Transnational Nahua Youth: Mobilities, Knowledge, and Youth Identities in Rural Mexico

• In Event: Jóvenes indígenas transnacionales: estrategias de vida transrurales, conocimientos, e identidades emergentes

Abstract

The international migration of Nahua communities in Puebla, Mexico, who were until the end of the 20th century engaged in subsistence farming, has been increasingly configured as a childhood and youth process. In the last decade, boys and girls in their teens have taken the lead in emerging patterns of circular migration across the US border in new migrant sending areas without previous experience of transnational migration. This paper analyzes the social and cultural resources children and youth drew upon and re-created in order to take the initiative in transmigration where there were no previous networks of support to provide knowledge and sustain the process. By drawing on forms of self-organization in bandas, young people were able to sustain processes of circular migration and the transnational life of their communities over time, reshaping the economic, social and ethnic practices and landscapes in their sending communities in rural Mexico and receiving urban contexts in the United States. The cross-border self-organizing of youth and their back-and-forth migratory cycles, as well as their experiential learning about different worlds, allowed them to create alternative transnational development projects in order to forge a future for themselves, becoming key socio-political actors in their rural communities. We cannot understand contemporary forms of rurality and indigeneity in Mexico without considering children and youth as key subjects of historical transformation.

Author

• Fina Carpena-Méndez, Oregon State University