México: País de migración de retorno (primera mitad del siglo XX)

Resumen

The edited collection México: País de migración de retorno (primera mitad del siglo XX) is a timely and significant contribution to the historiography of Mexican international migration. This volume focuses on Mexican nationals who returned from various nations, including the United States, during the first half of the twentieth century. The collection consists of an introductory essay by coeditors Fernando Saúl Alanís Enciso and Saúl Iván Hernández Juárez and five chapter-length case studies. The first case study, by Marisa Pérez Domínguez, examines the 1919 return of Archbishop Martín Tritschler y Córdova to the Archdiocese of Yucatán after spending five years in Cuba. The second, by R. Margarita Vásquez Montaño, studies the return of Partido Liberal Mexicano (Mexican Liberal Party) members who were exiled to the United States during the 1900s and 1910s. The third, by Alanís Enciso, analyzes how US-born Mexican American children adapted to life in Mexico after their families left the United States during the early 1930s. The fourth, by Hernández Juárez, examines the return from China in 1933 of Rosa Murillo de Chan, a woman who was stripped of her Mexican citizenship after she married a Chinese national. And the fifth, by Juan Miguel Sarricolea Torres, analyzes how Mexican media coverage of deportations from the United States during the Bracero Program (1942–64) influenced popular interpretations that cast deportees as “disposable bodies” (p. 206).Alanís Enciso and Hernández Juárez's coauthored introductory essay is particularly valuable because it provides a useful analytical framework for considering twentieth-century return migration to Mexico. The authors divide return migration into two broad categories. The first, “large-scale” return migration, occurred when tens or hundreds of thousands of Mexican nationals, particularly those who had migrated to the United States in search of work, returned during relatively brief time periods (p. 11). Large-scale returns were closely linked to US economic cycles and surges in anti-Mexican xenophobia, and Alanís Enciso and Hernández Juárez divide them into four subcategories: returns prompted by downturns in the US economy, such as the recessions of 1907–8 and 1921–22 as well as the initial years of the Great Depression (1929–33); returns caused by the end of seasonal work in US industries like agriculture; returns that resulted from popular fears that US officials were going to restrict the entry of Mexican immigrants; and mass deportation campaigns like 1954’s Operation Wetback, when US immigration authorities apprehended more than one million undocumented Mexican immigrants.The second analytical category that Alanís Enciso and Hernández Juárez identify is “small-scale” return migration, which occurred when hundreds or a few thousand returned to Mexico (p. 10). While large-scale returns were inextricably linked to the United States’ economic and political climates, small-scale returns were almost exclusively conditioned by political and social factors within Mexico. The authors divide small-scale returns into four subcategories: the return of migrants whom federal officials recruited to live in agricultural colonies in Oaxaca, Tamaulipas, and other states during the 1930s; the return of political exiles who opposed either Porfirio Díaz's government during the 1900s or the revolutionary administrations of the 1910s and 1920s; the return of exiled clergy members who ran afoul of anticlerical officials during the religious-political conflicts of the 1910s and 1920s; and the return of some 700 women who were stripped of their Mexican citizenship because they married Chinese nationals and who then joined their husbands in China after state governments, including Sonora's, expelled Chinese nationals from their jurisdictions during the revolutionary period.The case studies effectively use government documents, newspapers, and personal correspondence to cast light on the official, popular, and personal mechanics of both large- and small-scale return migration. Taken together, they reveal a key through line in return migration to Mexico—namely, that return migrants counted on minimal official support once they were back in Mexico. The case studies also demonstrate how return migration reflected and shaped debates about who was an ideal Mexican citizen. For example, Sarricolea Torres notes how undocumented deportees were contrasted negatively with braceros, seasonal contract workers who entered the United States with authorization. And Hernández Juárez shows that Mexican women who married Chinese nationals were labeled as traitors because their spouses were viewed as corrupting threats to the Mexican “race” because they were not of European ancestry.This collection is a valuable contribution to a historiography that has largely been preoccupied with Mexicans who migrated to work in the United States. Clearly written and effectively argued, it is suited for both specialists in Mexican international migration and readers with a general interest.