Coveted Across the Continuum: The Politics of Mexican Migration in Transnational Perspective, 1942-1965.

Abstract

My dissertation reveals the elements of Mexican society—including businesses, politicians, union members, peasants, and others—that opposed Mexican emigration to the US and sought to reroute migratory flows more fruitfully within Mexico. By uncovering these countervailing forces to migration, the dissertation is able to dislodge paradigms that assume the uni-directional movement of migrants out of Mexico to the US, and then explain these exits as a function of push-pull mechanisms at work between countries rich and poor, developed and under-developed, first and third world, etc. All such formulations, though foundational, are unable to accommodate the individuals and institutions in "sending-states"—in this case, Mexico—that, with varying degrees of success, leveraged propaganda, economic incentives, resettlement programs and even violence to interrupt and rearrange the trajectories of Mexican migration. In the interest of providing an easy-to-remember alternative, the dissertation unveils and spotlights the pull-pull dynamic that definitively shaped the movement of people across the US, Mexico and Borderlands, as, ultimately, Mexicans engaged in redirecting their fellow countrymen were continually forced to grapple with American political and economic elites set on preserving their own access to Mexican migrant labor.