Mexico’s Short-Lived Experiment with Internal Migration in Northern Mexico, 1955–63

This paper focuses on a program launched by the Mexican state in the mid-1950s to use migrant laborers en route to the US as guest workers to pick the harvest of cotton in northern Mexico. The federal government lured them by promising that if they first worked for northern Mexican agribusiness, they would receive priority when contracts for guest-work in the US were awarded. The program helped solve northern Mexican agribusinesses’ alleged perennial labor shortage, but proved problematic for both the communities that received these migrant laborers and the federal, state and municipal authorities coordinating their movement. The communities into which migrant laborers were temporarily introduced complained the migrants brought with them problems of overcrowding, theft, violence, and lack of hygiene. Though these issues were rooted in the fact that certain receiving towns lacked the structural accommodations in place to receive a large migrant influx, including hospitals and large reception centers, locals in places such as Empalme, Sonora blamed the migrants themselves. Likewise, officials of the Mexican state at all levels struggled to effectively coordinate to stamp out said issues, even though growers provided a significant subsidy for the government authorities to expand and improve housing, transportation, and medical services for migrants. More than simply being incompetent, most of the important on-the-ground government representatives participating in the program were eventually accused of corruption by migrants, leading to their removal by Mexican President López Mateos. Mexico’s experiment in instrumentalizing migration internally suggests the frailty of the supposedly nimble authoritarian P.R.I. regime, the reaches and limits of Mexican business influence, the leeway of on-the-ground Mexican migration authorities, and the feelings of local pride and aggrievement that Mexican migrants to northern Mexico ran into even before arriving to the US.