Fragmented transitions from school to work. The case of young people from two municipalities in the state of Puebla in Central Mexico

Abstract

Based on ethnographic information collected in two municipalities in the state of Puebla -Tehuacán and Pahuatlán-, in central Mexico, in this paper we analyze the fragmented transitions from school to work of large segments of the young Mexican population. Married unions and maternity/paternity at an early age are added to school dropout, resulting in a precarious job placement. We start from the premise that the fragmented transitions that define the life of this population are related to their precarious conditions of production and social reproduction, characteristic of broad sectors of Mexican society, exacerbated among women and populations of rural and indigenous origin. The transition from school to work for these young people is defined by their insertion in precarious jobs that mark their life courses due to the spiral of poverty. In Tehuacán we analyze the case of single women, most of them from rural and indigenous localities, who are inserted in the clothing maquiladora of that city with the idea of resuming their interrupted school trajectories when their income ceases to be essential for reproduction. of their families. However, in fact, his eventual labor insertion mutates into a permanent one. For its part, in the case of young men and women from Pahuatlán, where social coffee farming was dismantled in the 1990s as part of the neoliberal restructuring of the Mexican countryside, work in the United States, mostly men and women of productive and reproductive, became a fundamental economic activity to ensure the reproduction of families and the community.