The Roots of Mexican Labor Migration

Monto focuses on one Mexican town with high migrancy and on one of its migrants' main destinations, Salinas, California. He describes the network linking the two communities, which migrants use to maximize employment, minimize expenses, and return with the proceeds to Mexico, where they will be able to buy more. Monto finds that although macrosocial factors create the economic polarization that propels migration, the migrants are not merely pawns being pushed and pulled; instead, they use circulatory migration as one of several options selected according to their role in their domestic group and the group's particular needs. He concludes that this labor circulation is not a transitional phase bound to disappear when Mexico's workforce is converted to wage laborers, but a permanent, institutionalized component of Mexico's periphery-core relationship to the United States. In the next few years, predicts Monto, the proposed North American Free Trade Agreement, together with agricultural consolidation already underway in Mexico, will probably augment rather than reduce migration.Alexander V. Monto is the author of 'The Roots of Mexican Labor Migration', published 1994 under ISBN 9780275946302 and ISBN 0275946304.