Migration, racial capitalism, and Indigenous women: Re-Reading the gendered and racialized histories of U.S./Mexican migration

Abstract

ABSTRACT Studies of Mexican migration to the United States posit that from the 1940s to the 1970s rural men were migrant protagonists while women stayed home. If women migrated, they relied upon men’s established networks. However, archival and ethnographic research with Indigenous Zapotec women from the state of Oaxaca, Mexico, disrupts this narrative and demonstrates how women – instead of men – pioneered migrant networks. Originally employed in domestic service in Mexico City, Zapotec women leveraged work relationships to find opportunities in the United States. Subsequently, they helped other women to migrate. Studies have never documented these women-led migrant networks. Drawing on the analytic of racial capitalism, this article argues that Indigenous women’s migration was not an anomaly, but rather a key aspect of the gendered and racialized logics of accumulation that subsidised economic growth in Mexico during the ‘Mexican Miracle’ (1940s to the 1970s). Accordingly, while Zapotec women found opportunity in international migration, they were rendered surplus through a similar racialized logic that devalued their reproductive labour on both sides of the border. This article contributes to studies of U.S./Mexican migration by centreing the historical geographies of racialized accumulation logics when exploring how Indigenous Mexicans have moved to the United States.