The Discursive construction of migration in Mexico 1988-2012

• In Event: Reframing (im)migrant faces: immigration case studies and Human Rights in Hispanic America and Brazil.

Abstract

Researchers have extensively delineated Mexico’s position regarding its diaspora in the United States and have noted the Mexican state’s increased engagement with migratory issues. Despite the valuable insights that this scholarship has rendered, it has been hampered by fragmentary data sources and an almost exclusive focus on policies and regulation to the detriment of the Mexican state’s role as a producer of meanings and ideologies. We leverage a unique data set of presidential public speeches spanning four federal administrations (1988-2012) and use a mixed method approach to make two key contributions to this research. First, we provide a quantitative measure of the relevance of emigration as a discursive topic between and within presidential administrations. Second, we examine how these Mexican presidents constructed particular understandings of migration and the Mexican diaspora and how they connected these understandings to broader ideologies. Using both of these approaches, we show that between 1988 and 2000, the Mexican state had mostly a symbolic yet individualistic conceptualization of the Mexican diaspora, as well as an economic and domestic understanding of Mexican emigration. Contrarily, in the second half of this period (2000-2012), the Mexican state conceptualized the Mexican diaspora in instrumental and collective terms, and Mexican emigration as political and transnational. We argue that these findings were facilitated by our mixed methodology and systematic and comprehensive engagement with State meaning-making and discuss ways in which they can provide interesting clues for a deeper understanding of particular migration policies.

Authors

• Gustavo J Fondevila, Center for Economic Research and Teaching’s (CIDE)

• Miguel Quintana-Navarrete