Mixtec transnational migration is the phenomenon whereby Mixtec people have migrated between Mexico and the United States, for over three generations.
The Mixtec transnational social experience challenges traditional conceptions of cultural identity (nationhood) linked to geographical location (territory). They are an example of a social group in which migration had not led to a loss of cultural identity; rather, migration has generated territorial expansion and cultural reaffirmation.
Mixtecs have migrated to various parts of both Mexico and United States. In recent years Mixtecs, along with Zapotecs and Triqui, have emerged as one of the largest groups of migrants in the United States. Large Mixtec communities exist in the border cities of Tijuana, Baja California, and San Diego. According to statistics compiled by the National Geographic and Statistical Institute, out of the 241,080 indigenous people living in the border cities, 72,000 (30 percent) are migrants. As of 2011, an estimated 150,000 Mixteco people were living in California, and 25,000 to 30,000 in New York City.
Migration of indigenous populations to various cities of the United States constitutes an important source of income for the Mixtec, who have a long tradition of migration and are the most numerous in the United States according to the Mixtec Integrated Development Program. The remittances sent between 1984 and 1988 amounted $2,000 million pesos annually. Mixtec communities are generally described as transnational and transborder because of their ability to maintain and reaffirm social ties between their native homeland and diasporic community. For more than two decades, anthropologists have documented people who move from one country to another and who build transnational links.
Transnational migration
It is important, however, to define what transnational means and to distinguish among transnational migrants and immigrants. Nina Glick Schiller defines transnational as “those persons who having migrated from one nation-state to another live their lives across borders, participating simultaneously in social relations that embed them in more than one nation-state.” Activities and identity claims in the political domain are a particular form of transnational migration that is best understood as long-distance nationalism.
Stephen states that while the term transnational migration suggests a more or less permanent state of being between two or more locations, some people may spend a good part of their time engaging in this state of being, others may live for longer periods of time in one place or another, and still others may leave their home communities only one time or never. All the people living within a transnational social field are exposed, in different levels, but nonetheless in some shared way to “ a set of social expectations, cultural values, and patterns of human interaction shaped by more than one social, economic and political system”
Transnational social fields
By conceptualizing transnational social fields as transcending the boundaries of nation-states, individuals within these fields are, through their everyday activities and relationships, influenced by multiple sets of laws and institutions that exist within many states and cross their border. The national and the transnational part of migrant histories and experiences, particularly when it comes to the recognition or lack thereof of basic human and labor rights connected to their positions in the relation to the legal frameworks of the nations they are moving between Migrants Rights. When Mixtecs come into the United States, they cross a new set of regional borders that are often different from those in Mexico, but may also overlap with those of Mexico; for example, the racial/ethnic hierarchy of Mexico, which lives on in Mexican communities in the United States. These include ethnic, cultural, and regional borders within the United States. For these reasons, it makes more sense to speak of transborder migration rather than simply transnational. The transnational becomes a subset of the transborder experience
Background
According to social researcher Laura Velasco-Ortiz (2002), several decades of Mexican migration to the United States have led entire communities to develop economic, cultural and social ties in the US and Mexico concurrently. Moreover, evidence suggests that these migrant populations have modified the construction of the sense of territorial belonging historically associated as the foundation of local, regional and national identities. Velasco-Ortiz proposes a reconceptualization between the relation culture-territory in the process of transnational migration among Mixtec communities.