De ‘salir adelante’ a ‘bajar proyectos’: Global economic crisis, return migration and tourism in Mexico

• In Event: Transformations in Rural Mexico during the Global Economic Crisis: Migration, Precarity and Public Policy

Abstract

After the onset of global economic crisis in 2007, international migration flows changed dramatically in communities recently incorporated into transnational circuits. As more undocumented migrants returned seeking refuge from a contracting labor market, fewer individuals migrated to avoid violent border crossings and poor job prospects. Return migrants’ economic and social reinsertion into sending communities was characterized by difficulties stemming from precarious work and the social tensions generated by curtailed aspirations. Within this unfavorable panorama in communities which had grown dependent upon remittances, the growth of tourism activities within natural protected areas is notable and indicates further transformation in the rural economy. This paper examines the conjuncture between economic crisis, return migration and the development of tourism in one community in rural Puebla, Mexico. The material and discursive practices involved in the process of the reorientation of work and aspirations from migration toward tourism is contextualized within the realities of the neoliberal creation of surplus populations that are virtually excluded from the protection of the state. The disposability and marginality of rural workers is made invisible through the overdetermined national emphasis on tourism that seeks to commodify natural and cultural resources. However, ethnographic research reveals the quotidian struggles of men and women to adjust to local and regional rearticulated economies.

Author

• Alison E Lee, Universidad de las Américas Puebla