.” Likewise, Dolores Muñoz recalled that when she left the fi elds of northern Mexico to come back to Retorno in the 1990s, she was inspired to change the village. She described,

I used to tell the women, “You [women] have to go [participate]! How are we going to help Retorno advance if we don’t say anything, if we don’t speak, if there are meetings, and we don’t go? No. We have to go. We can!” . . . I told the women they didn’t have to let anyone take advantage of them. “Stop being abused. You have to fi ght for what is yours. If you see that something is not working well in Retorno, you have the right, you know? You have to go to the government, form a group, and ask about the corrup- tion. You have the right to have the village be diff erent. . . . Don’t let your- selves be cheated by the people who are high up in [PRI] politics, because the only thing they do is just come to the village to trick people. And then in the end, the ones who benefi t are those people, and our village remains the same.”

In some ways, Dolores’s language sounded like Western feminism. Yet her reason for urging women to participate was not gender abuse but the risk of village stagnation at the hands of manipulative politicians. Clientelism,

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she felt, deprived villagers of the only resources that might enable them to avoid migrating to northern Mexico or the United States.

New programs for women in development also made their inclusion crucial to garnering state support. Javier Ortíz, who was president of the FIOB branch in Retorno in the late 1990s, explained, “Foundations [in the United States and Mexico] also started to see that women’s participa- tion was critical, so they started to give projects for women.” They off ered chicken rearing, palm crafts, mushrooms, Lorena stoves, and microbanks. As they did, Javier added, they made women’s participation “fundamen- tal.” To get such funding, the FIOB insisted that women like Alma be involved. They also used women’s rights workshops as organizing tools, training women to advocate for resources and to contribute to FIOB mobilization.

As women participated in such trainings, they began to pay increasing attention to their rights as women. Adelina, for instance, attended FIOB- run workshops on human and women’s rights. She went to talks on how women should participate in assemblies. She refl ected, “[The FIOB] taught us about the rights every citizen has, that every person has. That we [women] have our own names and that we have the right to travel—they taught us that, as well as our responsibilities.” A decade later during my fi eldwork, Adelina led a group of women into the village square for Retorno’s election. Crowded together, they demanded fair distribution of state resources and reprimanded men in the pueblo for poor fi nancial management. Planted at the center, Adelina grumbled when the emcee did not call on her. To all assembled, she insisted, “It’s because I’m a woman; he’s ignoring me because I’m a woman.” Adelina’s eff ort to avoid dislocation and exclusion had driven her into new, gendered struggles. Now she claimed voice as a woman, even around issues like fi scal trans- parency, which fell outside the “feminine” domain.

Meanwhile, men in Retorno began to realize that by involving women, they, too, might get access to resources from the state. Slowly, they began urging their wives and daughters to serve on municipal committees and engage in civic aff airs. At fi rst, for instance, Adelina’s husband resisted her involvement in politics. Then, he realized she could access state funds on their shared behalf. He started to tell her, “Go [to the assembly], woman! Go, because they’re going to get support for the pueblo. Support is going

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to come for village, and for women! Come on.” Similarly, Tamara Huerta, one of the early women activists, explained that when she, Alma, and Adelina began organizing,

There were many houses where the men threw us out with sticks. Yes! Many, many. But today, everyone participates because ever since the Oportunidades program came in 1999, support started to come here. That year men set their wives free to join. Because before that, no; we were only a few that would go out. We were maybe forty, fi fty women who went out. But then when the Oportunidades support came, that’s when everyone in the pueblo joined.

State funds swayed the men to “set their wives free.”33

The more women gained voice in Retorno, the more they saw their hometown as a dynamic alternative to emigration. Instead of associating Retorno with patriarchy, for instance, Dolores Muñoz found “liberation” in the village. Not only could she escape her husband’s beatings by staying in Retorno when he went on to the United States, but she could also avoid the “slavery” of farmwork in northern Mexico and factories in North County San Diego. As Dolores mobilized, she also gained confi dence. She explained,

I was on the school committee, so when the school needed something I had to go ask for it. For instance, a delegate would come from Oaxaca, and we would have to go. . . . So I started developing more as a person at that point. Like I learned how to fi ght for things for Retorno. The people who were managing things badly—well, I would go and say to them, “No. This is not okay. You have to do it like this.” So a lot of people told me—a lot of people started to respect me. . . . So when I was back in Retorno, I was another person; I was no longer the same submissive Dolores that bowed her head when they punished her, that just cried and cried and never said anything. No. At that moment I changed.

Despite the burdens of community service, many women who partici- pated in politics felt a stronger capacity as women. Activists like Alma and Tamara described an “awakening,” saying that they could now “see them- selves,” that life in the village “felt great,” and that they would no longer tolerate abuse by politicians, employers, or men.34

As women took on new political roles, they also began to confront domestic violence, the lack of divorce, and men’s control over property

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and children. María Robles, a divorced single mom in her forties who ran a mini-mart near the town square, remembered that her father had refused to let her go to school. She quipped, “In the old days almost all the men used to beat women. But now, no; now it’s the reverse. Women con- trol the men! [Laughs.]” While women in most Oaxacan villages still lacked recourse to report domestic violence, with the help of the FIOB, those in Retorno regularly went to the district court to denounce abuse.35

Yet household relationships were not their only point of comparison. Rather, women of Retorno measured their quality of life against their experiences in the United States. They felt “strong,” as they put it, not just because they gained infl uence toward their husbands but also because they avoided exploitation, abuse, and discrimination in North County San Diego. In Retorno they built lives they had reason to value. Of course, they faced ongoing economic pressure. Many also made great sacrifi ces to sup- port public programs. Nevertheless, most echoed Alma: in Retorno, they said, they felt “free.” As in other countries, these women became feminist activists in and through their other kinds of struggles.36 Fighting against the degradations of migration gave meaning to their eff orts as women. By incorporating these women into politics—along with migrants and the poor—the FIOB transformed the pattern of authority in Retorno.

Coda: The Fragmentation of Solidarity

Still, the FIOB’s gains were fragile. For one, the PRI retaliated. As described in chapter 1, several of Retorno’s wealthier, PRI-affi liated fami- lies migrated to Mexico City in the 1970s and 1980s. When these families heard of the FIOB takeover, their blood boiled. In particular, a sixty- seven-year-old woman named Esmeralda Ruiz, who had worked for the PRI in Mexico City for years, decided to return and reclaim her pueblo. Esmeralda owned a grimy, paid bathroom in the nearby town square, charging two pesos (about twenty U.S. cents) per person to enter. The fi rst time we met, she reclined in the entryway to this business, in a billowing pink poncho and gold earrings. She explained that she had come back to the pueblo because by 2001, “The PRI was dead in Retorno; [the FIOB] had blocked the PRI.” Esmeralda took it upon herself to revive Retorno’s ruling party. Drawing on a wide, wealthy, and long-standing PRI network

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of patronage and her ties in Mexico City, she got funds for reforestation, beauty courses, and even cash handouts. She also twisted women’s empow- erment to her own ends. In workshops targeted primarily at older women, she denigrated the “licentious” behavior of FIOB leaders like Alma and Adelina. She told the señoras that these girls, the wives of their hardwork- ing sons away in the United States, were getting drunk and prostituting themselves to activist men. She also trained the elder women to defend Retorno’s “old stability” by supporting the PRI.

The PRI in Oaxaca City struck back as well. In 2001 Oaxaca’s PRI gov- ernor José Murat, who was known for manipulating social movements and their leaders, attempted to pay both Domingo García and Luis Pérez to abandon the PRD and shift the FIOB’s allegiance to the PRI. Domingo and Luis refused. In answer, the governor spread word across the press that the men had failed to account for US$120,000 worth of donated funds, most of them for women’s committees. In April that year the Oaxacan newspaper El Universal reported that the state branch of the Ministry of Social Development (Secretaría de Desarollo Social) had found corruption in the FIOB, led by Domingo and Luis. The governor arrested them both. Many people believed these rumors, and they may have been true. Regardless, Domingo argued, the PRI—profoundly cor- rupt itself—brought the case to light to break the FIOB. Had the PRD won in Mexico, the outcome might have been diff erent.

Instead, the PRI accusations dramatically weakened the FIOB. One- time participants felt angry, insulted, and swindled. As Javier, who was once again in charge of its node in Retorno, put it, “All the confusion and chaos means that many people prefer not to participate in any organiza- tion; they’d rather stay out of it.” Even Alma refl ected that with the FIOB, “You break off quickly [se zafa uno rápido], because you don’t get any- thing from them.” Though almost everyone in Retorno had participated in the FIOB’s actions from 1996 to 2001, by 2007 only 31 percent identifi ed with the organization and by 2011, only 6 percent. While the remaining FIOB members continued their grassroots movement, the organization had far more trouble securing support. Mexican state agencies and U.S. foundations halted their funding to the group.

U.S. enforcement also weighed on the village. For one, most migrants stopped circulating, with men either returning or bringing their families

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to the United States. By 2011 only 15 percent of couples were divided, compared to 67 percent two decades before. A growing number of young men were also deported to Retorno. While their predecessors had returned voluntarily, these deportees tended to feel more hostile toward their hometown. Most had gone to the United States as children, and they fi t awkwardly in Retorno. Julio Molina’s parents, for instance, brought him to the United States in 1995, at age fi ve. In 2009 the Vista, California, police caught Julio in a stolen car and deported him. During my fi eldwork he was twenty-one. We chatted often, as he hung around Retorno’s streets with little hope of a job. He constantly complained about being bored. Gesturing at his father’s house at the bottom of the hill, he grumbled (in English), “This shit is dirt. . . . In the States when are you going to have a house like this?” Every so often I heard that Julio had brutally beaten another young man. One weekend he landed a fourteen-year-old in a coma. Rumor had it that he was also at the helm of a string of robberies of elderly women’s homes. When I asked Julio why he and his companions fought, he replied, “What I see? The main reason is alcohol. That’s basi- cally it. Because they [we] got no life. They have nothing to do. So you drink, you drink, you get happy, and you don’t feel so bad. Know what I mean? Like when you’re drunk, you drink, everything seems fi ne. . . . It makes you feel good for a certain amount of time.” As we talked, Julio pointed to a cartridge from a .22-caliber pistol, lying on the ground in his driveway. “Know what this is?” he asked. Julio promised me he wouldn’t cause trouble. But his history hinted otherwise. He had been in a gang in the United States. He was used to a life where, as he put it, “If you don’t get shamed, you get shot.”

Whereas Partida’s collective structure helped discipline its deportees, those in Retorno were far less controlled. As people like Julio brought drug use and petty crime to the pueblo, they also sapped residents’ sympa- thy for migrants in the United States. Young women began to describe their male counterparts—both deportees and nonmigrant men—as “slack- ers,” “scrubs,” or “slimeballs.” Carmelita Caballero, a twenty-nine-year-old single mother, cut hair in the village salon. She’d been married for a bit but not for long, she explained, as she spun me in front of her mirror. She refl ected, “Men are assholes, so I think some women are just meant to be alone.” In reference to the rise in robberies, others told me that things had

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gotten bad. As Ximena Ortíz, a longtime migrant and mother of eight, put it, “This town is disintegrating fast.”

PRI attacks and U.S. enforcement eroded the ties that had fueled Retorno’s resistance. They diluted the hometown’s links to both migrants and the PRD. They also splintered the village itself, crippling its political capacity. After 2001 the results of every single election in Retorno were contested, requiring appeals to the state government. Such postelectoral confl icts were common throughout the Mixteca and sometimes lasted for months.37 As they went on, the government froze all municipal resources, leaving the villages starved for money. Sometimes the state even let the confl icts fester, to avoid distributing funds. Ironically, the entry of compet- ing parties into Retorno—which began with the goal of getting more state support—sparked confl icts that ended up inhibiting its access to cash. Without strong allies and transnational ties, the FIOB was more vulner- able, Retorno grew less stable, and the PRI reclaimed authority.38 Nevertheless, women, indigenous people, and the poor maintained their voice and vote. Retorno’s caciquismo was gone for good.

t h e r o l e o f m i g r a t i o n i n m e x i c a n d e v e l o p m e n t

Students of emigration sometimes assume that hometowns get “left behind.” Others focus on migrants’ remittances of ideas or money as motors of so-called development. This chapter complicates both models, illustrating how each community’s migration pathway shapes its relation- ship to political change. It shows how, even as migrants weigh in from afar, nonmigrants and returnees also develop their own attitudes about emigration and, more broadly, globalization. These understandings then infl uence how hometowns navigate broader political shifts, such as Mexican democratization.

In a place like Partida, where migration creates tensions between tradi- tion and Western individualism, it can spark antiglobalization backlash. As migrants from Partida embraced Los Angeles, their counterparts in Mexico reinforced their communal participation and landholding. For the latter, indigenous self-governance was not just an antiquated, passive form of resistance.39 It also off ered a tool to stand up to pressure to “modernize,”

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from both migrants and the state. By reviving communal values and politi- cal autonomy, the pueblo could make demands of migrants, manage deportees, and avoid some of the fragmentation associated with land privatization and Mexican political parties. That said, the insistence on tradition also tended to re-create characteristics supposedly endemic to indigenous villages, including being closed, insular, and patriarchal.40

In a place like Retorno, meanwhile, villagers’ sympathy with migrants can fuel demands for alternative globalization. Due to Retorno’s history of circulation and family separation, women, teachers, and other residents often felt close with migrants. Like migrants, they realized that to avoid the United States and live in Retorno, they had to end the pueblo’s old hierarchies. Through the FIOB and the PRD, they joined migrants to take down the PRI caciques and claim a new voice in local politics. The rebels scrapped the rules elites had once used to pinch their money and time. They gave migrants and poor people access to leadership roles. They also sought state funds and representation in Mexico as a whole.

As gender relations shifted in the process of migration, they also got caught up in hometown battles. In Partida men associated women’s rights with outside imposition, sparking patriarchal backlash. For many years they rejected state funding tied to women’s participation. Nevertheless, the village relied on migrants for money, and some villagers admired women’s actions in Los Angeles. Ultimately, therefore, the pueblo agreed to let women vote. By contrast, people in Retorno used women’s empow- erment programs strategically, drawing women into politics to fuel their movement for change. Not only were women the majority in Retorno, but state programs also encouraged the FIOB to include them in funding requests. Both men and women embraced such gender shifts as a means to meet their broader goals. As a result, women began to vote, run village committees, and attend meetings as never before. In short, migration drew women into politics not just through “social remittances” from the United States but also through the pueblo’s own mobilization.

As time went by, both hometowns were vulnerable to shifting policies in the United States and political warfare in Mexico. Though people in Partida wanted autonomy, they also relied on their counterparts in the United States. To the extent the pueblo alienated migrants, it risked losing not only its collective traditions but also its very ability to survive. As

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migrants from Partida settled into Los Angeles and grew ever more dis- tant, the village had to moderate its stubborn commitment to patriarchy and communalism. Retorno’s democratization also relied on outside sup- porters—particularly the PRD and the FIOB—who were vulnerable to fragmentation. Its migrants’ alienation from the United States was not enough for a transnational movement. Rather, the community needed cross-border connections and political allies to back its demands on the sending side. U.S. border enforcement and Mexican party contention threatened these ties. As my research came to a close, drug violence also wracked Mexico, destabilizing rural life. While Oaxaca remained rela- tively insulated as of this writing, other hometowns disintegrated. As broader politics evolved, hometowns’ struggles remained precarious.

Still, both of these cases highlight how sending sites can be a staging ground to challenge globalization and question migrants’ experiences of “illegality” in places like the United States. Some observers argue that Mexico should stem the fl ow of migrants by building better economic development. This chapter demonstrates that it is not so simple. Rather, rural villages’ engagement with party contention and state-run develop- ment refl ects their ties to migration. Hometowns use state programs to struggle against the broader process of globalization and the conditions of U.S. exclusion. As migrant communities seek to maximize democratic control, access to resources, and environmental stewardship, their approaches are molded by the political institutions already at their dis- posal as well as the prospects and threats they face in their destinations.

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