Labor Contractors, Coyotes, and Travelers: The migration industry in Latin America and the U.S. South

Abstract

During the 1990s, migration researchers in sociology and anthropology focused disproportionately on the idea of transnationalism, leading to investigations of critically important phenomena such as transnational parenting, diaspora politics and identity, flexible citizenship, social remittances, and other factors influencing the experiences of international migrants.  This work also produced comprehensive ethnographic accounts of families and communities with attachments to places in two or more countries, profiling peoples who had forged dynamic relations between sending and receiving neighborhoods based on economic opportunities, cultural exchanges, and social networks.  The argument presented here offers a slightly different perspective on transnationalism, examining managed migration and the migration industry that has emerged around labor contractors, human smugglers (coyotes), and travelers who routinely carry goods between migrant sending and receiving communities.  While this industry facilitates transnationalism, like transnationalism it is ultimately a symptom of a process more comprehensive than international migration: capital’s desire for a highly flexible labor force that expands and contractsseasonally and in response to periods of economic growth and decline, is highly mobile, and is largely separated from reproductive settings.