Migrant women crossing borders: The role of gender and religion in internal and external Mexican migration

Abstract

This article examines the migration experience of women crossing two different borders, international‐national and rural‐urban. Two ethnographic examples are provided to document women's transformations through migration. The first case deals with Mexican women crossing Mexico's northern border into Texas. The second case focuses on Maya women crossing the rural border of a Maya community to urban Cancún. The core of the study is the analysis of the parallelisms between these two cases, mainly expressed in the connections between religious conversion and socioeconomic transformations resulting from these women's migration experiences. The ethnographic method allows the comparison of the two cases of female migration and facilitates the understanding of the ideological transformation, expressed through the religious conversion, interwoven with changes in their migrant socioeconomic dynamics.