Buenavista, the homeland of ejido-holder mestizos

Buenavista is an ejido located in the municipality of Villa Corzo in the region called La Frailesca, in the state of Chiapas. It was established as an ejido in 1936 by means of the agrarian policy of President Cárdenas. Over the XIX century and the first third of XX, a large part of the population who lived in present-day Buenavista lived under the plantation system.

Plantations were agricultural production units, they had a large house with barns to store production, rustic housing for porters and other workers (baldíos), plus chapels, where festivities for the patron saint of the plantation were held. Porters were the low social class, which comprises individuals subjected to the system via their debts. For their part, the rest of workers, the baldíos, were free individuals who hired a plot of land they paid for as days in service of the plantation holder. This way, in basic terms, social classes were plantation owners, baldíos and porters.

Source: Departamento Observación y Estudio de la Tierra, la Atmósfera y el Océano, Grupo Académico Ecología, Paisaje y Sustentabilidad, ECOSUR.

Map 1. Origin of the respondents: Frailesca Region and Ejido Buenavista, Chiapas, Mexico  

Once the allotment of the land was carried out, everyday life changed the structures and introduced a new pattern. The main changes took place in production. Livestock turned into maize and bean cultivations, which were carried out by workers in the plantations, but they were devoted to address the population needs. These produce became the most used for family support and also as the main income source, under a schema of agriculture subordinated to a development model fostered by the State.

The change in the model entailed one in relation to the structure of labor relationships. The plantation as an economic unit depended on the work of porters and baldíos, who lived in servitude without receiving any income, but the owner gave them what was barely necessary to survive, or did so with what they were able to harvest in the small plots of land they were allotted (^{Toledo, 2013}). The state development model fostered the ejido and destroyed the labor relations that supported the plantations, which produced a peasant population, equally subjected to the state, who sold its labor force. The children of ejido owners, or neighbors without land, also opted for becoming salaried day workers.

This change had effects on other aspects of the community structure, making room for distinctions of class between owners of ejidos and those who were not, i.e., residents and day laborers. Ever since the constitution of the ejido, social classes were defined by a) land tenancy, b) belonging to the ejido (where land was shared), and c) agricultural activities. Owners of ejidos were the highest social class, whereas the lowest, merchants and aliens (from outside the ejido), where indigenous people residing in Los Altos de Chiapas were found. Adding to this type of differentiation, the plantation system left a mark: the issue of hierarchies. Surnames such as Grajales, Ruiz, Coutiño, Solís or Zuarth are linked to the plantation owner class, thereby, every individual from the Frailesca Region or from Buenavista who has these last names belong to a hierarchy above other people from this region.

The social, economic and identity configuration of Buenavista changed as well because of migration. In this sense, we identify two moments in the international migration from Buenavista. The first is the participation of individuals from Buenavista in the Bracero Program in 1955; then, a second wave opens with undocumented migration from Buenavista as of 1996, a moment that concurs with the structural conditions described above.⁴ Migration dragged rancheros, owners of ejidos, residents and the various hierarchical components. These differences in class and hierarchy between people from Buenavista reconfigured over the process of migration, which allowed this group to create a transnational network and an ethnic enclave as a strategy of identity contention before other ethnic groups in the US.

The transnational Buenavista network in Maryland

Nicolás Guillermo, who left in 1982 with another migrant from Villaflores, first to California and then to Washington, is considered the forerunner of migration from Buenavista. Nicolás invited a nephew to travel to the state of Washington in 1987, with Aldape, who would later work in a fishing boat of an English company, where three years after arriving he suffered an accident on the way to Alaska. After months in a coma and after his recovery he sued the company aided by an attorney and won the case. In 1995, Aldape returned to Buenavista Ejido with money, thus he sent a powerful message and image of success about international migration. His return generated expectations between acquaintances and classmates, as he returned in a new car and built an American-style house, making the people from Buenavista created imaginaries in which migration acquired centrality as an opportunity for economic growth and social mobility. Besides, the representations produced on the migrants from Buenavista, Aldape disseminated the information, providing possible migrants with the social capital he had acquired during his stay in the United States.

In 1997, there were four individuals from Buenavista in Maryland, US, who served as attraction poles for others, enabling the formation of migration chains. According to ^{Gaete and Rodríguez (2010)}, migratory chains are a sort of first phase in the development of networks and are defined as “informal social networks, composed of extended family, friends and neighbors who, in the postindustrial society, are still an important source of fellowship, mutual support and help” (Requena, 1991, quoted by ^{Gaete & Rodríguez, p. 700}). In any case, information regarding these migration chains from Buenavista favored the increase of migrants from Buenavista.

The earliest chains from Buenavista were commonly created by men in a range between 25 and 32 years of age, who had been left out from schooling opportunities and which because of the agrarian demise were excluded from the labor market in Buenavista. These migrants were fundamental to accelerate the migration process in Buenavista and invite relatives, friends and acquaintances, whom they provided with lodging, food and support for their insertion in the labor market in Maryland.

By the end of 1998, Hurricane Mitch damaged the watering dam that enabled the owners of ejidos and producers to harvest twice a year, deepening the agricultural crisis. By then, there were already about 25 individuals from Buenavista in the periphery of Washington D.C., in particular in the city of Greenbelt, in Prince George County. The arrival of individuals from Buenavista to Greenbelt apartments made the migrants from Buenavista scatter, for as more people arrived new groups that were looking for their own spaces appeared, which created new chains that moved as they learned about the place, the jobs and the new members. In spite of the dispersion of the chains, migrants from Buenavista had the necessary support to find housing, food and employment. From 2003 to 2005, 832 individuals from Buenavista migrated to Maryland, almost 10 percent of the total population of the ejido in Chiapas, 8 800 inhabitants (J. Núñez, field diary, May 7, 2016). In that moment, chains turned into a migration network.

In 2003, the transnational network created by individuals from Buenavista was composed mainly of people from the ejido who lived in such places, that is to say, in ejido Buenavista (Mexico) and in Buenavistita (Village Square North and The Pines, Laurel, Maryland, US), and interchanged communication and constant support. Such network has a solid social capital organized in communication and flow circuits through which material and immaterial goods flow. The transnational network from Buenavista is composed of relatives, neighbors, godparents and countrymen who mainly reside in Buenavistita, and other non-migrants who live in the Mexican ejido, who nourish and use the supportive networks as strategies in the migration process for their incorporation with greater certainty, cost reductions, as well as monopolizing opportunities and benefits (^{Massey & Aysa, 2007}).

In 2005, Martita traveled with one of her brothers to Laurel, where her boyfriend lived, who had arrived two years before. He paid for her travel expenses and helped her to obtain her “chueca” (fake work permit), in addition to lodging and food. After her arrival theymmade a home (J. Núñez, field diary, July 3, 2017). Out of love, solidarity, affection, necessity or integration, these migrants create and share a transnational worldview as they commit to the ethnic group and their homeland via meanings, memories, future expectations, language and collective representations.

At local level, the group from Buenavista reproduces by means of the updating of their membership in a host city (the way they speak, eat and think; certain aspects regarding the homeland) and their commitment to the place of origin through constant communication or money or in-kind remittances; this way, the transnational network remains because of reciprocity. Ethnic identity is updated with collective memory, the identification of the territory and the relative integration into the receiving community in Maryland (^{Basch, Glick Schiller and Szanton Blanc, 1994}). Transnational practices are the main actions to keep these networks alive, which generally become tangible with economic, sociocultural and symbolic remittances (gifts, virtual presence in baptisms, first communions, XV años, and weddings, among others).

We receive cheese and meat from Buenavista. Two years ago, in December, I sent a package with Fernando for my son who’s there; my son likes basketball: official shirts, Nike sneakers, perfumes, other clothing, sports pants, three pairs of shoes, a pair of Nike and the others cheaper, and things for my mom; not new clothes, but wearable, a computer. But we got robbed of the best of this, they took caps –which are expensive–, shirts which cost me 75 each, about 1500 pesos and 300 USD, and when things arrived, they were in disorder. I had enough of that and do not send anything anymore with him, I prefer to send them by [postal] mail and they arrive well (Imelda, personal communication, June 12, 2017).

Right now, I am waiting for some football boots to fit me, a pair of Concord, here you can’t find them, because there [in Buenavista] that was not enough to buy them, because they cost about 500 pesos and I didn’t have them, then… my brother, I phoned him time ago “brother, take a photo of a pair of Pirma Brasil, a couple of Manríquez, and a pair of Concord; the most expensive I told him, now I can afford them” and he said, “the most expensive is about 1000 pesos”, “oh well those I want, I can afford them”. From here, it is sent with Fernández, but my brother is going to send it to me in Villaflores, by parcel service, because once I had meat brought, my dried meat from my grandmother’s, because I know she does it really tasty, it came with worms. Delicious is my grandma’s meat, tascalate, cheese. Sometimes, two or three medicines for worms, I can’t find them here (Ernesto, personal communication, July 29, 2017).

The use of ICTs and social media has made it possible to revitalize these practices that individuals from Buenavista nourish day after day from the social hub they have created in Maryland to the ejido of origin. The networks develop by means of the active presence of their members and their practices (^{Faist, 2005}; ^{Levitt, DeWind and Vertovec, 2003}).

Buenavistita, an ethnic enclave in Maryland

The Washington D.C.-Baltimore corridor is at the southern end of BosWash corridor and it comprises the cities above, the capital city of the US and the most populated in Maryland, respectively, and the conurbation between them. The corridor has a diverse population, in which Hispanic are prominent in numbers and economically.

Source: authors own elaboration.

Map 2. Destination of the respondents: WashBalt corridor and area of the Buenavista enclave  

Out of the total of Latin Americans, Salvadorans account for most in this state, about 123 789, that is, 26.3 percent, Mexicans are next (18.7%), then Puerto Ricans (9%), Guatemalans (7.3%), Hondurans (4.4%), Peruvians (3.9%), Dominicans (3.2%), Colombians (2.8%), and Cubans (2.2%) (^{Department of Health and Mental Hygiene of Maryland, 2013}).

Migrants from Buenavista settle in the Washington D.C-Baltimore corridor, particularly in the periphery of Washington, in the Prince George and Anne Arundel counties, where they live in apartment buildings in Laurel city, in our case The Pines and Village Square North apartments ( Table 1 offers some data from Buenavista migrants).

The experience of migration at the destination places includes diversity and ethnic reordering different from those in the place of origin. The miscegenation in the destination lacks social recognition and blurs before the absence of documents of the migrants from Buenavista, which places those previously privileged in precariousness and invisibility. In the face of this, the resilient response is to create enclaves in which they are able to contain their collective identities, symbolically represented by belonging to the ejido. Such enclaves, as previously expressed, are supported by means of migrants’ networks and chains developed over the years.

The ethnic enclave allows visualizing the migrants from Buenavista by reconfiguring their culture and anchoring to their collective memory to reproduce their homeland in new places, such as ^{Giménez (2001)} affirms and ^{Velasco (1998)} demonstrates, from a transnational approach, for which the territory comprises nations and becomes the space where national states do not hold identities. In such manner that, depending on their place of origin and the role taken in the receiving place, migrants may be mestizos and rancheros and also urban Latin Americans in Maryland at once (^{Levitt & Glick-Schiller, 2004}).

I remember the fair, montadas de Judas in Holy Week, the charreadas, go up La Cruz Hill, in May, the Piedrona (huge rock) and the dam. Now, they post photos on Facebook, it doesn’t even look like the river I remember, totally dry it is (Irlanda, personal communication, July 9, 2017).

That is to say, “transnational migrations are noticeable because of their capacity to build new cultural configurations which cannot be easily attributed to a single national territory” (^{Velasco, 1998, p. 106}). Here, collective memory is the key for the migrants from Buenavista to build the simultaneity which keeps them standing on a here, whereas many of their thoughts, feelings and actions are aimed at a there.

My little children were born here, but it is as though they knew Buenavista. I tell the big one about the river, of La Piedrona, of the minibus my father drove, there boys attended high school in Villaflores, I tell him about my brothers, Mario and the way he studied as a grown-up. Sometimes, without a word, my little child tells me. “Hey, mommy! As in Buenavista!”, Or he asks me, “when are we going?”. Every time we meet the topic is Buenavista, “do you remember this and that?” it isn’t the same, but it’s a way to remember, being far away only the memories; I hope we return one day, but differently, with the opportunity to legalize our status (Alma Rosa, personal communication, July 22, 2017).

The impossibility to return to the homeland due to their irregular migration status shows the interests in keeping the life style that their labor income in the US allows them to lead, creating a simultaneity of transnational order, which is paradoxical, for it implies being at two different nations and interacting with two dissimilar national identities: the mestizo and the Latin American or Hispanic in the US, both are hetero-imposed, though the mestizo identity is indeed assumed. For individuals from Buenavista, their identity has to do with territorial, linguistic and cultural supports recreated over the migration (^{Giménez, 2009}). The enclave enables them to reterritorialize themselves in Maryland, recreating Buenavista, a place of memories about the ejido in the Frailescana Region in Chiapas, and which draws ejido members with cultural and indigenous-identity repertoires adapted to be recreated.

…Doña Margarita throws the party of the virgin on 12 of December, the same we throw in Buenavista. She invites all the plebe [the plebs]. We eat tamales, barbacoa, cochito horneado, Goodness! As in Buenavista. We just talk about Buenavista, the gossip, once the plebs are drunk, just dancing, as they say: una vez al año no hace daño [Once a year, it harms no one]. There you find what goes on in Buenavista, because when you speak to your family you only hear how they are, what they do, what they will buy or need. Thing is, when the plebs get together gossip from Buenavista comes out, you learn about everyone here… about the truth… we are just kidding (Fabián, personal communication, May 17, 2017).

Capable of dealing with simultaneity (^{Velasco, 1998}), these subjects reconstruct their culture and memory. The communication and the secrets inside the enclave are known for the entire network and travel at significant speed:

The problems of people from Buenavista are two; drinking, a lot of them get on a drinking binge and miss job, or arrive drunk and got fired. The other is what they do here soon enough becomes gossip in Buenavista, news travels fast, if they meet here, immediately it is known there, when Reneir Ramos, aka El Ojito, died on a drinking binge, he had an accident, he was with others from Buenavista. I talked to my mother in Buenavista and she told me, how is that possible? You learn about the events here phoning Buenavista (Pillo, personal communication, July 14, 2017).

Once inside the enclave, this unfolds in a multidimensional manner. On the one side, as the common place for migrants from Buenavista to reproduce their language or reconstruct identity elements that enable them to continue belonging and recreating their territory (^{Velasco, 1998}); while on the other side, as shield against the immediate others, e.g., Salvadorans and African-Americans.

As a common place, being a member of the enclave allows enjoying privileges, which aim at the remembrance of the homeland via flavors, odors, sounds and images. This way, individuals from Buenavista have stuff that belongs to their homeland delivered and once they have such cultural assets (^{García Canclini, 1993}), they dress in the Buenavista fashion, they party as they do in the ejido, they cook dishes with traditional ingredients and drink thinking of their childhood and youth. The enclave also works as a filter to dilute the class and hierarchy system of people from Buenavista, as it enables likening members of a related wealthy class with other of low class, as it is evinced in the following testimony:

My children’s father is from Buenavista; his parents sold empanadas and tacos in Buenavista, in front of my granny’s business. I saw him there, but we didn’t even greet. Here you see people from Buenavista you didn’t even know or didn’t get along with, and you make friends with them here because there are a lot of people from Buenavista. I met him here and it is fun that his last name is Tamayo, I wasn’t able to imagine I would relate to someone from that family (Irlanda, personal communication, June 12, 2017).

This way, the Buenavista ethnic enclave dilutes social class differences to exclude those who were not born there or do not have a common history, and which besides are part of immediate antagonistic identities such as African-Americans and non-Mexican Latin Americans. Individuals from Buenavista everyday interact with both groups in labor spaces and they exclude them as they represent labor competition. They see African-Americans as the fortunate, as they can afford not to work and exercise violence against Latin American immigrants, as documented by ^{Cruz-Salazar (2015)} researching on rivalries and rites of passage that new indigenous migrants from Chiapas experience from the African-American population; this way, their relation with them is highly tense and confronted. They have categorized each other according to their phenotype, and among individuals from Buenavista a series of stigmata have been unfolded around the brown skin color.

The dark skinned will never get along with Latinos. They are drunkards and druggies, conflictive, they meet you on the street and they ask for change for a cigarette (Coli, personal communication, June 12, 2017).

Since miscegenation, as a distinctive element of class-ethnicity, transforms as it encounters referents different from those in the homeland; these referents make room for the racial issue. The new referents are phenotype, race, ethnicity and behavior; this way, by and large, the ethnic groups they interact with in their everyday life represent alterity for them. They turn the Other into a stigmatized subject, deviated, demonized, inferiorized for representing threat and superiority. Black people are considered drunkards, drug addicts, conflictive, bad or beggars by people from Buenavista. From these categories, they contrast them with other ethnic groups such as the Muslims, which they consider “respectful, quiet”, finding that the former unlike the latter are rude, noisy, dirty and lazy as expressed by Ani:

There are people from everywhere in the apartments; many of them use their veils, Muslim a quiet people, don’t mess around. The dark skinned are different because they’re rude, noisy, there were a lot of them in the apartments, but these Muslims started arriving and they started to leave, very few remain, way better! Because they littered a lot. At work, there are many dark skinned, if it were for them, they would be sitting all day long (Ani, personal communication, July 7, 2017).

Unlike the previous case, for individuals from Buenavista, Latin American superiority is presented by Salvadorans, a majority Hispanic group with documents in Maryland. To refer to them, people from Buenavista generally use pejorative terms:

…Salvadorans are snobby because they have permit to be here, they hate us because they say they suffer a lot when they travel over Mexico, they are robbed, women raped, unfortunately there are lots of bad people (Axel, personal communication, May 23, 2017).

Salvadorans are the worst, they discriminate, they feel Americans, when a Salvadoran already stepped on American soil, they feel the best, when they remember they passed three borders, plus the Mexican, which is more complicated, they hate the Mexicans the most, particularly Chiapas they say, as it is one of the borders that they mentioned the most (Coli, personal communication, June 12, 2017).

The testimonies above refer to the status of temporary protection Salvadorans enjoy in the US. In their labor interactions difficulties with them are constant:

[…] if you start work where most are Salvadorans, they start gossiping, laughing at you, they are sort of dumb, this is why gringos prefer Mexican workers (Rafa, personal communication, July 27, 2017).

Salvadorans are good at work, but they are very rasquitas [quarrelsome], when two work together, they only talk bad about people, particularly about Mexicans, not that they are the best at work, but they make an effort, the usual thing, but if you compare them with one from Buenavista, they are no good (Lucre, personal communication, July 19, 2017).

As noticed, the power-inequality axes that are significant in the place of origin modify in the context of the receiving place, re-signifying and crossing with the migration category via the migration experience. It is in this experience where the migrants’ oppressions are suffered or reconfigured with the elements found in the destination in a continual coming and going across new borders, new inequalities and minimal privileges.

Unlike the statements by ^{Torres and Anguiano (2016)} regarding Mexican migrants in Arizona about labor division by sex and the strategies of public invisibilization to manage the adaption and stay in the United States, people from Buenavista are neither invisible nor divided by sex or by undocumented status. Conversely, they retreat and restrict their interactions within the enclave to protect themselves as a collective. The Buenavista ethnic enclave comprises speakers of the same language, from the same place that make compact groups isolated from the rest of the population, they hire in similar places and recreate cultural patterns in their destinations, which enables them to recreate their ethnic identity (^{Güemes, 1984}). ^{Marcuse (2001)} points that an enclave is the way in which minorities respond when they feel that their identities are threatened, thus strengthening their collective identities.

This way, the enclave works as a strategy that enables the migrants to contain their identities from their concentration in certain areas, permitting intra-group interaction, the reproduction of collective memory and sociocultural practices, reinforcing their group identity and establishing at the same time borders with other groups through their discourses in which categories and adjectives associated with the ethnicity of those others are underscored; in this case, African-Americans, Central Americans and Americans. As ^{García (2006)} reports for the case of Spanish migrants, the importance of belonging to migration networks is a preamble to the integration of migrants into the receiving society since networks enable labor integration and also offer support for a less traumatic adaptation.