Migration Times and Ethnic Identity: Mexican Migration to the US Over Three Generations

Abstract

This chapter uses census material and interviews with three generations of Mexican migrants to the US to explore the changing meaning of migration for family strategies of survival and how it affects transnational identities in both the US and Mexico. Using the concepts of family time and industrial time (labor markets and urbanization), and adding that of migration time (the dominant US migration policy), it looks at migrant family economies and the different ways family members adapted to historical changes in industrial time and migration time. The paper begins with the Bracero Program (1941-1962) and continues with the surge in undocumented migration from the 1970s and the peak in the 1990s, ending in the present when non-visa net migration to the US is close to zero. The drastic change in migration policy with the border blockade of the new millennium has paradoxically locked temporary undocumented migrants into the United States. This has helped create a new demographic in the US in which Hispanic children, mainly of Mexican origin, are the largest single ethnic component in the school-age population in many cities and states. It also weakens transnational ties with Mexico at the same time as the rise in involuntary deportations increases the insecurity of a substantial portion of the Mexican-born population in the US.