Nayarit: Migration and tobacco

The state of Nayarit is located in the centralwestern region of México and is made up of 20 municipalities, with a territorial extension of 27 857 Km² that correspond to 1.4 % of the 1,084 million inhabitants up to 2010, which represented 0.97 % of the total population in México (^{INEGI, 2011}).

Nayarit has a long migratory tradition towards the United States that is circular and permanent. Among the most recent data, both for 2000 and for 2010, Nayarit was the fourth place in the migratory intensity index towards the US (Table 1); from this that the importance of the migratory phenomenon for the state of Nayarit can be understood, at the regional level and in the national context.

Table 1 México-United States migration according to the index and degree of migratory intensity (2000-2010). 

Source: elaborated from data by ^{BBVA Bancomer (2012)}.

According to data from the Border Migration Survey (Encuesta sobre Migración en la Frontera, EMIF), with the information reserves provided by migrants at the time of the survey, migrants from Nayarit have as their main destination the Northern Border on the Mexican side, although in 2006, 2007 and 2010 the tendency was reversed to the degree of finding more Nayarit residents who were going mainly to the United States (Figure 1).

Source: data from ^{EMIF (2011)}

Figure 1 Nayarit migrants according to the place of destination (2004-2010). 

On the other hand, from every 100 international migrants who left the state of Nayarit, 95 of them went to the United States, an important difference from the national average, whose mean is 89 migrants for every 100 (^{INEGI, 2011}). In addition to this, data from ^{CONAPO (2010)} place Nayarit with 2.11% of households with migrants in the US, while for return migration the figure is close to 4 %. In the category of households that receive remittances, Nayarit is similar to Zacatecas and Michoacán, with 9 % (^{CONAPO, 2010}). With regards to the households that receive remittances, 75% of these are clustered by 13 municipalities, where 50 % of them correspond to the seven municipalities considered with a medium migratory intensity index (Figure 2) (^{CONAPO, 2010}), which stands out because migration cannot be considered as quite a recurring strategy, although effective in terms of the number of households which participate and depend on it, compared to the other municipalities where the flows are more intense while the households that capture remittances are fewer.

Source: ^{CONAPO (2010)}.

Figure 2 Degree of migratory intensity according to the municipalities in the state of Nayarit (2010). 

Concerning the places to which Nayarit residents go in the US territory, the state of preference is California, although the following also stand out: North Carolina and South Carolina, Louisiana, Washington, Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, Utah and Montana (^{Gómez, 2010}).

In the US, one of the regions that shows higher presence of migrant Mexicans from the traditional region is the Eastern Coast, going from 3.8 % to 7.5 % in the period of 1970 to 2000 (^{Durand and Massey, 2003}). Although this region is not the most important yet in terms of absolute percentage as destination place for migrants, it takes on importance because the increase in migrants has doubled in three decades. On the other hand, it obtains relevant dimensions for this document because it is the place of destination for tobacco migrants³ who leave the Nayarit fields - from the municipality of Santiago Ixcuintla, primarily. Thus, it becomes especially interesting to understand the movement of Mexicans towards this zone, which allows identifying, in turn, the Nayarit migration flows, mainly those that migrate to tobacco producing states such as North Carolina, South Carolina and Virginia.

Nayarit is the main tobacco producing state in México, with little over 80 % of the surface cultivated (Table 2), and fundamentally fine tobacco is grown there, curated by heat, and dark curated by air. However, this activity has decreased in Nayarit since the beginning of the 1980s, reducing the surface cultivated with tobacco and the number of producers authorized. At the same time:

Table 2 Behavior of tobacco production in the state of Nayarit. 

Source: elaborated with data from SIAP: http://www.siap.gob.mx/cierre-de-la-produccion-agricola-por-estado.

There is […] a migratory phenomenon that is worsened as a result of the loss of dynamism in tobacco production; for example, not only is a lower presence of workers required because of the increase in localities and number of producers that are left without the benefit of qualification, but there is also a change in the proportion of the varieties cultivated that considerably affects the number of day laborers used. The ovens for curing black tobacco are closed, which brings with it the near disappearance of “teams” for cutting in the plot as well as for curing in ovens; light tobaccos start to stand out in the zone, for reeling, which require less workforce and are usually grown with family work (^{Madera, 2010: 107}).

Thus, out of the 29 845 hectares sown with tobacco in Nayarit during 1980, in 2014 only 6773 would be found. For Nayarit producers in particular, continuing to cultivate tobacco represents obtaining a greater profit in economic terms compared to what could be obtained with other crops like rice, sorghum, maize or sugar cane. In addition, despite the cultivated surface being drastically reduced, employment is still generated for around 18 thousand day laborers who find in tobacco work a means to sustain their families.

Tobacco production has been and continues to be one of the most important activities in Nayarit’s economy, since the nightshade is cultivated in 10 out of its 20 municipalities, although it is concentrated mostly in the municipality of Santiago Ixcuintla, which during season 2014 recorded 4816 hectares sown out of the 6773 there are at the state level, which translated into 71.1 % of the total state tobacco production and 60.1 % of the national total.

Tobacco generates employment permanently during an average period that ranges from November to May, situation that is not possible to carry out with other crops such as bean, tomato, papaya, mango, watermelon, jicama, among others, which have a shorter agricultural cycle and, therefore, demand less workforce. In addition to the economic benefits derived from tobacco, there are also the social ones associated to the crop: access to social security for the producer and his family, as well as the possibility of having a retirement plan.

Even when the relationship between tobacco and migration in Nayarit has been studied, the emphasis has been placed on the migration of indigenous day laborers who reach the tobacco fields of this federal entity to be employed primarily during the phase of harvesting (^{Pacheco, 1999}; ^{Díaz and Salinas, 2001}; ^{Talavera, 2003}; ^{Pacheco and González, 2002}). On the other hand, despite the importance that the migratory phenomenon of Nayarit residents towards the United States of America could represent, the studies that have taken Nayarit as a study object are scarce and have been focused primarily on the impact of remittances on economic growth (^{Ayón, 2004}; ^{Vega and Huerta, 2008}; ^{Figueroa, 2008}; ^{Huerta, 2012}), return migration (^{Becerra, 2004}), and the influence of social clubs of Nayarit migrants in the northern neighboring country (^{Imaz, 2004}; ^{Gómez, 2012}; ^{Gómez and Becerra, 2015}). No records have been found about the impact of migration of Nayarit residents to the US associated to tobacco, and therefore there is a need to document the migratory route generated around tobacco from the fields in Santiago Ixcuintla, Nayarit, towards the Eastern Coast of the United States.

Tobacco migrants: two facets in the same activity

At least since 2004, with the ratification by the Senate of the Republic of México to the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control by the World Health Organization (WHO) to reduce/eliminate the tobacco production in México, a policy in the tobacco fields of Nayarit has been implemented seeking to change tobacco for other crops or activity, which, we maintain, has not found echo.

The migratory exodus that took place with tobacco producers from the so-called “Costa de Oro” in Nayarit is not exclusive to this area, nor is it recent; “it began to get worse in the 1980s and has reached the point of becoming an important strategy for the survival of peasant production domestic units that grow tobacco” (^{Madera, 2010: 108}). When the harvest that corresponds to the coasts of the state is over, the tobacco producers leave towards the United States hired with a temporary permit to work in the US tobacco fields, primarily in those of the state of Virginia, although they now enter those fields as wage-earning laborers or day laborers.

In this article we seek to contribute information to understand how tobacco migrants go from being producers or tobacco day laborers in the municipality of Santiago Ixcuintla and are then inserted as day laborers in the tobacco fields of the US Eastern Coast, in a circular migration they participate in, working all year long with the same crop, which allows them to ensure their survival and that of their families through work and the financial benefits obtained from this. For example, Rubén, from the municipality of Santiago Ixcuintla, points out:

I have been working in the countryside all my life. I started with tobacco when I was fifteen, I think, since my wife and I would help my father. I began in the irrigation fields and tobacco plantations in addition to other crops that grow here. When my father didn’t throw it anymore [he’s referring to not planting tobacco anymore], I went to work with other people and I would tell those employers to leave a number of hectares to me, and I would make an effort and bring them forth (Rubén, 2014).

On the other hand, Efrén, who was a producer of different crops and is currently devoted to tobacco as main occupation, says:

I began in the agricultural activity when I was young, as a producer since I was 16 years old. A bad experience because of natural harshness during those first years as a papaya producer4 led me to choose tobacco growing, which I have been devoted to for 24 uninterrupted years, planting tobacco for the same company (Efrén, 2014).

Rubén and Efrén begin working in their respective tobacco fields at the beginning of November, when the planting season in Nayarit’s tobacco fields begins, and they finish in mid-April and the end of May. When they deliver all of their harvest, Rubén goes to the United States hired to work in the tobacco produced in the states of “North Carolina, Virginia and Kentucky [where he arrives for] planting, replanting, and then the same as here: removing, cleaning, fertilizing…” (Rubén, 2014). In turn, Efrén leaves in the month of July towards the states of Kentucky and Tennessee.

Rubén has been performing this activity for 20 years and since his first migrating adventure he has always left to work with tobacco. In turn, Efrén has been migrating for seven seasons in two stages: first he had one of four consecutive years and then he spent three years without migrating because he was devoted to tomato and papaya production, where he points out that he didn’t fare well; now, he has spent one new season of three years that still continues…

Naturally, the cases of Rubén and Efrén are not unique since approximately:

Some 500 people from Tuxpan, as many from Ruiz, Santiago and Rosamorada left, as every year in the month of July, towards the United States to work in tobacco fields in localities of Virginia and Kentucky, constituting an important entry of remittances in months of low agricultural activity in Nayarit (^{Periodismo en Nayarit, 2013: 1}).

Thus, when concluding the local tobacco harvest not only in the Santiago municipality, but also in the rest of the tobacco municipalities in Nayarit:

In the towns of the central and northern coast it is common to see buses that leave full at different hours towards Tijuana and other border cities. These Nayarit residents that leave are part of the workforce specialized in cutting, stringing and drying tobacco, which the tobacco consortiums in the United States require with urgency to perform their harvests (^{Ramos, 2006: 2}).

Just in 2012 it was expected that close to seven thousand agricultural seasonal workers would arrive to the fields in North Carolina with H2A visas, and they would become incorporated to the planting and harvest of crops such as tobacco, sweet potato, strawberry, cucumber, watermelon, pine trees, among others (^{Gómez, 2012}). It is through emigration towards the United States that the households can attain temporary employment and solve some of their financial problems, such as affording daily expenses or acquiring a patrimony, which ranges from building a house, investing in businesses, purchasing cars, plots and/or lands (^{De León and Madera, 2013}). For Rubén, to be a tobacco migrant:

Allows me to sustain me and my family with the little I bring back from there. Here, with the little that remains from the severance pay there are many expenses and a small money entry. If there is anything left from what I get here, I save it and when I go to the United States I can still sustain my family and carry out some investments such as renting the lands necessary to continue cultivating tobacco.

It helped Efrén pay some debts:

It allowed me to pay a financial debt of many thousand pesos, which was a product of a bad agricultural season in the papaya and tomato crops where a disaster led me to lose my savings and become indebted. Thanks to being able to migrate temporarily it was possible to pay those debts and now I don’t owe anybody from that bankruptcy.

The importance that the Nayarit migrating workforce and the time that they remain there is fundamental for US tobacco production. In the words of Vicente González, who once served as a contractor of temporary tobacco migrants in the municipality of Tuxpan, Nayarit:

US producers take advantage of the broad experience of tobacco workers from the Nayarit coast and during the summer thousands of workers leave hired to the tobacco fields in the United States and, generally, they stay there for four to five months in the neighboring country (^{Periodismo en Nayarit, 2013}).

The process of arrival and route of migration

Around 1998, Durand and Massey pointed to the tobacco migrants being recruited by contractors who operated in the states of Jalisco, Zacatecas, Michoacán, San Luis Potosí and Guanajuato (^{Durand and Massey, 2003}), referring to those with a regional level of reach. However, at least for the case of Santiago Ixcuintla, the study detected cases of people who have emigrated without resorting to the mediation of a contractor or to the presence of recruitment at the microrregional level.

In terms of the process to be followed to reach the United States to work with tobacco, Efrén says: “the first thing is to be hired, to be requested by the employer. The contractor sends you, you reach the consulate and from there they assign you to send you directly to the employer”. Or else, in words by Rogelio, a contractor of temporary tobacco migrants:

The company must fill out an application and then after having accepted the rules set out by the insurer, it should have a house for the workers with a good kitchen, it should have good working conditions, among other things. After the employer accepts all sorts of rules, he sends a letter to the immigration office with the name of the workers lost and, if they don’t have any problems, immigration lets the employer know that they are classified and then they send that form to me. Also, the employer has to be authorized by immigration and in addition pay for a work permit for the employers and the worker (Rogelio, 2010).

Once recruited, the next step is to travel to the American consulate to request the work visa. In the case of Efrén:

I’ve had to leave from Santiago on a bus towards the consulate in Monterrey, although other people go straight to the one in Guadalajara, but it is more common to get the visa in the Monterrey consulate, where you arrive to go through the work visa process and, depending on the instructions from the employer, you immediately leave towards the United States, you wait for a few days in Monterrey or you return to your town to wait to be called and, only then, go to the United States.

The arrival of Nayarit migrants to US territory takes place in “buses, in groups of six to eight people, to where the employer goes to get one, because we live with the ranchers so, not in the town, because the houses are outside the towns” (Efrén, 2014). Around 1998, Durand described similar cases to what Efrén shared.

In groups of five to fifteen workers, they take them to their ranches that are dispersed throughout the tobacco zone of North Carolina and Virginia. They will be there for three to five months until they return to their land after being isolated and working (^{Durand, 1998; cited in Durand and Massey, 2003}).

Living conditions of tobacco migrants here and there

The life of tobacco migrants subject to the study is divided in two, one when they are in México, in their hometown in the state of Nayarit, as tobacco producers, and the other when they leave to the United States to work as temporary day laborers in the same crop. It has become a cyclic work life in two territories that are far one from the other, adopting different roles where there is little time for something other than working because:

Here you have to work from Monday to Sunday, if it’s necessary; when it’s possible I rest, but when not, I work nonstop. I begin a normal day at four in the morning to go to the plantation. I arrive to hang up strings, to uncover and everything else that can be done in the ward. After the water falls off the tobacco I set out to cut and then at around 10 in the morning I begin to string, so that at noon I can take out the strings already made and have lunch. At 2 in the afternoon I return again to cutting and at 4 I am already carrying the cut tobacco. I finish daily at around 7 at night and from there I go home to rest (Rubén, 2014).

Both Rubén and his wife are in charge of performing all sorts of activities and, sometimes, whether it is Saturdays or Sundays that they don’t have school classes, their three daughters support in simpler tasks such as stripping, cleaning or cutting tobacco. This allows the family to perform some of the activities required by the crop and then to keep the cash that they receive from authorization to destine it to “daily expenses” in their household (Rubén, 2014).

At the end of the season, what is obtained from the severance pay is used to support their children’s studies, to sustain the family and to continue renting lands or habilitating their own for sowing; if there is anything left, then it is saved. Thanks to having employment throughout the year, for tobacco migrants there is always a money entry that allows supporting the family expenditures and needs.

Migrating to work with tobacco in “the north” is part of the chain of tobacco tradition because, as Rubén recalls:

Not every season as producer is good, since sometimes what is left from the severance pay is scarce and here you have a lot of expenses; then it is better to go over there and with what you bring back you can support yourself and continue to work the land.

In his turn, Efrén mentions that life here and there is quite different. He says there is some sort of magic that runs out once you cross the border because:

Here, you are forced to accept having everything put on the table and there you have to become responsible. Over there you learn to value many things. You have responsibilities that range from scrubbing the plate that you use, sharing a single stove, sharing a single bathroom when you live with 12 people and where you have to place your towel to get in line to use it and to have a chance to shower… (Efrén, 2014).

The conditions and work days under which the tobacco migrants from Santiago perform are also different between the north and the south. There, you have to be up since six or seven in the morning, whether for cutting or stripping. The work day is sometimes extended and you have to work for 10 to 12 hours, depending on the employer, and there is barely time to eat something with one hour for lunch:

Over there you have no time to rest because they are always checking on you, since you work per hour. In México, if you get tired you can rest, if you don’t want to work and then in the afternoon you don’t go. Here you can make bad decisions and there, no matter what, you have to go on the edge (Efrén, 2014).

Social relations and human capital in the tobacco migrant’s life

Migration towards the United States generated from tobacco in Nayarit has allowed those who perform it to not only earn financial resources to send to their families, but also to build social relationships in US territory and to increase human capital of their own through the acquisition of new knowledge that can be taken and brought back in this journey, to be applied in the different activities that they carry out in one role or another, whether as producers or day laborers.

In the case of Rubén, what he learned in México has been very useful to take to the United States, but also his experience in the US fields has been useful to incorporate knowledge and techniques that he applies in his own tobacco fields in Nayarit, for example:

I brought back from there a technique for cutting tobacco leaves, in which they [tobacco producers from the US, his employers], only take three leaves on a straight line at the time when they do the first cut, and they let 15 days go by before they cut again, and then every 15 days they cut again. After the second one, onwards, they leave it to mature and then they do cut it all. Some do that, others leave the top leaves; it is quite different. I got financial results, mostly because at the moment when the tobacco was delivered it was more kilograms and of better quality. In the payment of tobacco is where I saw the result of having applied the knowledge that I brought from over there (Rubén, 2014).

In his turn, Efrén mentioned that he has found useful to be in contact with tobacco the whole year. In that sense, there was a year when he left to work since the beginning of the tobacco production in the US in order to:

From planting, knowing in order to learn things that Americans do differently than Mexicans. In those fertilized, for example, in the type of fallow lands that they do there and here and from there they continue with the old preparation cultures. So to speak, before I left towards the United States, here I would prune late, I would forget about pruning and over there you do them on time, since here the company also tells us when, but sometimes you are closed-minded and here they give us the guides, but I learned it there because I watched them and saw how the tobacco would fold [weigh] more than tobacco here (Efrén, 2014).

Thanks to this knowledge acquired as a tobacco day laborer in the United States, in the words of Efrén, he has realized that one of the final results is the delivery of greater quantity or quality in their harvests because there is a thickening of the leaf texture and, therefore, it fares better in the payment. “When I didn’t apply this knowledge my payment for two hectares was $65 000.00 pesos. Now that I apply it, it is $50 000.00 per hectare. The increase has been large” (Efrén, 2014).

Not only is there an accumulation of knowledge for the tobacco migrants who improve the intellectual capital applied to the agricultural tasks of tobacco, but rather that social capital related to the construction of social relationships is also promoted with the people with whom they live or coexist daily, whether because they live together or because they work in the same ranch.

Rubén says that he has found there people he knows from the same municipality of Santiago Ixcuintla and from communities like Sentispac, in addition to having befriended people from the municipality of Tuxpan who are now in México and with whom he spends some time occasionally. In turn, Efrén mentioned:

From the group of six to eight people with whom I go to the United States, most are from my town, which is an advantage because we all know each other’s quirks and sometimes of other people you don’t know their reach. With those from my ranch I get along very well because I know them normally. I have also made friendships with people from La Presa [locality that is also in the municipality of Santiago Ixcuintla] and also from Estancia de los López [locality of the municipality of Amatlán de Cañas]. I run into people from La Presa often in the streets of Santiago, we say hello and sometimes I even stay there for a while talking. I also have friends from the same dam with whom friendship has developed more strongly to the degree that we visit each other; they come to my house or I go to theirs (Efrén, 2014).

When abroad, there is little time for group or individual leisure that allows strengthening the social relationships that develop, insofar as:

Being there, there is no time, since you work from Monday to Saturday and Sunday is the day that you can go out to buy lunch, the day you clean your house so it can be acceptable. There is no time for sports or any other activity, and also it is risky because something can happen to you. There, you go exclusively to work. This past year, I asked for permission from the employer to go to the Alcoholic Anonymous groups and he did give it to me, but you end your day really tired and they you don’t go… (Efrén, 2014).