Entre surcos y caminos: una aproximación a la vida cotidiana de la población infantil jornalera de México

Abstract

In Mexico, agricultural day laborers migrate in family groups to the different agroindustrial enclaves in the country in search of work, therefore adjusting to the production and labor dynamics that intensive agriculture requires. Girls and boys from these groups accompany their parents during their travels and stays throughout the year, meaning that spatial mobility, temporary stays in shelters and tenement blocks, attendance at rudimentary schools, and participation in the furrowing and harvesting of tomato fields form part of their life experience in precarious conditions. The goal of this article is to make these children visible, to show how their lives among paths and furrows allow them to spend time with their families while adapting to the work conditions as well as the spatial mobility that the work requires; as well as showing what allows them to know the practices and spaces of their daily lives and generate spatialities that are their own, in the case of Yurecuaro, Michoacan, one of the points in their migration route. The theoretical approach that sheds light on the above is the spaces of life framework, originating in French human geography. This framework helps reconstruct the spatiality of the study population. Children’s drawings are employed as a qualitative research technique that helps elucidate graphically the spaces with their material and natural elements, the practices that are carried out in them, and the people with whom the children interact either in the fields, during their commutes, inside their homes, or around their community; aspects that permeate the lives of boys and girls, their thinking and actions. Apart from the information provided in these drawings (85 in total), we used, mainly, the field notes containing our observations and conversations during our visits to the different spaces, as well as interviews of day laborers of different ages, including the child population (16 in total). Cross-sectional content analysis guided by the topics in which the drawings were classified, the included elements, and the short texts that some of the children wrote is used. The results reveal the strong ties that the study population has with their place of origin despite their lengthy stays elsewhere, the experiences they have internalized during their short lives and their significance, as well as the economic, national and local interests that contribute to the forging of a reality in which the state, with its tenuous presence in the form of assistance programs for the day laborer population, more than dignifying their living and working conditions, contributes to the subsistence of the labor that this agroindustry requires.