![Sample our Politics & International Relations journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5947/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Politics-International-Relations.jpg"})
This manuscript presents a synthetic view of Chiapas’ migration history over the last century through a thorough examination of relevant English and Spanish-language literature sources. Unlike most Mexican states, Chiapas did not heavily rely upon migration, especially international migration, as an economic strategy until very recently. The reasons that underlie Chiapas’ late adoption of economic migration include socio-political and economic structural factors that shaped rural and agrarian policy and demographic trends. This paper evaluates these structural factors with regards to several migration theories to assist our understanding of how and why Chiapans were prevented or discouraged from leaving their native communities. The paper concludes by detailing the perfect cascade of climatic, demographic, economic and political factors that ultimately forced Chiapans to resort to international migration as a major economic diversification strategy.
Acknowledgements
We are grateful for comments provided by Mariel Aguilar Støen. The paper received support from MIRLU: The effect of migration and remittances on land use change in rural Mexico and Guatemala: Is there a forest transition? (Centre for Development and the Environment at the University of Oslo) and has been endorsed by the DIVERSITAS program.
Notes
1. The term peasant refers broadly to include landless farmers, ejidatarios, and smallholders with fee title land.
2. Latifundios refer to the few great estates of Latin America that largely rely upon peasant labor for commercial farming. Minifunidos, in contrast, are small-holdings used for subsistence farming.
3. The Washington Consensus, as originally defined, represents a list of ten neoliberal policies proposed to reduce poverty conditions throughout Latin America. These neoliberal policies include: fiscal discipline, trade liberalization, privatization, deregulation, property rights. Within Latin America, Mexico has gone the furthest in implementing the neoliberal reforms advocated within the Washington Consensus (Fluharty, 2006).