Contesting Transnational Migrant Mobilities: Resettling Deportees, Building Roads, and Constructing Race in Mexico

Session Submission Type: Panel

Abstract

This panel analyzes how Mexican migrants negotiated racial and spatial boundaries in Mexico and throughout its diaspora. It examines how Mexico’s 1950s deportation and resettlement regime transported borderlands violence deep into Mexico’s interior and how the state’s attempts to control migration had tragic implications. Then it explores how postwar Mexican road building policy transformed rural mobility and demographics in west-central Mexico by galvanizing mass emigration through agricultural industrialization and guest-worker programs. Lastly, it investigates how racial identity has been articulated and contested by Mexican migrants and their transnational communities and how these processes informed social inequality during the late-twentieth century.

Sub Track

• Migration, Borders and Diasporas

Session Organizer

• Mateo J Carrillo, Stanford University

Chair

• Julia G Young, The Catholic University of America

Individual Presentations

• Punitive Deportations, Bracero Deaths and Migration Control in Mexico - Laura D Gutierrez, University of California/San Diego

• Paving the Way to an Emigrant Republic: Roads, Agriculture, and Nation Building in Mexico, 1940-1964 - Mateo J Carrillo, Stanford University

• Migration, Race Making, and the Mexican Bajío in the Late Twentieth Century - Yuridia Ramirez, Duke University