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Oaxaca Trip: Those Left Behind

Posted February 2, 2010 by Ted Hesson

Since visiting Oaxaca on January 9 - 16 as part of a delegation studying the roots of migration, I’ve been posting blog entries rehashing some of our experiences. Some of the highlights include a lecture about how global corn prices affect migration, a visit to a Oaxacan migrant shelter, and my first installment about the disappearing village, San Juan Sosola.

Like many small Mexican farming towns, San Juan Sosola has been losing residents to migration since the onset of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1994, as well as other, lesser known free trade agreements between the U.S. and Mexico. The village is populated by indigenous Mixtecas, a people who have been cultivating corn in the Oaxaca region for thousands of years. But as a result of NAFTA, homegrown Mexican corn can’t compete with cheap, subsidized corn from the United States, and small Mexican farmers have been forced to abandon their livelihood (For more info on this, click here).

Since NAFTA went into effect, 2 million Mexican agricultural workers have been displaced, and since 2000, an average of 575,000 Mexicans per year have migrated to the U.S.

In San Juan Sosola—a small farming town a few hours outside Oaxaca—the effects of this mass exodus are strikingly clear.

According to residents, San Juan Sosola had about 350 residents back in the 1970s and early 1980s. But beginning in the 1980s, people began to leave the village, and now there are somewhere between 50-100 people living there.

There were 70-80 children in the village kindergarten and elementary school back in the 1970s, residents say. But along with the general population, those numbers started to decline in the 1980s. There are currently eight children in San Juan Sosola, three in kindergarten and five in the other elementary grades.

As one member of our delegation learned, kids in the village don’t even play soccer because there aren’t enough players to make up a team. They play basketball instead. But they still don’t have enough players for a team or league.

During our stay in the village, our delegation split into groups and ate meals with different families. My group (Rahsmia Zatar, Wilhelmina Funderburke, and myself) ate with Gabriel’s family, which was made up of his two sons, three daughters (one living in Mexico City), and his mother, Dona Antonia.

We ate a half dozen meals with the family during the three days and two nights that we were in San Juan Sosola, and, during that time, we learned a bit about the family.

They lived in a simple country home, with dirt floors and cardboard walls reinforced by bamboo, as well as some cinder block. Just outside the kitchen and the dining room were some of the family’s farm animals, so it wasn’t too strange when one morning a turkey paraded her chicks past us as we were finishing breakfast. Most of their animals, however, were at another farm that was about an hour and a half walk from the house.

The cuisine was largely vegetarian and homegrown, with lots of vegetable and herb soups on the menu, as well as a tall stack of fresh corn tortillas with every meal. When, on the morning before we departed, our family prepared freshly killed venison for us, it was a very special occasion. They hadn’t eaten venison in three years, and they asked us not to mention the meal to anyone else in the community.

Some meals we ate by ourselves: Dona Antonia and her daughters served us, but ate in the kitchen, and Gabriel wasn’t usually around. But for other meals, Gabriel’s 20-year-old son, Gabby, joined us.

We learned that the mother in the family had migrated to the U.S. five years ago, and had been sending money back home to them in San Juan Sosola. As of two years ago, however, the family lost contact with her. She was still in the states, but for whatever reason, she stopped communicating and stopped sending money.

During the time that we were in the village, we spoke with Gabby more than any other member of the family. Aside from sitting with us at meals, he took some of the delegation members on a hike down a relatively steep valley to see a cave (We also ran into a tarantula at the bottom, escaping unscathed). On the second night, Gabby and some of the other Sosola set schooled our Long Island crew in full court basketball, which surprised a few of the delegation’s cockier athletes. I blamed the mountain air and stand ready for a rematch in Florida, New Orleans, or any other place below sea level.

At one point, Rahsmia, who had the lengthiest chats with Gabby, asked him if he intended to get married. Gabby—tall, athletic, and handsome—said that he didn’t want to get married yet, but that even if he did, there weren’t any women for him in San Juan Sosola. Village residents typically married someone from another family in the village, he said, but in his case, he’d have to go looking for a partner someplace else.

During our time in the village, we came across several new homes being built out of cinder block. The construction must have happened in spurts, because the buildings I saw were all at various stages of completion, but no one seemed to be actively working on them while we were there. Each time I heard a delegation member ask about one of these houses, residents explained that the houses were being built by someone who was working in the states and sending money back home.

Despite the inauspicious population trends in the village, there were also signs of hope. Many residents had fled San Juan Sosola in recent years—that couldn’t be ignored. But there were some young people, like Gabby, who wanted to stay.

And there were good reasons to stay: The landscape around the village was stunning; except for a tarantula every now and then, residents didn’t worry about safety; and most of all, for people in San Juan Sosola, the village was home. Even after occasional business trips to Oaxaca, Gabby was glad to return home to the quiet countryside.

Another positive development in the village was a weaving collective that had been founded a few years ago (I need to fact check exactly when it began). The collective gave village residents a source of income apart from farming, and they produced hats, tortilla trays, and satchels for tourists that visited Oaxaca. Deborah Little, a professor from Adelphi who was on the trip, asked lots of questions about the collective and will mostly likely draft a blog post about it in the coming weeks.

Of course, politically oriented groups in the area are also hopeful that there will be a shift in global trade ideology. Free trade agreements like NAFTA could be repealed or reworked to promote more equitable trade between the U.S. and Mexico—a scenario that’s not as far-fetched as it may sound.

I guess that leads me to the topic of my next post, when I’ll ask (and try to answer) “What can be done about NAFTA, and how could policy changes affect migration patterns?”

For the rest of the Oaxaca trip posts, click the tag “oaxaca.”