Memorias de la tierra que se secó: migración y memoria del paisaje en Chalcatzingo

Abstract

In the last 40 years the Mexican countryside has suffered profound changes generated by a host of factors, including the demographic transition, modernization, and changes in economic policies and migration. One of the most significant transformations resulting from this process was probably the abandonment of agriculture, which had been until the 1980s the axis of economic and social life in the rural villages. This work explores how these changes affected the relationship between these rural societies and their space, how these places are now produced and what the role of migration in this process is. These questions were inspired by the theoretical frame suggested by those who propose understanding the mutual construction between society and space (Hierneaux and Lindón, 1993). According to these perspectives, changes in rural Mexico could be understood as a „territoriality‟ change: a transformation in the way social space is produced. My intention is to understand how these changes occurred and how they affected the day to day life of the inhabitants of rural Mexico. In order to address these questions I built a case study that could help to reconstruct the history of rural transformation in Mexico through a qualitative research. I chose the village of Chalcatzingo, located in the state of Morelos, which can be seen as a valuable example of this process, since it had a vigorous agrarian life from the Pre-Hispanic period until the 1980s, when Chalcatzingas abandoned their lands and started to migrate to the United States. As I consider migration a crucial factor in the reconfiguration of rural Mexico, I conducted a series of deep interviews with both migrants and non-migrants in the cities of Chalcatzingo, San Diego and New York. The main objective of the fieldwork was to collect „memories of the land‟ and „migratory discourses‟, categories created to guide interviews around the specific subjects of the research. I conducted 37 interviews that allowed me to reconstruct the spatial history of Chalcatzingo through the voices of those who lived it, bringing to light the changes in the landscape as much as the changes in practices and in the way that Chalcatzingas symbolized their territory...