Engendering Mexican Migration: Articulating Gender, Regions, Circuits || Constructing the Family: Mexican Migrant Households, Marriage, and the State

Constructing the Family: Mexican Migrant Households, Marriage, and the StateAuthor(s): M. Bianet CastellanosSource: Latin American Perspectives, Vol. 35, No. 1, Engendering Mexican Migration:Articulating Gender, Regions, Circuits (Jan., 2008), pp. 64-77Published by: Sage Publications, Inc.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27648074 .

Accessed: 12/06/2014 14:11

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

Sage Publications, Inc. is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Latin AmericanPerspectives.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 62.122.76.48 on Thu, 12 Jun 2014 14:11:25 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=sage

http://www.jstor.org/stable/27648074?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp


Constructing the Family

Mexican Migrant Households, Marriage, and the State

fry M. Bianet Castellanos

Recent research on migrant settlement shows that women play an important role in

consolidating migrant households and facilitating permanent settlement in migrant sites. Other studies demonstrate that government policies and legislation also determine the contours of migrant communities. A case study of a Maya migrant community in Cancun,

Mexico, shows that state policies and the economic systems associated with an interna tional tourist industry restrict the actual process of settlement to men and women who enter into a marriage contract, replicate the model of the "nuclear family," and demon strate good citizenship. This case suggests that the global economy and state policies play a key role in reifying gender relations in migrant communities.

Keywords: Housing policies, Gender, Indigenous migration, Settlement, Mexico

Studies of migrant settlement practices offer key insights into the relationship between gender systems, migration, and the state (cf. Hondagneu-Sotelo, 1999;

Malkin, 2004).l In her seminal work on the settlement experiences of Mexican

immigrants, Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo (1994) demonstrates that patriarchal

gender relations structure the migration and settlement patterns of both male

and female migrants. As a result of the autonomy and freedom that female

migrants experience living and working in the United States, it is women, not

men, who push for family reunification and actively work at building community ties and networks in migrant sites. Jacqueline Mar?a Hagan (1994) points out,

however, that in some cases the emergence of immigrant women's autonomy, in particular that of undocumented women, within specific domains, such as

the home or the workplace, is offset by their increasing dependence on men

with legal residence or citizenship to legalize their status. Both of these studies

examine the effects of the legalization process (through the passage of the 1986

Immigration Reform and Control Act) on the consolidation of immigrant families.

In the case of Mexican migration to the United States, the state's role in the

settlement process has been well studied, and we are reminded that state

policies regulate and constrain the movement of people and inform our con

ceptualizations of this movement. My concern here is with understanding how the policies of the Mexican nation-state configure migrants' settlement

experiences within its own boundaries. I suggest that internal migrants in

Mexico, like immigrants in the United States, encounter state policy regulations that constrain their settlement options.

M. Bianet Castellanos is an assistant professor in the Department of American Studies at the

University of Minnesota. She has worked in Mexico's Yucat?n Peninsula for over a decade. This

LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES, Issue 158, Vol. 35 No. 1, January 2008 64-77 DOI: 10.1177/0094582X07311365 ? 2008 Latin American Perspectives

64



Castellanos / CONSTRUCTING THE FAMILY 65

Although globalization processes highlight the constructed nature of the nation-state as an ideological project that is no longer geographically bound

(Abrams, 1988), Akhil Gupta and Michel-Rolph Trouillot call attention to the nation-state's materiality. Gupta (1995) shows that the Indian state is made concrete by ethnographically tracing the discourses of corruption in the media and the practices of corruption among local bureaucratic officials. Correspondingly, Trouillot (2001) points out that we can see state "effects" by identifying the sets of processes and practices of individuals, governments, and institutions in local contexts. In order to locate the Mexican "state" and trace its effects, I focus on the land distribution policies administered by a state-run housing agency in Canc?n, the Instituto de la Vivienda del Estado de Quintana Roo

(Housing Institute of Quintana Roo?INVIQROO) and Maya migrants' engagement with these policies.

A discussion of the settlement process also requires an understanding of the

ways in which rights to property are imagined and enacted. As Carmen Deere and Magdalena Le?n (2001) argue, access to property rights is a gendered process produced by the interplay between the family, community, the econ

omy, and the state. In Mexico, the gendering of land rights is made evident by women's roles in the ejido. A collective landholding system established by the

Revolutionary Constitution of 1917 and modeled on indigenous systems of

landholding, the ejido has regulated social, political, and economic relations

among rural households. Although Article 200 of the 1971 Federal Law of

Agrarian Reform explicitly gave women the right to ejido membership, by the mid-1990s they constituted only 15-30 percent of ejidatarios (Stephen, 1997). Male heads of households make up the overwhelming majority of ejido mem

bership. Moreover, in 1992, revisions to Article 27 of the Constitution made it

legally possible for ejidatarios, typically male, to sell ejido land. This move toward privatization removed many women and children from the decision

making process involved in land use (Botey, 1998). Access to land, then,

clearly represents a struggle for gender equity for rural Mexican women. In contrast to the abundant research on rural Mexican women's rights to

property (e.g., Baitenmann, 1997; Botey, 1998; Deere and Le?n, 2001; 2002; Gonz?lez Montes, 1988; Robichaux, 1988; Stephen, 1997), very little work has been done on the gendering of property in Mexico's cities, especially cities like

Canc?n, whose exponential growth is a direct result of migration.2 What role does gender play in access to property rights in urban settings? What gender ideologies undergird the rules and laws that govern settlement processes?

How do these policies in turn shape gender relations among internal

migrants? This article examines the relationship between gender, citizenship,

research was supported by the National Science Foundation's Predoctoral Fellowship, a

Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship, University of Michigan's Rackham Graduate

School, UC San Diego's Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies and Center for Comparative

Immigration Studies, the University of California President's Postdoctoral Fellowship, and

the University of Minnesota's Faculty Summer Research Fellowship. The author is indebted to the community of Kuchmil for its generosity and friendship and to the directors and admin

istrative staff of the Instituto de la Vivienda del Estado de Quintana Roo for their time and gra ciousness. She is grateful to Ruth Behar and Robert R. Alvarez for their encouragement of this

project. Jan Rus, David Barkin, James Levy, Lynn Stephen, Roger Rouse, B?len Agrela, David

Karjanen, Tamar Diana Wilson, Hinda Seif, Ellen Moodie, Lourdes Guti?rrez-N?jera, Deborah

Boehm, Conrad Kottak, and Travis Du Bry offered insightful comments on various versions of

this paper. In spite of this support, she takes full responsibility for any errors that may be found in the text.



66 LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES

and land ownership through a case study of the settlement experiences of

Maya migrants from the rural community of Kuchmil, Yucat?n.3 More specif ically, it analyzes the gender ideologies that undergird programs created by the Mexican state to facilitate the settlement of migrant workers in the inter national tourist resort of Canc?n, Quintana Roo. While the state established

programs to address the housing needs of migrants, it based these programs on exclusionary ideologies of family, gender, and citizenship. I argue that by excluding Maya migrants who are unmarried and childless from affordable

housing and land programs, the state defines citizenship narrowly and

encourages migrants to embrace the nuclear family if they wish to become cit izens of this new urban space.4

In the following sections, I first provide a brief historical overview of the role of migrant labor in Canc?n's tourism industry. Then I discuss the implementa tion of housing policy in Canc?n. I show that Kuchmil migrants' experiences

with state housing and land redistribution programs illustrate not only the

gender ideologies that guide state policies but also the effects of these policies on gender relations. I conclude with a discussion of the importance of the global economy and state policies in the reification of Maya gender relations.

SETTLING IN CANC?N

Mexico's economic crisis of the late 1960s was exacerbated by increasing rural-urban migration. To divert this migration and modernize the countryside, the government selected Kan K?n, a tiny fishing village sandwiched between the Gulf of Mexico and the vast tropical jungle of the Yucat?n Peninsula, as one of five sites for tourism development. Within a decade, Canc?n, as this town is now known, became Mexico's premier international tourist resort. This transformation required more labor than was originally available in the area's sparsely populated communities. Migrants from both the rural and urban sectors of Mexican society and foreign countries as far away as

Argentina and Italy soon became permanent residents of Canc?n's shanty towns. As a result, today nearly half a million people work in Canc?n (INEGI, 2000). At least one-fifth of these migrants come from the indigenous Maya communities of the neighboring state of Yucat?n.

In a place like Canc?n, where the population growth has outpaced infrastruc ture development and employment fluctuates with the seasons, settlement is a

complicated issue for the state and for migrants. The infrastructure demands created by Canc?n's booming migrant population have overwhelmed the city government's development efforts; the government has not been able to build as fast as people arrive. As a result, in the past 30 years shantytowns have

sprung up around the perimeter of the city, and it is in these neighborhoods that

newly arrived migrants find places to live. They rent small one-room dwellings in the backyards of people's homes or build their own homes on unoccupied land. Consequently, many housing structures are unregulated and poorly con

structed. In the year 2000 in the county of Benito Ju?rez, where Canc?n is

located, 30 percent of the resident population was renting or borrowing hous

ing (INEGI, 2001: 434), resulting in an average occupancy of four persons per




structure (INEGI, 2000: 49). Sharing housing reduces expenses and permits migrants to save money for remittances.

Leonardo May Kauil's experience illustrates the difficulties migrants encounter in finding housing in Canc?n. At the age of 15, on the day after he

graduated from ninth grade, Leonardo left Kuchmil, a small Maya village in the rural southeastern section of the Yucat?n Peninsula. In the early hours of the morning, he boarded a bus for Canc?n in the company of his older brother

Horacio, who worked as a bartender there.5 His new home consisted of a tiny one-room wooden structure with a corrugated cardboard roof located in the

backyard of a house.6 This room, which he shared with Horacio and another

Maya migrant, was located in one of the regiones (working-class neighbor hoods, also called colonias populares or colonias proletarias) on the edge of the

city's commercial district. To help pay the rent, he found a job as a janitor in a hotel where a cousin of his was employed.

For Kuchmil migrants, access to inexpensive housing had become a critical issue because, as housing costs rose, this expense consumed a larger portion of

monthly salaries. In 1998, the average rent for a room was US$40 per month,7 but Leonardo, who by then was working as a steward (waiter's assistant), earned only about US$59 (excluding tips) per month.8 By 2001 rent had increased to an average of US$100 per month, and Leonardo was earning

US$65 (excluding tips) as an assistant bartender in another hotel. Since a month's rent exceeded his monthly salary, he still had to share housing. When I spoke with Leonardo in 2001, he had moved at least six times.9 He currently shared a small room with a Maya coworker. This room was part of a long rec

tangular concrete building that had been subdivided into four rooms with their individual bathrooms and entrances, one of two buildings that had been

squeezed onto the landlord's house plot. It was located a block away from his brother Horacio's home. After six years of migrating throughout Canc?n's

shantytowns in search of dignified and affordable living accommodations, Leonardo had begun saving to purchase a plot of land in Canc?n.

Owning a parcel of land or a home is an important step in the settlement

process because home ownership provides a stable place of residence through out the fluctuating tourist seasons. Between September and mid-December, which is considered the low season because of the decline in hotel occupancy, hotel corporations typically minimize costs by reducing their staff and by refus

ing to renew their contracts with short-term employees. The lack of income makes it very difficult for the working-class, who are typically employed in these positions as waiters, bartenders, and cooks, to pay their rent during the low tourist season. Those who have been able to save enough money during the

high season can wait out the low season, but those who have not return to their natal villages. Owning one's home makes it easier to remain in Canc?n contin

uously and be able to sponsor relatives who wish to find work there. For Kuchmil migrants, the impetus for land ownership was not derived from

capitalism's emphasis on private ownership but rather originated in their families' history of indentured servitude and their experiences with the ejido. Their grandparents had worked as indentured servants on haciendas before the

Maya uprising that became known as the Caste War of 1847. After escaping the haciendas and indentured servitude (locally referred to as esclavitud [slavery]),




their forefathers had settled in the southeastern part of the peninsula, which was abandoned during the war. With the establishment of the ejido system, their rights to work the land in this area were formally recognized by the gov ernment. As a result of these experiences, land came to represent freedom from slavery and hunger and autonomy from the state. Not surprisingly,

Kuchmil migrants attached many of these meanings to land in Canc?n and thus transformed the meaning of land from private property (as recognized by the state) into a symbol of freedom and autonomy from tourism and the state,

despite the significant role of the state in providing them with access to land.

Purchasing land or a home, however, was very difficult to manage on a

hotel employee's salary. The value of finished homes and the land on which

they were built, particularly if the land included basic services such as electric

ity, a sewage system, and access to running water, had increased dramatically over the past three decades. To purchase developed property required large amounts of cash and credit. For example, in 2001, a new two-bedroom house cost about US$30,000 if paid in full at the moment of purchase. With the

financing of a 30-year mortgage, the price increased exponentially to an esti mated US$300,000. Undeveloped land was significantly cheaper, especially if it was located in an undeveloped neighborhood; the lack of a housing struc ture and basic infrastructure (i.e., roads and schools) reduced its cost consid

erably. On the private market, terrenos bald?os (undeveloped land) retailed for

US$3,000 to US$6,000 and required a deposit of US$300 to US$500 and a fee of US$200 to transfer the title. The remaining balance was typically paid in

monthly installments over a three-to-eight-year period.10 The plot sizes of ter renos bald?os varied; for example, a plot measuring 320 square meters was

priced at US$5,000. Few Maya migrants, however, had the capital necessary for this kind of investment, and many turned to INVIQROO because this

organization was established in order to diminish such inequities within Canc?n's housing market.

SUBSIDIZING PROPERTY

Although the federal government established public agencies like the Instituto del Fondo Nacional de la Vivienda para los Trabajadores (National Institute for Funding Workers' Housing?INFONAVIT), the Fondo de la

Vivienda del Instituto de Seguridad y Servicios Sociales de los Trabajadores del Estado (Social Security Institute's Housing Fund for Federal Government

Employees?FOVISSSTE), and the Fondo de Vivienda Militar (Institute for

Military Housing?FOVIMI) in 1972 to address the housing needs of its citizens and promote social-interest housing (Gilbert and Varley, 1991), many migrants have not earned enough or worked long enough to accumulate the credits nec

essary to qualify for a home loan through such programs.11 Since the early 1980s, the reduction in government subsidies to these public housing agencies, the increase in inflation and the cost of housing materials, and stagnant minimum

wages have further eroded the purchasing power of lower-income households

(Gilbert and Varley, 1991). To reduce the growth of irregular housing such as squatter settlements spurred by rural-urban migration (Ward, 1982), the




government has actively engaged in directing land development in its cities. In states where the population has grown exponentially, alternative institutions and policies have been created to address the working poor's housing needs.

In 1984, the state of Quintana Roo established INVIQROO to curb the

growth of irregular housing and provide access to housing for the popula tions residing in these hastily constructed dwellings (Diario Oficial, March 9,

1984). This agency was charged with overseeing urban development (both tourism and commercial) and administering the state's national land reserves for the benefit of its working-class families and local commerce.12 In

Canc?n, INVIQROO's efforts focused primarily on securing land to meet the

housing needs of working-class residents. Thus it promoted a form of self

help housing by providing vacant lots for sale on which working families could construct their own dwellings, often providing their own basic services while they waited for the state to develop their neighborhoods' infrastructure (Ward, 1982).

INVIQROO's primary objective was to provide "dignified and decent homes" for the state's working-class families by distributing land plots to families with access to limited resources (Diario Oficial, March 9, 1984). INVIQROO was also

responsible for building the basic infrastructure, such as electricity, running water, schools, and parks, necessary to integrate these families into Canc?n's

developed zones and the nation-state.13 INVIQROO allocated 160 square meters of land to each recipient and required that a home be built on it within a year. To receive this grant, recipients were required to provide a down payment of

roughly US$380 and sign a contract with the state to pay US$4,783 for the land over a ten-year period. Repayment of this loan consisted of monthly payments of US$44. As of January 2002, 6,200 applications were pending at INVIQROO, of which only 2,500 had been assigned a parcel of land (Mart?n Martinez, INVIQROO's director in 2002, personal communication, February 21,2002). As a

result of this overwhelming demand for land, INVIQROO "operates like a

resilience and perseverance test," according to INVIQROO representative Edgar Campos Garcia (personal communication, November 16,2000). Applicants must wait three to four years for a parcel of land.14

The length of the wait for land was primarily determined by land availability. The state's land reserves were derived from expropriated ejido land and from national forests. As the forests dwindled, the agency periodically expropriated the ejido lands that surrounded the city, from which it carved out subsidized land plots for Canc?n's working class. The 1992 revisions to the constitution, however, made it possible for ejido land to be sold instead of expropriated. Prior to the revisions, ejido land had been conceptualized as inalienable; members had usufructs rights only.15 The new agrarian law, however, permitted ejidos to be divided up among their members as long as two-thirds of them agreed to do so. Ejidatarios residing in ejidos neighboring Canc?n took advantage of privati zation to sell their lands at a profit to the state, private enterprises, and individ uals. However, the cost of these lands was prohibitive for INVIQROO, which

depends primarily on the state and federal governments for funding, and there fore it relied on the government's right to expropriate land for the public good as a mechanism by which to acquire land (Edgar Campos Garcia, personal com

munication, November 16, 2000). Ejidatarios were compensated but not at the market rate. In 2000 INVIQROO's land reserve included 3,846.49 hectares of land spread throughout the state, of which only 460.87 hectares were located in




the municipio of Benito Ju?rez and the adjacent municipio of Isla Mujeres (La Revista Peninsular, 2000). In 2002, in order to increase its land reserves,

INVIQROO began negotiating with the ejidos Isla Mujeres and Alfredo V.

Bonfil to expropriate over 2,500 hectares of land (Mart?n Martinez, personal communication, February 21, 2002). Likewise, migrants who did not meet the

qualifications of government-funded housing agencies or did not wish to wait

three years for a parcel of land now had the option of purchasing ejido land.

Unfortunately, in doing so they ran the risk of purchasing fraudulent titles

from ejidatarios who had sold multiple titles to the same plot. Acquiring land through the INVIQROO required more than just patience and

perseverance. Applicants had to meet a host of qualifications in order to partici pate in this program. They had to be married by the civil registry or a participant in a common-law marriage that could be verified with receipts demonstrating cohabitation, be registered to vote in Canc?n, be able to prove that they did not own any other property in Canc?n, and provide proof of residence in

Canc?n verified through an official letter from the ayuntamiento (municipal office). INVIQROO's representatives extolled the progressive character of this agency because, in contrast to INFONAVIT, it did not limit land distribution to those with a history of work in the formal sector. However, although applicants were

not officially required to provide proof of economic stability (at least this was

not one of the qualifications mentioned by the representatives of INVIQROO),

they were asked to submit an employment contract or a letter from an employer demonstrating proof of employment. Once applicants were informed that they had been assigned parcels of land, they were required to secure their contracts

with down payments of US$380. Therefore this review process limited appli cants to a particular sector of workers from Canc?n.

CONTROLLING MIGRATION

In Mexico as in many other Latin American countries, the ideology of home

ownership has been used as a mechanism for social control of the middle class and the poor (Eckstein, 1977; Gilbert and Varley, 1991; Ward, 1982). The state

of Quintana Roo was no exception. Housing played a central role in shaping the contours of membership and belonging in Canc?n. It transformed

migrants into settlers, at least at the level of the political, and into citizens who

through their right to vote could make claims on the state of Quintana Roo.

Moreover, access to housing made it possible for the state to establish a per manent workforce for its tourist economy. Yet, the ideology of home owner

ship tended to be conflated with a particular conception of the family and

oriented toward specific sectors of Mexico's population. A careful examina

tion of the INVIQROO's prerequisites reveals the exclusionary ideologies underlying state land distribution policies and highlights the state's regard for

nuclear families as the primary beneficiaries of subsidized housing. For INVIQROO, belonging to a family was the "fundamental" attribute

that shaped its applicant pool (Edgar Campos Garcia, personal communica

tion, November 16, 2000). "Family" was defined as heterosexual and nuclear or alternatively as a single-mother household. As a result, not all migrants were eligible to participate in this program. INVIQROO claimed not to

discriminate against common-law marriage, but the majority of its recipients




were married couples with children. This outcome may also be the result of the difficulties couples faced in verifying cohabitation if they did not have children and thus could not provide a birth certificate confirming their union or if they lived in unofficial rental housing, for which written rental agreements

were uncommon and payment receipts to substantiate claims of cohabitation were difficult to obtain. Married couples without children were often placed at the bottom of the waiting list because families that included native-born citizens of Quintana Roo were given priority. For the state, the presence of children played a critical role in determining who received land because in

practice "family" was defined as a married couple with a child, preferably a

child who was born in Canc?n and was thereby automatically a citizen of the state of Quintana Roo. Likewise, single men like Leonardo and most single

women?except those with children who met all the other requirements?did not qualify. Consequently through its focus on the nuclear family, the state determined which migrants could become property owners and thus establish

permanent residences in Canc?n and a formal relationship with the state.

Campos Garcia considered INVIQROO "progressive" because it was aimed at incorporating the working poor into the state's urban development. Yet, this

progressive character was not as all-embracing as INVIQROO's representatives claimed. In addition to adhering to the moral framework of a family-centered ideology, applicants also had to become voting citizens of Canc?n and show

proof of the ability to hold long-term employment contracts. The migrant poor had to demonstrate their transformation from peasants (conceptualized as back ward and primitive) into stable, diligent workers (conceptualized as modern).

Not surprisingly, a narrow window of income earnings limited participation in INVIQROO. The migrant poor who had a difficult time finding employment and were relegated to the informal employment sector or to short-term contract work were disqualified (cf. Cornelius, 1975). The state perceived them as inca

pable of meeting the monthly payments and therefore too risky an investment. At the same time, migrants working in the informal sector who earned salaries

equivalent to those of hotel employees were ineligible unless they could demon strate proof of stable employment. Similarly, migrants employed in the formal sector were usually ineligible if they earned enough credits to qualify for hous

ing through INFONAVIT.16 Through this process of documentation, the state ensured that the families who received subsidized housing included a male

provider capable of sustaining a nuclear household.

Consequently, INVIQROO did more than just hand out land to needy families. It relied on the images of the nuclear family and the good worker to determine who would be the future landowning citizens of Canc?n. Through this agency, the state played a critical role in shaping the future of Canc?n,

controlling the migrant population, and attempting to curb the accelerated

growth of its periphery.

REIFYING GENDER RELATIONS AMONG KUCHMIL MIGRANTS

Understanding settlement in the case of Kuchmil migrants requires an

examination of Maya gender relations before and after migration. As I have

said, the ejido served as the basis for social organization in Kuchmil. Families




cultivated corn, squash, and beans for consumption. Work was typically split between men who worked in the cornfields and women who cared for children and tended to the gardens on their house plots. Young men and

women were expected to marry and start a nuclear family by the age of 25

years. This gendered division of labor, however, became increasingly difficult to sustain over time because of the degradation of the soil and the lack of an irrigation system. To supplement farm work, both married and single men

sought wage work through migration, while women remained at home. In 1991, after a severe drought, seven young girls left Kuchmil to find work in

neighboring cities, and their departures resulted in a shift in gender relations

(cf. Mummert, 1994). Now that women had become a source of cash through their work as domestic servants, they were no longer expected to remain at home and therefore could share the burden with their brothers of supporting the natal household. Like single men, these young single women were

expected to contribute economically to the household. As a result, families

began to invest in their daughters' education (with the support of their

daughters' wages). Although male migrants continued to marry by 25 years of

age, female migrants postponed marriage in order to continue supporting their natal households after the loss of their brothers' wages. Not surprisingly, for these women living and working in Canc?n came to be equated with phys ical and economic autonomy. Through the act of migrating, Maya women

transformed local conceptions of gender based on a gendered division of labor

(Castellanos, 2007). In spite of the surge in female autonomy, migration also led to a reification

of gender relations. To illustrate this process, I return to 21-year-old Leonardo, whose experience is typical of that of many male migrants in Canc?n. By 2001, he was tired of renting apartments and was saving money to purchase property. Renting a place, he explained, "isn't the same [as owning a home]" because landlords "prohibit us from making any scandal. They prohibit heavy drinking, loud noise, or bringing friends to drink in your house." The privacy Leonardo

sought had to be purchased, but as a single childless male with a short

employment history (six years) in Canc?n he did not qualify for a land grant through INVIQROO or a house through INFONAVIT, and he was not ready to get married. He wanted to buy a parcel of land and build his home first to

provide himself with a bit of autonomy from the fluctuations of the market. In

Kuchmil, young men usually built their homes next to their fathers' houses or on plots provided by the ejido. In Canc?n, Leonardo's brothers had been able to build their homes on their in-laws' property. Leonardo either had to pur chase property or get married and apply for land from INVIQROO.

Most male migrants married by their mid-20s and thus perpetuated the model of the nuclear family promoted by the state and by their natal commu

nity Although many of their sisters worked in Canc?n and they agreed with the need for greater equality between the sexes, these young men, even when

they married female migrants from Kuchmil, expected their wives not to work. On the surface, this attitude appears to be representative of traditional

family values promoted by the state and "traditionalists" in Maya communi ties (cf. Re Cruz, 1996), but in Canc?n it stemmed from the context of raising a family in a growing urban center with finite land reserves. INVIQROO's

bureaucracy required that migrants become active participants in the land




acquisition process, and since male migrants worked all day, their wives played a pivotal role in this process. These women were unable to work full-time jobs if they wished to become engaged in local politics.17 Grassroots organizations

provided institutional support for migrants' land claims in exchange for these

workers' political affiliation and activism. For male migrants, this type of

political engagement was impossible because of their work schedules. As a

result, it was their wives who gathered and submitted the paperwork to

INVIQROO and became active members in these organizations. Jovana Can Tun's experiences are representative of those of Maya women

who marry male migrants. In the year 2000, Jovana married a migrant from

Kuchmil who had been working in Canc?n for four years. She had worked as

a domestic servant in Canc?n, but she quit her job a few months after she

became pregnant. She and her husband, Juan, shared a one-room rented

apartment with her sister Mariela. The birth of their son made them eligible for housing through INVIQROO. In 2001, a few months after Jovana and Juan submitted an application to INVIQROO, they joined the grassroots organization

Uni?n de Colonos Independientes (Union of Independent Neighborhoods? UCI). The UCI pressured the local government to provide land to its most

active members by teaching them the tactics and language that would get them access to politicians and thus to land. Women served as the principal

representatives in this organization. Jovana attended UCI meetings, organized and participated in political rallies, and walked precincts so that her family could earn enough points to make its way to the top of this organization's list. In June 2002 Jovana and Juan were rewarded for their months of activism by

being granted a parcel of land through INVIQROO. As women became key players in the settlement process, they established

strong relationships with political leaders and bureaucrats and learned to maneuver around bureaucracies such as the government's Desarrollo Integral de la Familia (Family Welfare Program?DIF), which was dedicated to improving women's and children's welfare. These engagements with a wider social network

alleviated the extreme loneliness women experienced; with only their children

for company, married women usually spent most days (or nights, if their hus

bands worked in discotheques) confined to their one-room apartments. However, although these activities gave women the opportunity to learn

about their rights as citizens in Canc?n, this engagement was constructed on

the basis of their status as mothers and wives, not as workers. As a result, par

ticipation in these organizations and institutions reinforced the prominence of

the nuclear family and motherhood as the context within which Kuchmil

migrants engaged with the state. In contrast, unmarried, childless women and men, like Mariela and Leonardo,

who wished to settle permanently in Canc?n were marginalized by the

nation-state's efforts to transform migrants into citizens through land owner

ship. Their unmarried status prevented them from receiving the state's sup

port in acquiring land. As in the ejido, single women residing in cities had few

opportunities to become property owners. I did not encounter any grassroots

organization that provided support for these migrants' efforts to acquire land.

As a result, most unmarried migrants preferred to maintain their political affil

iations and voter registration cards in their natal states, where they had




already established formal ties with the nation-state through the ejido and

municipal offices, instead of transferring this allegiance to Canc?n and the state of Quintana Roo.

CONCLUSION

Studies of immigrant incorporation into the nation-state point out that this

process is fraught with contradictions (Chavez, 1991; Rouse, 1992). Even within

nation-states, the process of transforming migrants into settlers involves

conflicting messages between the way the state defines the contours of its

imagined community and the way state policies are developed. Government funded organizations like INVIQROO provide the cheapest alternative for land acquisition, but local politics, bureaucracy, long waiting periods, and economic and social criteria reduce the probability of land acquisition for

many migrants. Migrant settlement practices, then, are influenced not only by regional economies and kin and social networks but also by the administrative

mandates and acts of state agencies. The Kuchmil case demonstrates, further, that the study of gender is central to an understanding of the way state land redistribution programs function and which migrants get access to housing. To participate in state-sponsored land distribution programs, Maya migrants are asked to conform to state expectations of the social and economic behavior

appropriate in its citizens and thereby document their transformation into modern citizens. In the process, gender relations among them become reified

by state policies and organizations rooted in images of the family as nuclear. These policies mark other unions, such as same-sex unions, as undesirable.

Understanding settlement among migrants, then, requires an interrogation of the ideological notions that underpin state policies and the way in which these

policies shape migrants' practices.

NOTES

1. Migration studies incorporate studies of internal, international, and transnational migration

(e.g., Pessar, 1999), and my discussion draws on this broad literature. I use the term "migrant" to

refer to people who migrate within and across nation-state boundaries. Although I recognize that these migration experiences are different, I want to highlight the similarities between the

experiences of internal, international, and transnational migrants. I use the term "immigrant" when

I refer to research that specifically focuses on immigrants. 2. For further discussion on rural women's rights to property after ejido reform, see Baitenmann

(1997), Botey (1998), Deere and Le?n (2001; 2002), Stephen (1996; 1997), and Villag?mez and Pinto (1997).

3. This research is based on fieldwork conducted from September 2000 to 2001 and during the months of February 2002 and May 2006.1 use pseudonyms for the names of the people and

places discussed here, with the exception of large cities like Canc?n and elected officials.

"Yucatec Maya" is the term used by anthropologists to differentiate indigenous people who

speak the Yucatec Maya language today from other indigenous people from Mexico and Central

America whose language belongs to the Mayan language family (e.g., Huastec, Quiche). The

people scholars refer to as Maya, however, do not refer to themselves as such. They rely on a

number of identity markers, depending on the context: mayero and yucateco in Canc?n and

maazehual (worker), campesino, and mestizo/a in Kuchmil. Not all people from Yucat?n are




Yucatec Maya-speakers or consider themselves "indigenous," and not all Maya agree on which

term to use. I rely on the identity marker of "Maya" for simplicity and because the subjects of

my case study all spoke Yucatec Maya. 4. The term "citizen" can evoke membership in a multitude of spaces, both territorially

bounded (e.g., the nation-state, states within nations, and cities) and imagined (e.g., transnational

communities) (Holston and Appadurai, 1999). Through the use of the term "citizen," I aim to evoke

both types of belonging. Since I am discussing the movement and displacement of people as they cross state lines within a nation-state, I am concerned here with examining how citizenship is inter

preted not only by the nation-state (through state institutions) but also by migrants themselves as

they participate in multiple spaces of belonging. I engage with Holston and Appadurai's (1999:

4-5) call for examination of the disjunctures caused by the tension between formal and substantive

citizenship. 5. For a detailed discussion of the relationship between kin-mediated migration networks

and regional economies, see Wilson (1993). 6. The government does not have the manpower to regulate the construction of secondary

buildings on private property. For further discussion on the relationships between landlords and

renters, see Gilbert and Varley (1991). 7. The exchange rate for the Mexican peso in 1998 was 11 pesos to the dollar. During my

fieldwork period of September 2000 to September 2001, the average exchange rate was 9.2 pesos to the dollar. In 2004, it was 10.94 pesos to the dollar.

8. Migrants allotted their minimum-wage daily salary to housing and relied on tips to cover

other expenses. In 2001 during the high season, hotel and discotheque employees earned

between US$100 and US$200 a month, but during the low season tips diminished to as low as

US$50 a month.

9. Leonardo's first move was to obtain better housing. The second move was a result of

Horacio's change in marital status; after Horacio moved into a room on his father-in-law's prop

erty, Leonardo and his roommate moved into a smaller room. However, in spite of this move,

their housing expenses remained high. Eventually, Leonardo moved into the home of his other

brother and his family. After a year and a half, he moved to a more central location in town, which he shared with a friend from Kuchmil. He finally moved to his current location to be

closer to the bus route to his new job. 10. The cost of this land varied because it was sold by former ejidatarios and each owner deter

mined the price of the land, the deposit required, and the number and amount of monthly payments. 11. INFONAVIT caters to workers employed in the private sector by offering home loans

through a lending institution funded by employer contributions; employers contribute 5 percent of their employees' daily wages as credit toward this program (http://www.infonavit.gob.mx). FOVISSSTE provides home loans for government employees and their families (http://www.fovisste

.gob.mx). FOVIMI finances housing for the military (Gilbert and Varley, 1991). 12. In 2002, the state changed the name of INVIQROO to Instituto de Fomento a la Vivienda y

Regularizaci?n de la Propiedad (Institute for the Development of Housing and Property

Regularization?INFOVIR). The functions of this organization were expanded to include land reg ularization of ejido plots sold through private transactions. In 2004, the Instituto del Patrimonio

Estatal (Institute of State Patrimony?IPAE) was established to centralize the distribution of the

state's land reserves (national, state, and municipal), and INFOVIR became dependent on IPAE for

access to these reserves. INFOVIR continues to oversee urban development (Alejandro Handall, INFOVIR's Interim Director, personal communication, May 23,2006).

13. Other states have established similar housing institutes, like the Instituto de la Vivienda

(Housing Institute?INVI) in Mexico City and the Instituto de la Vivienda de Oaxaca (Housing Institute of Oaxaca?INVO).

14. Despite the long waiting period, Edgar Campos Garcia informed me that the city of

Canc?n provided land at a faster rate than most other states.

15. Ejidatarios were typically allocated 4 hectares of uncultivated land, but depending on

land availability and the size of the ejido they could request up to 20. In Kuchmil, ejidatarios cultivated on average 3 hectares of land, but a few ejidatarios cultivated as many as 12.

16.1 know of one case in which a family who lived in a house mortgaged through INFONAVIT

was allowed to apply to INVIQROO for housing. The house was located a few blocks from the beach

in an area recently devastated by a hurricane. Members of the family made a persuasive claim that

their ability to sell their home was compromised by its location and they needed to move for safety




reasons (i.e., that the house was not sturdy enough to resist another hurricane). INVIQROO did

process their application, but they had not yet received a parcel of land.

17. This political involvement is not new. Maya women are active participants in local politics in Kuchmil. Both single and married women often attend political rallies and meetings, in many instances without their husbands in the case of those who are married. In Kuchmil, politics cannot

be divorced from issues of land and work because access to land is linked with political participa tion. Membership in the communal landholding system or ejido gives males the right to vote on

all local issues and government policies that affect agricultural production. While women cannot

vote if they are not listed as ejidatarias, they actively participate in debating these issues in public forums and privately with their husbands and fathers. Women can also hold public office as

health promoters and managers of the corn mill cooperative.

REFERENCES

Abrams, Philip 1988 "Notes on the difficulty of studying the state." Journal of Historical Sociology 1(1): 58-79.

Baitenmann, Helga 1997 "Rural agency and state formation in post-revolutionary Mexico: the agrarian reform in

Central Veracruz (1915-1992)." Ph.D. diss., New School for Social Research.

Botey, Carlota

1998 "Mujer rural: Reforma agraria y contrarreforma," pp. 95-154 in Josefina Aranda, Carlota

Botey, and Rosario Robles (eds.), Tiempo de crisis, tiempo de mujeres. Oaxaca: Universidad

Aut?noma Benito Ju?rez de Oaxaca, Centro de Estudios de la Cuesti?n Agraria Mexicana A.C.

Castellanos, M. Bianet

2007 "Adolescent migration to Canc?n: reconfiguring Maya households and gender relations

in Mexico's Yucat?n Peninsula." Frontiers: A Journal of Women's Studies 28:1-27.

Chavez, Leo

1991 "Outside the imagined community: undocumented settlers and experiences of incorpo ration." American Ethnologist 18: 257-278.

Cornelius, Wayne 1975 Politics and the Migrant Poor in Mexico City. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Deere, Carmen Diana and Magdalena Le?n

2001 Empowering Women: Land and Property Rights in Latin America. Pittsburgh: University of

Pittsburgh Press.

2002 "Individual versus collective land rights: tensions between women's and indigenous

rights under neoliberalism," pp. 53-86 in Jacquelyn Chase (ed.), The Spaces of Neoliberalism:

Land, Place, and Family in Latin America. Bloomfield, CT: Kumarian Press.

Eckstein, Susan Eva

1977 The Poverty of Revolution: The State and the Urban Poor in Mexico. Princeton: Princeton

University Press.

Gilbert, Alan and Ann Varley 1991 Landlord and Tenant: Housing the Poor in Urban Mexico. London: Routledge.

Gonz?lez Montes, Soledad

1988 "La reproducci?n de la desigualdad entre los sexos: pr?cticas e ideolog?a de la herencia en una

comunidad campesina (Xalatlaco, Estado de M?xico, 1920-1960)," pp. 65-81 in Josefina Aranda

Bezaury (ed.), Las mujeres en el campo. Oaxaca: Universidad Aut?noma Benito Ju?rez de Oaxaca.

Gupta, Akhil 1995 "Blurred boundaries: the discourse of corruption, the culture of politics, and the imag ined state." American Ethnologist 22: 375-402.

Hagan, Jacqueline Maria

1994 Deciding to Be Legal: A Maya Community in Houston. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Holston, James and Arjun Appadurai 1999 "Introduction: cities and citizenship," pp. 2-18 in James Holston (ed.), Cities and Citizenship.

Durham: Duke University Press.

Hondagneu-Sotelo, Pierrette

1994 Gendered Transitions: Mexican Experiences of Immigration. Berkeley: University of California

Press.




1999 "Introduction: gender and contemporary U.S. immigration." American Behavioral

Scientist 42: 565-576.

INEGI (Instituto Nacional de Estad?stica, Geograf?a e Inform?tica) 2000 Cuaderno estad?stico municipal, Edici?n 1999: Benito Ju?rez, Estado de Quintana Roo. Mexico City. 2001 XII Censo general de poblaci?n y vivienda. Mexico City.

La Revista Peninsular

2000 "Reserva territorial y su urbanizaci?n," Semanario de Informaci?n y An?lisis Pol?tico 562.

http://www.larevista.com.mx. Malkin, Victoria

2004 "'We go to get ahead': gender and status in two Mexican migrant communities." Latin

American Perspectives 31(5): 75-99.

Mummert, Gail

1994 "From metate to despate: rural Mexican women's salaried labor and the redefinition of

gendered spaces and roles," pp. 192-209 in Heather Fowler-Salamini and Mary Kay Vaughn (eds.), Women and the Mexican Countryside, 1850-1990. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.

Pessar, Patricia

1999 "Engendering migration studies: the case of new immigrants in the United States."

American Behavioral Scientist 42: 577-600.

Re Cruz, Alicia

1996 The Two Milpas of Chan Kom: A Study of Socioeconomic and Political Transformation in a Maya

Community. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Robichaux, David

1988 "Hombre, mujer y la tenencia de la tierra en una comunidad de habla n?huatl de Tlaxcala,"

pp. 83-100 in Josefina Aranda Bezaury (ed.), Las mujeres en el campo. Oaxaca: Universidad

Aut?noma Benito Ju?rez de Oaxaca.

Rouse, Roger C

1992 "Making sense of settlement: class transformation among Mexican migrants in the

United States," pp. 25-52 in Nina Glick Schiller, Linda Basch, and Cristina Blanc-Szanton

(eds.), Towards a Transnational Perspective on Migration: Race, Class, Ethnicity, and Nationalism

Reconsidered. New York: New York Academy of Sciences.

Stephen, Lynn 1996 "Too little, too late? The impact of Article 27 on women in Oaxaca," pp. 289-303 in Laura

Randall (ed.), Reforming Mexico's Agrarian Reform. New York: M. E. Sharpe. 1997 Women and Social Movements in Latin America: Power from Below. Austin: University of

Texas Press.

Trouillot, Michel-Rolph 2001 "The anthropology of the state in the age of globalization: close encounters of the decep tive kind." Current Anthropology 42: 125-138.

Villag?mez, Gina and Wilbert Pinto

1997 Mujer maya y desarrollo rural en Yucat?n. Marida: Ediciones de la Universidad Aut?noma

de Yucat?n.

Ward, Peter M.

1982 "Introduction and purpose," pp. 1-13 in Peter M. Ward (ed.), Self-Help Housing: A

Critique. London: Mansell Publishing. Wilson, Tamar Diana

1993 "We seek work where we can: a comparison of patterns of transnational outmigration from a rancho in Jalisco and internal migration into a Mexicali squatter settlement." Journal of Borderland Studies 8(2): 33-58.



Documents

Engendering Mexican Migration: Articulating Gender, Regions, Circuits || Constructing the Family: Mexican Migrant Households, Marriage, and the State