Rural Migrations to Surplus Populations in the US and Mexico

Unemployment in economic history is often told as an abstract story of international competition and business cycles. In intellectual history, ideas—and their translation into public policy—are the prime movers in the history of late twentieth century unemployment. Despite the transnational turn and disciplinary enthusiasm for global history, twentieth century labor histories of unemployment and deindustrialization are often told through analyses of particular cities or regions undergoing capital flight and industrial decline. This paper examines the histories of unemployment and informality by examining similar and interrelated processes of capital re-composition and labor decomposition in late twentieth century Mexico and the United States. In both countries, mechanization and modernization of agriculture generated not only unprecedented productivity growth but also the redundancy of farm laborers who were then drawn to urban industrial centers in search of work. In the US, the story of the Second Great Migration often ends in the tragedy of migrants heading to industrial centers just as these regions began their industrial decline. In Mexico, the so-called Green Revolution led rural agrarian workers to head to industrial cores that were incapable of absorbing all their labor and were then dealt a devastating blow by the Mexican debt crisis. Through US and Mexican central bank, policymaker, and labor archives, this paper illustrates the capital and state interconnections that generated these “surplus populations” and then explains how the newfound underemployed, unemployed, and informally employed reconfigured their conceptions of labor and the family in the wake of their new condition.